Getting the right team to upgrade a data centre

As the amount and importance of big data and the cloud grow, companies ofall sizes are finding they increasingly need to quickly and efficiently deploy new solutions (including prefabricated assemblies) to support their business-critical applications with an improved time to market by leveraging experienced project management; achieving faster time to operation; and benefiting from predictable time to production (planning, design, installation, commissioning).

The project team for a data center upgrade should includeall relevant stakeholders from within the organization as wellas a complete set of appropriate vendor partners. Internal stakeholders should be in agreement with respect to goalsand objectives for the project, and there should be noorganizational silos between the IT and facilities departments.

The data center is the backbone of a business and requires innovative, mission-critical power and thermal-management solutions that will drive efficiency, quickly scale to meet needs, and ensure optimization of IT assets. These solutions needto be easy to deploy and resilient enough to accommodate reduced facility infrastructure redundancies while supporting the quality of service offered. Critical to business success is finding a partner that delivers the engineering skill, service expertise and interoperability that lowers cost, reduces risk and provides a safer environment across the data center lifecycle. When engaging in any data center retrofit project, considerthe use of design service experts who are available to help determine the best power methods and solutions to ensure efficiency, cost and safety. Make sure vendor partners under consideration have documented proof of having successfully completed similar projects under similar circumstances.

Once potential options are identified, businesses must weigh the costs and benefitsand then decide which ones make the most sense to pursue. Based on that analysis, managers can then prepare a business case for securing adequate funding as a means to be able to better take a data centre to the next level for the business and the ways a business can run from a new data centre.