Hydropower incentives and Free Cooling options are making Toronto a premier location for driving energy efficiency within data centre infrastructure. This, coupled with higher temperature allowances and enabling technologies from Virtualisation to DCIM and from SaaS to IaaS, creates endless opportunities for IT Optimisation and getting the most from your Infrastructure. Exponential data growth and a thriving third-party market are making enterprises question the different value propositions and ask what are the risks involved with these options? What are the options most appropriate to your organisation?

The DatacenterDynamics Toronto conference will explore an enterprise’s strategic options for accommodating its growing needs; weighing up the benefits, the risks and the performance characteristics of the different options, as well as the human resource considerations.

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.

Design, Build, Operate

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. DCIM tools hold out the promise of monitoring in a holistic way the IT and facility infrastructure to enable the dynamic data centre.

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.

Outsourcing Decisions

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.

IT Optimisation

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.

Securing improved IT Optimisation, for example with virtualisation or a private cloud, can help data centre and IT management determine the need for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-service (SaaS). IT Optimisation themed sessions will provide insight on how IT needs drive data centre strategy and how best to deliver the required infrastructure.