This whitepaper has been written for people who are finding that they need to know a lot more about data centres, how they work and what they do, than they previously expected. It has been produced using the wealth of information which Atos Origin has accrued over the years from running data centres for itself and for customers.
This second edition (July 2009) covers the advances and changes that have taken place in little over a year since the beginning of 2008.
So, what is new?
There are some specific developments which are worthy of special note:
- The financial crisis has had many impacts. The availability of capital for investment is a major issue, both for customers and for service providers who themselves need to invest in data centres to deliver services;
- The need to become “greener” was previously identified, but seems now to be universally recognised as an essential issue; data centres are a significant part of that concern;
- Cloud Computing has emerged as a new industry “buzz” – much discussed and varyingly understood;
- Some very big players, such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, are building mega-data centres to supply to this cloud market, but the effect on the rest of the market is only starting to become clear.
What has stayed the same?
This document has thus been updated to reflect those developments, but much of it does remain as before and data centres are still generally not well understood.
- Data centres are the key and most capital-intensive foundation of almost all IT systems and services;
- Although data centres are by their very nature “back room” activities, their services are also more and more exposed as IT becoming part of everyone’s way of life;
- A large part of managing data centres is about managing risks;
- Data centres are also becoming more visible as major users of energy, with all of the environmental implications that entails, and there remains much room to become “greener”;
- Large parts of IT services are being off-shored.
This is a fast-changing world and, as was predicted in the last edition of this document, and depending when you are reading this, it may already be (becoming) out of date.
Download new "Data Centres in the Early 21st Century Whitepaper"