IT departments today are all about speed – adding more applications faster to satisfy voracious global appetites for mobile, social media, streaming video and other resource-intensive applications. These applications must be available, regardless of their impact on critical infrastructure performance. If growth is stretching your resources too thin, you must take action to ensure availability. But because IT organizations are pressured to lower costs, you have to build an unassailable business case when deciding how to expand.
A variety of solutions are available for upgrading and expanding your critical infrastructure, including building a new data center, but how do you know which option is best?
Because you can take many actions short of building a new data center to improve your critical infrastructure, you may want to consider building new only as a last resort.
Building new is expensive and difficult. Factors such as getting a loan, finding a location and determining if you can get fiber optic cable all come into play. It can take three years before the new space is operational, and managing logistics for a move is challenging.
Still, there are times when building new is a good choice:
- Your business growth is through acquisition, and you need to consolidate a number of acquired data center You may have to build new to accommodate them.
- You don’t have a disaster recovery site. You can build new and use the old facility for this purpose.
- Your equipment is so old and poorly maintained that it’s not worth it to upgrade. Building new is an opportunity to take advantage of new, more efficient technologies.
Here is an interesting case study about Paragon Internet Group in the UK.
What about you? Have you assessed and optimized your existing critical infrastructure or have you preferred to invest in a new data center project?
Author: Paul Russell, Emerson Network Power.
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