Selecting Your Data Centre Solution
Whatever vision you may have of your future data centre, the most important considerations are the kind of organisation you want to be and, therefore, the things you must be able to do.
First understand your needs:
- Analyse all of your data centre assets
- Evaluate your mechanical, electrical, structural, life safety and communications infrastructures
- Apply ITIL and ITSM industry best practices
- Review the operational readiness of your data centre support teams
- Perform financial analysis comparing overall data centre spending with potential savings
Then evaluate all your options:
- Converged infrastructure environments can limit your ability to scale quickly. They are already being surpassed by hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) or software defined data centre solutions. These are generally more scalable and cost effective
- Private clouds allow applications and workloads to be moved around an environment with ease. They need to be highly scalable and provide public cloud-scale capability by allowing workloads to be deployed to 3rd party IaaS and public clouds
- Public Clouds offer a cost-effective alternative to managing and consuming resources on-premise. That’s because they can provide instant access to a vast pool of compute and storage resources. However, not all application workloads will work natively on these platforms while some will work with limited capability
- Traditional platforms are suitable for applications with specific requirements, such as Oracle, SAP, BI, which cannot run in the cloud or in virtualised environments