The modern-day wholesale data center is a complicated place. The emergence of mobile devices, connected cars, and other smart things has placed ever-increasing pressure on large colocation facilities.
The end user’s expectations are also at an all-time high, so the demand for data will not slow down (ever). So, data center managers manage all the different variables while controlling costs.
So, what do wholesale data centers do to face the big problems?
1. Shortage of Talent
You need highly skilled individuals to run a small but optimally leveraged team for a large and complex facility to run smoothly. As colocation facilities are growing rapidly, it’s creating a void for experienced personnel that can handle the task at hand.
Adopting efficient and modern methods such as DevOps and Agile will require managers to find the right talent with enough experience using the right tools. So, this can be a common problem that will become even harder with current immigration reforms.
Building highly skilled and functional teams is critical because this enables seamless communication with all stakeholders and ultimately helps solve business problems together while keeping operational costs down.
2. Where Do We Go From Here?
As technology rapidly evolves, new competitors with new paradigms will start popping up. For example, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) appeared in the marketplace, it disrupted the traditional data center model.
As a result, wholesale data center managers must constantly think of new options to develop new strategies to keep the business going upward.
3. Maintaining Governance and Control
Moving from a rigid environment to a dynamic cloud can be a huge challenge to maintain governance and control. In this scenario, complete transparency regarding virtual and physical utilization and usage must be transparent. Further, there also needs to be complete visibility of capabilities.
This will require centralized management that can easily control utilization and consumption while keeping them strictly business-oriented.
4. The Consolidation of Infrastructure
Colocation operators always need to create higher utilization rates to achieve much more with what they already have. So, this is always a challenge that is revisited on a regular basis.
You must approach this by first taking a look at the following subsystems separately:
- Compute
- Network
- Storage
Once you’ve done that, the next step is to look for cross-subsystem consolidation opportunities.
Modern solutions enable facilities to incorporate software-defined networks (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS). So, there are a lot of variables to consider when consolidating data center infrastructure.
The Bottom Line
These are just four problems faced by wholesale data center managers, but they are the main issues that come up on a regular basis.
What other colocation problems can you add to this list? Share your thoughts and experience in the Comments box below.
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