|
Along with their desire to optimize the design and operation of data centres, customers have this companion need to optimize the management of their data centre. When they talk to us about what issues are most important to them, it’s how to simplify deployment, reduce CAPEX and improve efficiency. But more than one data centre infrastructure manager or IT manager has said to me “but listen, Panfil, the data centre can never go down.” So they realize that there are some efficiency improvement modes and actions they can take, but that this would sacrifice the reliability of the data centre. So while they want to increase their energy efficiency, they don’t want to sacrifice their reliability or the availability.
And they want to maximize their existing resources. More and more we’re hearing customers say that they want to use everything they buy 100% of the time to its maximum benefit. This all makes sense. Actually it's something that I talked about last year when I used the term ‘free up stranded capacity’ because at that time folks were just on the cusp of starting to see an upturn. Their capital budgets were still really, really tight and they couldn’t spend any more money, but they had these new applications coming at them. At that time, they were more focused on freeing up resources, especially stranded capacity that they could potentially utilize.
Today what we’re hearing is that not only do they want to maximize their existing resources, they also want to simplify deployment as they either add to existing infrastructure, or go through consolidation, taking multiple smaller data centres and rolling them into a large facility, or take a step into colo and cloud. And on the other side, they want to optimize management.
|
