Energy consumption is one of the primary burdens of traditional data center infrastructures, and it is often a struggle to ensure efficient infrastructure without impacting on CapEx and OpEx significantly. Combine this with companies' seeming contradicting goals for increased capacity and desire to drive down energy consumption, it is obvious that data center professionals must plan and take full advantage of the technologies available.
The use of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools can go a long way to improving facility efficiency. Others may find the answer in new technologies and architectures, for example the elastic capacity in cloud computing, or a tiered solution in modular data center technology.
Building on the success of last year's conference, DatacenterDynamics is proud to announce the expansion of the Washington conference program. With an emphasis on operational-level case studies and security, this event will provide an opportunity to get to grips with the latest in mission-critical infrastructure and network with professionals from across the sector.
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.
Design, Build, Operate
Design, Build, Operate is our longest running conference theme and focuses on every part of the mission-critical facility lifecycle. From site selection and engineering design through to power availability and full data center automation; this is a must attend event for any organisation embarking on a new data center project or operating existing facilities.
Outsourcing Decisions
For every decision to build a data centre there is one to outsource. From collocation to Platform as a Service, from Software as a Service, to building your data center capacity in the cloud, what are the options most appropriate to your organisation? This conference theme explores an enterprise's strategic options for data center outsourcing, weighing up the economic benefits, the risks and the performance characteristics against those of doing it yourself.
IT Optimisation
The efficiency of the facility is only half the equation – optimizing all the systems that run within it is crucial: from processing to storage, to network to application. The ITO conference stream provides insight on how IT needs drive data centre strategy and how that impacts infrastructure requirements.
