Network Communications News (NCN) April 2016 | Page 38

COLUMN

know how

Trimming the fat
Viktor Petik of Emerson Network Power explains how to trim the fat off a bricks
and mortar approach to data centre design by adopting a modular infrastructure.

A

s little as a decade ago, telecom
and data centre infrastructure
design was given little attention
by senior decision makers. In
today’s world however, the
industry has evolved and the
importance of being nimble,
flexible and scalable has become
a primary, if not key, focus globally.
Starting at their foundations, businesses
are urgently looking to adapt to stay
competitive and future proof – and that
starts by getting the right infrastructure
in place.
When looking at the telecoms
industry – a sector which has undergone
huge transformation in recent years –
while many companies have embraced
change, for others, the technology
has remained largely unchanged.
Naturally, as the necessity of telecom
and data centre design has risen
up the board agenda, so has the
offering of infrastructures available in
the market place. Consequently the
variety of options has left many IT
and telecom decision makers with a
pressing quandary; what approach to
infrastructure design is right for them?
An increasingly crucial decision
to ask upfront is whether to take a
traditional bricks and mortar approach,
or opt for an integrated, modular
solution. Modular infrastructures have
been defined in numerous different ways
over the years, but essentially involve an
approach to designing and delivering
infrastructure using prefabricated
modules. Once used primarily for
remote locations, modular systems have
today evolved to answer a magnitude
of different needs in the enterprise,
telecom, data centre, and cloud space.
As a result in today’s market, modular
designs have become popular solutions
for short and long term capacity overflow
and disaster recovery, as they offer a
highly flexible and efficient solution
that many businesses seek in the ever
changing data world.
The modular infrastructure market
is growing rapidly too, with the global
industry expected to triple i