Is Bigger Better? CIOs Discuss Future Of The Data Center

The data center is not going away, but midsize companies are looking at alternative, cloud-based functions or virtualization technologies to consolidate some of their core IT infrastructure, according to some midsize CIOs.

The subject will be a topic discussed at the Midsize Enterprise Summit from May 3-6 in Miami, which will draw more than 300 CIOs of midsize companies. It's an especially timely subject for Bill Danuloff, vice president and CIO of The Gorman-Rupp Company, Mansfield, Ohio, who is designing a data center for a new 380,000-square-foot facility his company is building.

Gorman-Rupp is a growing business, but the new data center won't be any bigger than the current one because the company will utilize virtualization technology, Danuloff said.

"We will move some of the servers we virtualized; those are fairly new. There will be some additional new equipment as well, like routers, switches. We want the advantage of higher bandwidth, better performance. We're not at the point of picking that out yet," Danuloff said.

Gorman-Rupp hasn't heavily explored the idea of putting its applications or storage into the cloud yet, Danuloff said.

"Being a manufacturing firm, we've been a little reluctant not to have the data reside here. We're comfortable here. We still do backup off-site, but not having it here [at all]—we haven't determined if that is a good thing or not for us," he said.

At the upcoming Midsize Enterprise Summit, Danuloff hopes to learn more about environmental controls in a modern data center. Gorman-Rupp has budgeted to make the entire data center climate-controlled, but Danuloff wants to know if his company can just encapsulate the racks to save money.

"Even though we've committed to a raised floor for the whole data center, we can save a lot of money on estimates if we don't have to do that. Especially since people have to work in there," he said.

Meanwhile, John Nguyen, senior vice president of IS technology at National Geographic Society, has no specific data center projects for this year, but his long-term goal is to have a hybrid model that includes in-house infrastructure as well as cloud-based storage.

"I have to have both. I've said that since the beginning. The nature of multimedia requires our [employees] to have to sit next to the machines, but for 600 or 700 Terabytes of archive, I don't need that to be here," he said.

Jim Williams, director of IS at A&W Food Services of Canada, Vancouver, B.C., has spent the past couple of years retooling his organization's data center to the point that he doesn't expect to have to make changes for the next several years.

"We've pretty well virtualized everything. We've taken a lot of Windows-type servers out. We have three virtual servers that equates to about 22 or so servers. Unless the business changes, I don't see big changes."

Another CIO, who asked not to be named, said there's always going to be a need for data centers within midsize companies, due to corporate concerns about security.

"But I'm looking at a lot of [alternatives]. A lot of marketing stuff doesn't need to be embedded in the [data center]," he said.

He said that with the price of storage as low as 15 cents per Gigabyte, cloud-based storage is compelling.

"I think things have been overhyped in terms of the 'cloud,' but we're figuring out how to monetize it so that it makes sense."

Tweet

   

More Channel Programs