OnLine Distribution presents the future of datacentres

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The seven city road show kicks off in Abu Dhabi on December 5th and covers Dubai: Riyadh and Dammam in Saudi Arabia; Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. Seminars, at the road show, will present delegates with new tools to redesign core data centre architectures to cope with evolving business models. As part of its strategy to provide resellers and end users with value added support, the event is supported by senior members from vendor partners like Avocent, APW, Corning, APC and Ortronics. The half day event comprises of five sessions and an 'open house' session post lunch with the vendors, where delegates can meet vendors for one to one meetings.

'We have organised this road show to promote our vendors in the different verticals,' says Venu Menon, divisional manager, Online Distribution.

'According to recent reports from IDC, data centres will need to be fundamentally re-engineered to meet the challenges ahead, as companies grow their business. Automated management tools have become essential to keep down IT admin costs low, and data centres need to keep up with growing business requirements. However, these large clusters of power-hungry machines, along with rising energy prices, are generating huge energy bills, forcing data centre owners to seek more energy-efficient solutions.'

The Middle East is now a manufacturing hub, and remote assistance and control of data is a major challenge. According to recent reports, without modification, data centres will only keep pace with increasing business needs for a year and 10 per cent of them do not even match current business requirements. It has been estimated that standardising on a smaller number of management tools could help data centres shave up to 50 per cent of costs from their operations. 'Companies in the region need greater visibility and control over the servers in their data centres while removing the need for multiple management tools,' says Menon.

Storage, security, in-house or remote management of data are the basic elements dealt with in a data centre and with segmentation and vertical housing of data, centralisation of data has become a major challenge. Many CIOs and IT directors are opting for a quick-fix solution of buying more servers, but this is not a long term solution. 'They need to look to make investments in solutions that will meet their current and future needs - offering scalability to grow and adapt with their business, and extending the life of their data centre,' adds Menon.

'With the increase in demands on IT, it is the industry's responsibility to help customers make smarter choices around all data centre issues, including energy consumption. Data centre owners running large amounts of IT equipment should consider using combined heat and power (CHP) technology to reduce their emissions and electricity consumption,' he adds.