Expansion Planning For Systems Growth
By Esther Shein
Something scary is happening in the world of computing. Even though everything is getting smaller and more powerful, we're faced with increasing demand for power to run systems, keep them cool and house them. Although disk drive capacity requirements double every year, if companies require more drives, the issues become how to deal with the increased expense to run systems and keep servers cool -- and where they will house everything.
"Server consolidation and virtual servers are a major step toward improving capacity utilization of servers," says Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group, a storage and server analyst consultancy in Hopkinton, Mass. "Every data center person should be looking at both. Companies are also turning to blade servers as another strategic way of consolidating space."
Restricted Space
Companies in cities such as Manhattan and London are facing serious storage issues because there physically isn't room for them to increase the size of their data centers. Many organizations are being forced to move their operations to locations with more open space.
Yet moving a data center is among the hardest processes from a planning and execution perspective. The volume of data that companies possess is daunting, and they don't have the luxury of simply turning systems off and putting them onto a truck. (article continues)
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