Server maker Dell says it can continue the life of existing data centers based on its own experience which it said it opted to upgrade the servers in its own data centers instead of spending $100 million on two brand new facilities.
Rick Becker, vice president of the software and solutions enterprise product group, said that after an evaluation the company opted to virtualise its existing facility and install Energy Smart and Blade servers.
The result was an extension of the life of the existing data center, a capital saving and cheaper running costs as it was cheaper to install and run the new energy efficient servers than run the old ones, he said. The firm said it could add three years to the life of an existing data center.
Vic Smith, Dell's data center enterprise technologist said: "Many data centers were designed and built around the year 2000 with a ten year life span and we're reaching that now and they are running out of capacity. When we looked at our own data centers back in 2006 we realised that we did not have enough space or enough cooling to handle our needs."
Dell said a combination of its use of industry standard components such as fans and power units and its close work with Vmware enabled it simplify the virtualisation process and drastically cut energy use at the server level.
The company is building a package of product and services around its data center market push covering server, storage, virtualisation and Data Center Optimisation Services. Stage one was to decommission out of use servers, virtualise everything, raise temperatures in the data center, utilise containment and move cooling closer to IT. This will be followed by refreshing of legacy systems and deliver greater compute power.
The company said it is looking to package data center services through a modular approach to take cost out of what was traditionally an expensive option.