Migrating From a Legacy Data Center to a Smart Data Center

Did you know what the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee had to say about data?

He said, “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”

However, maintaining complex data is one of the biggest challenges for enterprises with aging data centers.

With a traditional data center, you might have to manage reduced energy consumption issues, lack of performance capacity, etc.

As the world advances and so do the applications, it is important for organizations to choose smart data center solutions that can provide agile, reliable, and efficient support.

This blog post will help you understand why smart data centers are the future and how developing a ‘smart’ data center will help organizations overcome the challenges posed by the traditional legacy data centers.

Let’s begin!

Issues with Legacy Data Centers

Old Equipment

In a legacy data center, core mechanical and electrical components tend to depreciate over time.

Such systems become unreliable over a period of time and therefore are expensive to maintain. Regular inspection and maintenance is required to ensure UPSs, static transfer switches, and power distribution units are working properly.

Security Issues

The data infrastructure of legacy systems is unreliable and often poses a risk of data breaches. Unfortunately, these systems are unable to fulfill today’s strict data security and privacy requirements.

Here’s why?

a. Vulnerable to cyber attacks
b. Unable to scale
c. Inadequate at ensuring compliance
d. Lack of data integration
e. Causes data silos
f. Usually expensive

Insufficient Cooling Capacity

A study predicts that an average of 40% of a data center’s energy consumption goes into powering its cooling and ventilation systems.

In most of the legacy data centers, the cooling systems have significantly lower power densities. As a result, they have to struggle to cope with the intense heat generated by dense, power-hungry IT equipment.

Requirement of a Crisis Management Plan

What will be the consequences if something goes wrong in a smaller but mission-critical asset?

Downtime and lost data are non-permissible in today’s world. Hence, making a crisis management plan and disaster recovery a crucial driver for every data center project.

However, legacy data centers don’t have up-to-date crisis response plans for the central data center and secondary sites.

Inappropriate Sizing

The size of your data center should ideally depend on the size of your organization, the technology, budget, and resources available to you.

For small to medium-sized organizations that are already using legacy systems, a small data center with traditional network and server infrastructure might work well.

However, they need to ensure that their existing electrical infrastructure is capable of supporting the growing data needs.

Since data needs continue to grow, there will be some exponential increase in demand for computing and storage. To fulfill these demands, a data center is required that has abundant, sufficient, and reliable power.

Why is Smart Data Center the Future?

Smart Data Center optimizes all aspects of IT operations and automates crucial processes such as decision-making, fetching insights through predictive analytics, IoT, and prescriptive intelligence.

It is the heart of software technology for most organizations since it enables them to run the business properly. A smart data center is needed to make IT operations more agile and meet business requirements.

Here’s what a Smart Data Center helps you with:

a. Expedites deploying the IT resources and managing administrative tasks
b. Streamlines the process of replacing new infrastructure technologies
c. Maximizes operational efficiency and is pretty cost-effective
d. Enables holistic data center management and data-driven decision-making
e. Improves alignment of business processes and consistent delivery of services

Data Center Migration Types!

Data Center Migration into Private Cloud

Private cloud, also known as internal cloud, gives you control over the resources, improves the security level, and offers better performance and speed.

Such an infrastructure will help you handle certain workloads and data sets for security reasons.

Thus, you can migrate your legacy data center into a private cloud by opting for any of the following two ways:

a. Either hire a team or allocate your administration teams to design and build a private data center infrastructure.
b. Or work with an organization that can provide a robust systems integrator.

Consolidations

Data center consolidations leverage virtualization and/or hyper-converged technology to reduce the number of physical data centers or servers used by decommissioning legacy servers or repurposing servers. The aim is to reduce data center footprints and achieve a higher level of density.

Data center consolidations:

a. Reduce power consumption and cooling loads
b. Demand less hardware and smaller network
c. Lower facility costs
d. Require fewer software licenses

Hybrid

In a hybrid model, organizations divide their data center across multiple IT landscapes. These landscapes can be operated, leased, and owned data centers, colocation facilities, and various private and public clouds.

Hybrid data centers move applications between various infrastructures with ease to optimize performance, cost, and security. But the biggest advantage of using hybrid data centers is the speed with which organizations can respond to market opportunities.

Wrapping Up

The data center architectural decisions directly affect an organization’s ability to build a successful business. Hence, it’s time for organizations to enable their IT team to focus on fixing persistent issues and create a sustainable long-term plan by choosing smart data centers.

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