Stakeholder engagement is vital in the design of a datacentre, according to University of Melbourne director of IT infrastructure, Peter Sack.
Sack made his comments during a discussion on the designing of a technology-centric datacentre at a Datacenter Dynamics conference in Sydney.
Some of the trends Sack identified as currently affecting the datacentre are stakeholder engagement and having a consistent vision of company ICT and a property strategy.
“Datacentre strategies are no different from any other IT strategies in the sense that you need to have a good understanding of the business and its requirements – and to do that, you need to have a good customer relationship with stakeholder management,” he said.
According to Sack, businesses need to look at IT at an enabling level and think about a fit for a structured IT platform that quickly deploys and implements data centre solutions.
“I think one of the problems we have, particularly in IT, is that we think that to be innovative we have to be the innovators or the creators of a solution. You can innovate while allowing an innovative solution to be made,” he said.
Sack mentioned that the traditional data centre design is not going to be able to cope with the evolution of compute as known today as it is more focused on high and variable density.
He also said businesses want cheap infrastructure services at high volumes and high speeds, which require specialised infrastructure – including variability in cooling and design.
As such, businesses are encouraged to adopt a cooling design that can specifically cater for heat spots or targeted cooling; enabling it can deploy IT where it wants to.
In relation to infrastructure, Sack named four key considerations surrounding the cloud technology and virtualisation space: increased density, reduced footprint, potential hot spots and reduced loads.
“In terms of running a datacentre, one of the challenges I see is the future of converged infrastructure as virtualisation goes beyond just a server and what it means for the organisation,” he said.
However, high-level stakeholders are not concerned with the type of solution but rather, the timeliness of project delivery, right placement of project infrastructure and enabling data to be placed and processed on it, Sack said.
