Category Archives: Data Center

Eliminate Data Center Downtime through “What If” Simulation

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How vulnerable is your data center to system failure? Are you able to access how resilient your data center is by knowing how many single points of failure you have or identify your weakest links? In today’s digital lifestyle of always-on and fully connected, the costs of data center downtime is measured both financially and in the impact to a company’s reputation.  According to the Uptime Institute’s seventh annual Data Center Industry Survey, downtime matters with more than 90 percent of data center and IT professionals believing that their corporate management is more concerned about outages now than they were just 12 months ago.  However, only 60 percent report that they measure the cost of downtime as a business metric.

Having significant hardware redundancy, a backup for the backup for literally everything could make a data center more resilient.  However, this is not a good strategy for a company’s bottom line especially in light of the exponential growth of data from IoT.  Thus, means for eliminating or mitigating downtime to non-harmful levels should be top of mind for IT management. One such way is to allow facilities managers to experiment in safe offline environments by creating virtual prototypes to troubleshoot “what-if” simulations for potential risks associated with power failure or critical systems going offline. Read full article here.

Edge Data Center Deployment Considerations

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As emerging trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), streaming content and next-generation telecoms come into play, new thinking is going to be required to optimize opportunities of edge computing initiatives. Where technology is going to be deployed and what supported resources are needed to boost application performance, will determine the level of success for innovations in edge solutions.  Just as important, who within the organization is leading the charge for an edge deployment and are they a part of the data center team?

Edge data center technologies take center stage when it comes to businesses that need to reach their customers quickly in an effort to drive sales by taking advantage of where the customer is at that moment.  One such example provided by Kelly Quinn, analyst for the International Data Corporation, highlights that in an effort to reduce latency and improve customer responsiveness; a retailer could deploy edge data center devices to quickly sense when connected customers come into the store and push special offers to those shoppers while they are there.  According to Quinn, “Any business that serves content to end users or engages end users in time-sensitive transactions stands to gain by implementing edge deployments.” Read full article here.

Edge Computing Offers Opportunity for Enterprise IT

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As computing becomes increasingly more data driven, what come next for enterprise IT?  Trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and the collective digital world are now exposing cloud computing limitations as more issues arise due to high traffic and latency problems.  All the connected devices between people and things have marketers realizing that consuming and processing data is influenced at the point of consumption.  Therefore, opportunities exist at the point of consumption to market services within real-time interactions and decisions which drives the need for the edge computing layer to run closer to the data sources. 

In addition to IoT, traditional business applications will start to benefit from reducing the amount of data that flows back and forth between the data center and the public cloud. Edge computing could complement cloud function services by enabling IT to retain sensitive data on-premises and pre-processing data while still taking advantage of the elasticity offered by the public cloud. With everything becoming a source of data and the growth of instant data analysis requirements gathering, combining and correlating these data sets will help unlock new insights for what’s next in enterprise IT. Read full article here.