FEATURE : DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE
Data centre infrastructure ( DCI ) is the convergence of IT and building facilities functions within an organisation . Industry experts share with Intelligent CIO Africa how
CIOs on the continent can succeed and optimise their data centre operations . By Manda Banda .
The goal of data centre infrastructure ( 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 .
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 .
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 HCI and continued to do it until they were able to come up with their own HCI offering ,” he said . “ There is no denial that HCI represents a major leap in the architecture of the data centre offering unmatched benefits . It is time to stop listening to the noise and start digging deeper into the benefits , compare solutions , test them and see first hand how much your organisation would benefit from this .”
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 . “ In the past the IT infrastructure and operations professionals were given the choice of platforms for running an application or business service . This traditional approach is no longer acceptable because it is component and not business service-oriented , and it doesn ’ t take costs and value into consideration .”
Data centre infrastructure management
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