Event/ DataCenter 2008

DataCenter 2008

Speakers focused upon the various aspects of managing the technological and business aspects of a data center at DataCenter 2008.

Trade Fairs and Conference International (TFCI) organized DataCenter 2008 focusing on the initiatives in data centers. The objective of this event was to provide a comprehensive agenda for those in the data center domains gain a deep insight on managing the technological and business aspects.

The one-day event’s agenda covered servers, IT operations, data center facilities, and—a must in today’s world—business continuity and disaster recovery. It also presented a serious look at best practices from throughout the data center field.

Companies like, Hewlett-Packard, Tyco, NetApp, Microsoft, CtrlS Data Center, EMC, APW President, Delta Energy Systems, Symantec, etc participated in the event to discuss critical factors such as people, technologies, processes, and data center facilities; they also discussed the value proposition of this business, and how to manage the impending transitions effectively.

Business Continuity

While discussing about the issues and concerns regarding the data centers, Poonacha PT, Business Manager, ESS Software Technology Solutions Group, HP, said, “By 2010, more than half of all data centers will have to relocate to new facilities and more than 40% of data centers will be replaced within the next 10 years.”

Bhupendra Rane, Country Sales Manager, Tyco said, “Data center efficiency is measured on uptime and even a few minutes of downtime could be costly for any data center. Traditional LAN equipment will not allow designers to achieve the requisite density, scalability, manageability, and flexibility.”

Focusing more on the need for business continuity, Anand Naik, Director Systems Engineering-India and SAARC, Symantec Corporation, said “Increasing business requirements have made disaster recovery a top priority for organization. It is not just regulatory policies but the need for 24/7 business continuity that are driving its adoption.”

Naik enumerated the elements of BC:

• Disaster recovery: Recover mission-critical technology and applications at an alternate site
• Business recovery: Recover the business process; workspace recovery
• Contingency planning: Developing procedures and arrangements in advance that will support recovery

Underscoring this, Venkateshwer Nippani, Senior Principal, Wipro, said, “Going ahead business continuity will have a key role to play in organized strategy in designing and deploying data center. A business continuity plan will provide an enterprise-wide risk-based approach, covering people, processes, technology and extended enterprise to ensure continuing availability of business support systems and minimize risk of disruption.”
“Business continuity is not about failures but too many business, more planning and availability of information. It is important that the companies should look at both day-to-day and occasional business continuity. The process for both forms of business continuity would be the same,” said Kishor Bhagwat, Client Solutions Team Lead-EMC.

Servers and operating systems

According to Gartner, IT infrastructure consolidation will remain the focus of IT infrastructure and operations cost reduction initiatives through 2010.

Prasoon Srivastava, CEO, Ctrl S Datacenters, “In many companies IT and facility cost are not consolidated; as a result, incomplete cost-optimization leads to misallocation of resources and energy waste in many traditional data centers. By consolidating servers, businesses will see significant reduction in the number of physical servers managed.”

Durgadutt Nedungadi, Director, Marketing and Alliances-HP revealed that within the next five years, one out of every four data centers will experience a business disruption and with virtualization, server management costs are increasing four times faster than new server spending is. Hence, data center transformation is necessary as it will reduce cost, mitigate risk and help a business grow.

“A data center needs to be transparent and transformable and unified storage caters to all the needs, when you move from a normal environment to a virtualized one,” stated Sunil Brid, Sales Director, NetApp.

RahulKrishna Gupta, Technical Sales Specialist-Novell India, said, “Third generation Linux is now nearly equal to UNIX or in some categories better than UNIX. Around 69% of all data centers run Linux in some form or the other.”

According to him, some of the factors that had contributed to the growth of Linux are reduced hardware and software costs (Linux saves 40% on hardware and 34% on software), business agility, vendor independence, quality of service, better utilization and greater choice.

Gupta pointed out that usually all the data centers have a mixed environment with all kinds of servers and therefore interoperability is crucial.
The Green DataCenter 2008 Conference offered guidance on how to turn today’s improvements in IT infrastructure and process efficiency into tomorrow’s business advantage.