Data centers have a bad reputation lately. Administrators often complain they are expensive to maintain, consume too much energy, and run inefficiently. They've been viewed as a burdensome utility or even worse - a barrier to growth.

Alternatively, what if your data center could be a high-performing strategic asset? What if you could allocate more of your IT budget to innovative new projects? According to the 2012 Global Data Center Efficiency Study, enterprises with highly efficient data centers allocate 53 percent more of their IT budgets to new projects because they are able to minimize maintenance costs. As one of the world's largest builders and managers of data centers, Esolvit can help you realize this goal by creating optimized, flexible data centers that are aligned with your business imperatives. By planning, designing, and automating key functions of your data centers, we build efficient, effective computing hubs that serve as a platform for agility and innovation. With Esolvit's Data Center Services, you can identify areas to improve operational efficiency across your infrastructure.

Requirements for Modern Data Centers

Effective data center operations require a fine balance of investment between both the facility and the housed equipment. Data center transformation takes a step-by-step approach through integrated projects taken over time. There is a trend to modernize data centers in order to fully leverage the performance and energy efficiency increases of modern IT equipment and capabilities like cloud computing. Data center transformation includes the following:

Standardization/consolidation:

The purpose of this project is to reduce the number of data centers a large organization may have. This project also helps to reduce the number of hardware, software platforms, and tools and processes within a data center. Organizations replace aging data center equipment with newer technology that provides increased capacity and performance. Computing, networking, and management platforms are standardized so they are easier to manage.

Virtualize:

There is a trend to use IT virtualization technologies to replace or consolidate multiple data center equipment such as servers. Virtualization helps to lower capital and operational expenses and reduce energy consumption. Virtualization technologies are also used to create virtual desktops, which can be hosted in data centers and rented out on a subscription basis. Data released by investment bank Lazard Capital Markets reports that 48 percent of enterprise operations will be virtualized by 2012. Gartner views virtualization as a catalyst for modernization.

Automation:

Data center automation involves automating tasks such as provision, configuration, patching, release management, and compliance. As enterprises suffer from few, skilled IT workers, automating tasks make data centers run more efficiently.

Securing:

In modern data centers, the security of data on virtual systems is integrated with existing security of physical infrastructures. The security of a modern data center must take into account physical security, network security, and data and user security.