Back when the economy was rosy, a lot of organizations deployed data centers that they expected to run for maybe six to eight years before seeing a major refresh. But as uncertain times linger, CIOs are finding ways to stretch the data center's life longer than originally anticipated, reports Sandra Gittlen at Computerworld.

Joanne Kossuth, the CIO at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, had planned for her data center last about seven years back when it was deployed in 2001. Now, the college could use greater capacity and improved connectivity, but a wholesale upgrade isn't in the cards.

"Demand has certainly increased over the years, pushing the data center to its limits, but the recession has tabled revamp discussions," Kossuth said. Instead of replacing the old gear, she is shifting her mindset when it comes to the lifecycle of servers, storage gear, applications, data and even the facility.

With data center refresh costs running multi-millions of dollars, more enterprises are seeking ways to avoid having to upgrade or expand right now, said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner. A variety of strategies, such as consolidation, virtualization and shifting gear around can extend a data center's life as much as five years, he said.

One way Kossuth reduced the amount of information Olin College's data center had to handle--and reduced the cost of handling it--was by moving some non-critical data out. Specifically, she opened a Flickr account to deal with high-resolution photos taken regularly at alumni gatherings and other events. This amounted to 10 terabytes of data, which used up a lot of bandwidth, server and storage resources. By turning it over to Flickr, Kossuth didn't have to shell out $40,000 for a new storage array.

"There is little risk in moving non-core data out of the data center, and now we have storage space for mission-critical projects," she said.

Standardizing storage and servers can also buy a data center some time. Marriott International has been using the same data center for 22 years, and one reason is because IT has been efficient about standardization, according to Dan Blanchard, the hotel chain's vice president of enterprise operations. The IT department chooses a "handful" of server and storage models every year, and then deploys them as needed. "Uniformity makes it much simpler to manage resources and predict capacity. If you have lots of unique hardware from numerous vendors, it's harder to plan [out the data center]," Blanchard said.

For more, see:
- Sandra Gittlen's article at Computerworld

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