EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
HOW CAN CIOS OPTIMISE THEIR DATA CENTRE SPACE , IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AND REDUCE COSTS OF THEIR DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE ?
Data centre infrastructure ( DCI ) is the convergence of IT and building facilities functions within an organisation . Industry pundits share with Intelligent CIO Africa , how CIOs on the continent can succeed and optimise their data centre operations .
The goal of DCI is to provide administrators
with a holistic view of a data centre ’ s performance so that energy , equipment and floor space are used as efficiently as possible . Data centre infrastructure management started out as a component of building information modelling ( BIM ) software , which is used by facilities managers to create building digital schematic diagrams .
Paulo Pereira , Senior Director , Systems Engineering , METI at Nutanix , said in order to optimise their data centre space and cost , CIOs should be looking at the use of hyper-convergence as the foundation of their data centres . “ For several years some big IT vendors have minimised the capabilities of hyperconverged infrastructure ( HCI ) and continued to do it until they were able to come up with their own HCI offering ,” he said .
Sevi Tufekci Director , Sales Engineering Emerging Markets , EMEA , Citrix , said : “ In the Middle East and Africa ( MEA ) market , we observe that many customers are developing their existing capacities to fulfil Business Continuity needs and move some of their services to the cloud . Hosted data centres have become the model of choice for small to mid-size companies . According Tufekci , organisations continue to invest in data centre infrastructure primarily for security and compliance reasons . “ But due to cloud evolution , some customers are shifting to hybrid cloud infrastructure using private cloud data centre infrastructure and integrating the systems with public cloud infrastructure ,” she said .
Tufekci pointed out that CIOs can minimise the data centre footprint by using hyper-converged infrastructure ( HCI ) and rely on cloud-based applications and virtual desktops delivery instead of high-end PCs with high energy needs .
“ Virtualisation ( for servers and networking ) presents several tangible benefits , such as reduced operating cost , improving application performance , minimising downtime and reducing heat build-up ,” she said .
Pereira added that HCI converges the entire data centre stack , including compute , storage , storage networking and virtualisation . “ Complex and expensive legacy infrastructure is replaced by a distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers that enables enterprises to size their workloads precisely and to scale flexibly as needed ,” he said .
Antoine Harb , Team Leader , Middle East and North Africa at Kingston Technology , said in the coming years , capacity planning will no longer be just a process aimed at forecasting hardware needs .
“ It will be the key to understanding and optimising the cost of running business services through platform selection ,” he said .
Harb explained that the capacity planning of tomorrow supports internal as well as external choices , virtual as well as physical alternatives . “ The new capacity planning organisation is no longer part of the IT infrastructure and operations department – it has to be part of an overall management group reporting to the CIO ,” he said .
26 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com