Cost-saving and efficient IT for the datacentre

Topic: Cost-saving and efficient IT for the datacentre

Time: 11.00am

Date: Live Tuesday 11 November 2008

Duration: 60 minutes

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After years of uncontrolled growth, many datacentres face a crisis as they run into space and power constraints. Even though remedies to the problems exist, current typical business practices concerning datacentres do not encourage the prioritisation of power reduction within one of the most power hungry areas of a business.

According to research a worrying number of firms do not measure utilisation and may have totally incorrect ideas as to the real level of their resource usage. In addition, a significant minority of firms will likely soon run out of datacentre space but have either no idea when this will happen and in a lot of metro areas, datacentres have space but cannot deploy any more IT equipment because of power constraints.

The datacentre industry is now believed to generate as much CO2 as the airline industry. Just as there is outrage at ghost flights, with airlines flying planes with no passengers around the world so that they can keep to schedules, datacentre industry figures believe that they’re doing the same thing, effectively running servers at such low capacity, which is the equivalent of airplanes flying around the world with a handful of passengers.

But as the lead times in new datacentre builds are measured in years, firms may not be able to take effective steps to rectify the situation within time frames acceptable to the business. Such lack of awareness of the key datacentre issues may result in firms not being able to deploy the IT resources required to support business growth.

This webinar will put into context the whole issue of datacentre resourcing and propose solutions to these potentially business-inhibiting issues. It will:

• Outline the current datacentre landscape, identifying the trends and dynamics.
• Identify the key technological issues and business challenges that firms face regarding datacentre resourcing and power utilisation.
• Offer strategies that firms can take in order to improve resourcing and utilisation efficiencies.
• Look at the key technological solutions which can provide support in addressing these challenges.
• Draw on a case study of an end user that has used advanced strategies - for example virtualisation - in order to bring out measureable efficiencies and to address the challenges of having to increase efficiency and productivity in the datacentre.

Format: 5 minute introduction followed by three 10-minute panel interviews plus a 25/30 minute moderated Q&A session.