Six Strategies To Manage IT Growth

Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson, released a CIO Playbook focused on helping IT executive management choose datacentre growth strategies that best meet capacity and financial requirements. The new Playbook offers timely planning insight for the many enterprises aiming to soon build a new datacentre or lease space from a co-location / managed hosting facility. It also presents options for organisations looking for other ways to expand.

“When you look at the market demands for mobile, digital video and other feature-rich, data-intensive IT applications, it’s not surprising that organisations are concerned about having enough compute capacity, space, power and cooling to support demand – they’re worried about availability,” said Peter Panfil, VP, global power, Emerson Network Power. “But they’re also pinched to keep costs down. The good news is that there are options for growth. You may not have to build a new datacentre at an average cost of $1,000-$1,500 per square foot.”

The Playbook, “How Do You Plan to Grow?” begins by examining six growth strategies:

• Optimise existing infrastructure

• Retrofit existing infrastructure

• Outsource

• Deploy an integrated modular room(s)

• Get creative

• Build a new datacentre

For each option, the Playbook describes “how to do it” and “what you get” in terms of benefits. For example, an integrated, modular room is simply deployed outside the existing facility, or remotely, to handle overflow. What you get includes the most efficient technologies preconfigured and ready to go, and rapid deployment ability.

According to the Playbook, a thorough evaluation of existing critical infrastructure is required to determine which strategy to choose and to evaluate return on investment for the different options. It then discusses two effective methods for mining that information: a professional datacentre assessment and using datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) technology.

The Playbook also notes that paths to growth can have advantages and disadvantages based on an organisation’s needs. It then concludes by providing a decision checklist for CIOs and other IT leaders to use to ensure the growth strategy they select is effective.