Advanced strategies can add capacity without a massive capital investment

In many cases, a lack of resources-investment in new or existing facilities or infrastructure, or lack of time to optimise existing systems-is the primary factor limiting organisational growth. "Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business" poses questions and offers strategies to help IT decision-makers overcome some of those impediments.

"Data centre and network infrastructures will always be subject to certain physical constraints relating to power, cooling and space. However European businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the competitive advantage resulting from a greater understanding of the network's true utilisation, capacity and load criticality," comments Franco Costa, vice president and general manager, AC Power business for Emerson Network Power in EMEA. "This incentivises CIOs and data centre managers to invest in technologies that offer long-term, efficient solutions to the challenges within their business."

The Playbook explains that a deep understanding of the IT load, its criticality and available capacity can help businesses put together a plan that considers three key strategies for creating a more scalable, adaptable infrastructure:

* Use advanced technology or software to unlock existing capacity and scale up or down. Today's power and cooling technologies have the capability to scale up and down as needed, or to support various applications that might be ramping up when others are cycling down. Understanding these patterns and optimising utilisation rates dramatically improves facility-wide energy efficiency and helps avoid bloated data centres.

* Scale up with building blocks. The introduction of self-contained, integrated and modular power and cooling systems-including everything from row-based UPS and cooling systems to large containers with complete infrastructures-makes incremental investment in infrastructure capacity possible. In some cases, that level of convenience and flexibility is enough to overcome some sacrifices in terms of capital and operational expenses.

* Just do it. If a data centre has (a) reached the limits of its existing capacity; (b) exhausted its options for unlocking more; (c) run out of physical space to grow; and (d) eliminated outsourcing as an option, then the time has come to build a new facility-one with infrastructure technologies that enable intelligent, efficient IT growth that meets current and future business needs.
With a whole spectrum of choices available, budget-conscious businesses will use all the information available to them with today's advanced technologies to ensure they make the right choice.