Rethinking your data center architecture – Spotlight session at the ‘powering the cloud’ events

Most organisations have gone through some sort of data center refresh over the last few years implementing virtualised architectures, creating more application aware and responsive networks and enhancing storage arrays to cater for the increased volume and variety of data.

However, the pace of change is accelerating with the need not only to support Big Data & Analytics applications but also a whole variety of real time and mobile applications. “The push toward faster time to market is becoming apparent, with data centers under pressure to deliver internal and external services more quickly, while avoiding large speculative capital investment,” according to Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager with IDC’s Enterprise Server Group. “The Web era brings with it new levels of expectation; technology is becoming easier to consume on tap. This is leading to a review of purchasing processes and a greater openness towards prebuilt solutions, both on the facility as well as on the back-end system side of the data center. Needless to say, automation is a key ingredient for success at all levels.”

So maybe, rather than implementing data center upgrades in a ‘piecemeal’ fashion, it is time to rethink the whole of the data center in a more holistic manner.

With this in mind one of our Spotlight Sessions at this year’s ‘Powering the Cloud’ events will look at the driving forces behind this need and what are the possible scenarios that a CIO needs to understand.

In the first session we will explore the role of the data center in this new IT world and how it is changing at an ever increasing pace. In particular this session will address the need to support more dynamic and varied business applications, cater for huge increases in data, support a diverse range of users and ensure security and performance.

In the second session we will look at some of the innovative storage, virtualisation, networking and security solutions that enable the data center manager to meet the challenges of this interactive, multimedia and mobile IT world.

In particular we will look at how hardware and software vendors are continually striving to provide ‘best of breed’ solutions to meet the complex needs of the modern data center. Some of these solutions are trying to address the broader issues the data center manager now faces and others are focused on a particular problem.

Having looked at ‘best of breed’ solutions, in our final session, we will turn our attention to the case for ‘Convergence’ in the data center.
Convergence is being driven by the need to move away from the ‘siloed’ architecture of past data centers and deliver a more flexible, responsive, scalable and cost effective solution.

Virtualisation and the ability to provision processing and storage ‘on-the-fly’ has been the catalyst behind the move to convergence. However, are there any pitfalls to avoid from going the converged architecture route?

In this session we will explore the benefits and potential dangers of convergence and debate the issues that are raised.

Within the overall theme we will also address some of the ‘green issues’ and the rise in popularity of modular or containerized solutions as Chris Ingle, associate VP Consulting, IDC System Infrastructure Solutions explains, “With the number of computing cores shipped into Europe growing at double digits despite low server shipment growth, power and cooling density has been growing dramatically. Combine that with constrained budgets for capital expenses in the midmarket and financial sector and it becomes clear that modular facilities, or, in cases where high cooling density or small environments are required, containerized solutions become increasingly attractive.”

“A recent IDC survey showed that around 15% of European enterprises are using or plan to use modular or containerized facilities. While they currently account for only a small portion of the datacenter facility spending in Europe, this will remain a key segment, with growth in the 30%–40% range over the next few years, led by deployments in Northern Europe and emerging markets.”
The objective of these sessions, which will be made up of presentations and panel debates by industry analysts, sponsor spokespersons and data center managers, will be to explore all the issues surrounding the role of the data center, possible scenarios for future architectures and most importantly give delegates ideas that they can go back and implement in their own data centers.

Registration for the 2013 events is already open and early bird delegates can save the normal Ä120 fee by registering using the promotional code: P3M13 at www.poweringthecloud.com