Data center challenges

There are five major issues IT managers must consider to ensure smooth data center operations in 2007: regulatory compliance, disaster recovery/business continuity, power, cooling, and IT as a service. In the compliance arena, recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure make it necessary to store key data for longer periods as to be able to retrieve that information at a granular level. Disaster recovery is crucial, but business continuity seldom goes beyond the planning stages at most companies until downtime or data loss hit. Power continues to lead as a concern for data center operations. Per-cabinet power consumption has steadily increased over the past several years, and faster CPUs, larger memory chips, and smaller disk drives also continue to increase power demands. Careful planning and growth projections must be maintained to ensure that power requirements can be met. Approximately half of the power consumed by a data center is required for cooling. Alternate approaches, or a reduction in the amount of equipment housed in each cabinet, must be considered. Finally, customers will continue to leverage the computing and storage infrastructure managed hosting operators have made large investments in, and companies will continue to derive increased cost savings and benefits by using shared, highly available infrastructure.

Read more on data center issues:
- read the article at LocalTechWire.com

ALSO:
- read this on the greening of data centers
- and this on energy efficiency in the data center