With the arrival of the West Africa Cable System, South Africa is now more than ever the regional hub linking the African market to the rest of the world. This will lead not only to increased investment in the region, but also greater demand on data centre infrastructure. The conference will present the opportunities and requirements this will place upon data centres and the manner in which they can be addressed, whether through infrastructure development, colocation, new build facilities or virtualisation technologies.
As the South African market becomes an increasingly viable option for multinational corporations, debates over the merits of physical relocation and development of data centres or a move into the cloud will come to the fore.Parallel to this, speakers will examine perennial operational concerns such as rising energy costs and grid reliability, their impact on facility uptime, and the solutions to be found through the management of data centre infrastructure and opportunities of the cloud.
In combination the three themes outlined below will provide end users with an informed discussion of the varied landscape of building/not building out their own data centre facilities, relying on third-party services, and with technologists who will set out how enterprises can retain direct control of infrastructure assets with the adoption of the latest software and IT advances to maximise bottom-line performance.
From site selection and construction through to cooling and power availability, and data centre automation, Design, Build, Operate sessions at DatacenterDynamics are must attend for any organisation intending to build a data centre or running existing facilities.
Not too long ago data centre facilities were designed for constant loads and steady availability, now they are dynamic. The transition from single tier, to multi tier to dynamic tier. Application, hardware and physical infrastructure are following this rule: from servers that power down, to distributed applications, even to variable frequency drive fans.
The focus now is on scalable and modular data centre design to reduce energy consumption. DatacenterDynamics will demonstrate how to plan for and build data centres , taking into account all the component parts and their configuration.
Depending on the size of the enterprise, outsourcing is rarely an all or nothing proposition. The challenge for CIOs, CTOs and data centre management is to decide what it makes sense to outsource and what is so strategic that you must keep it in house, and how to optimise the management of owned data centre infrastructure with capabilities that are in the cloud, at a collocation provider, or with a managed services operation.
Ultimately, the optimal solution for an in-house and outsourced data centre services mix is a function of likely utilisation rates of servers required to run applications, the capital cost of hardware and infrastructure, and the mission-critical nature of data storage, processing and dissemination. Any decision to outsource will require an analysis of the contractual obligations offered by third party providers in their service level agreements.
Enterprises continually need to evaluate their data centre requirements and decide on how best to accommodate growth and the changing way in which business operates and uses IT. The efficiency of the facility is only half the equation – optimising all the systems that run within it is crucial, from processing to storage to network to application.
