What constitutes a good data center design?

Today’s best data centers are designed from the concept stage through the entire service life of the facility, with the following three objectives:

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Virtual Infrastructure Optimization is about optimizing the performance, availability and utilization of both the physical and virtual IT infrastructure. Virtualization, both for servers and for storage, is becoming widespread and somewhere between 30% to 40% of IT applications are now virtualized within a typical data center. For many organizations, this is where “virtual stall” enters the picture. The low-hanging fruit of IT-controlled applications (e-mail, file services, test & dev,…

Internal processes may be the best answer to mitigating risks associated with third-party virtual appliances.

The enterprise data center is, in most cases, what aquarists would call a “closed system.” This is to say that from a systems and application perspective, the enterprise has control over what goes in.

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Expectations are high for enterprise and service provider data center organizations

to adapt their complex, dynamic infrastructures to the changing needs of business. But between virtualization and public/private cloud hybrid environments, the old ways of doing things won’t cut it when it comes to scaling dynamically to provide elastic monitoring and performance analysis, finding the root cause of problems and analyzing service levels across the entire infrastructure.

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Workers and customers, empowered by smartphones and widely available Wi-Fi services, want and are demanding 24x7 access to email, company network resources, and Web sites. And thanks to today’s global marketplace, even small companies must support round-the-clock activities. 



Unfortunately, IT system downtime remains a problem for companies of all sizes. A 2010 eWEEK article1 reporting on an industry study noted that North American businesses suffer an average of 10 hours of IT…

Cloud computing is extremely beneficial for today’s datacenters. Private clouds are typically offered as a more managed service offering, so companies can move some (or all) of day to day IT management duties to a cloud provider, housed in a datacenter. This increase of customers choosing the cloud means cloud companies will continue to increase their footprint in datacenters.

IT Managers should care because of the variety of operational and strategic benefits:

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The Cirtas Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller is useful in today’s enterprise data center because it resolves the issues surrounding rapid growth of data storage capacity and associated data protection costs. By harnessing the power of public cloud storage utilities, Bluejet frees up data center rack space and substantially reduces power and cooling requirements. To servers and applications, Bluejet looks like an on-premise storage array accessed using iSCSI, NFS (network file system) or CIFS…

The dynamic nature of today’s virtualized data centers presents new environmental monitoring challenges 



The combination of today’s powerful servers with the wide-scale adoption of virtualization is radically changing the way companies must monitor their data centers. 



The consequences when problems arise are very high. While the loss of a single system in a smaller server room is cause for concern, a single data-center blade server failure in a large…

The “what” is a dynamic data center infrastructure. Cloud is “how” to get there. 



Admist the chatter and sound bites on Twitter coming from Cloud Connect this week are some interesting side conversations revolving around architecture and how cloud may or may not change the premises upon which those architectures are based. Architecture is, in the technology demesne, the “fundamental underlying design of computer hardware,…