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Moving towards services-oriented data centres

By Busie Mhlanga-Mjimba, Senior Conference Producer, ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 02 Jul 2015
CIOs and IT leaders must take their place around the boardroom table as technology business leaders, says Nkosana Mbokane, CTO of TechnoChange Solutions.
CIOs and IT leaders must take their place around the boardroom table as technology business leaders, says Nkosana Mbokane, CTO of TechnoChange Solutions.

While SA seems to be ahead of most African countries when it comes to data centre trends, it appears to be lagging behind in comparison to other global data centre players.

So says Nkosana Mbokane, CTO of TechnoChange Solutions, who notes the level of maturity can be measured, for example, by counting the number of South African companies with tier-four data centres.

"As far as I know, we are talking about fewer than five companies in the space where we have hundreds of big IT and data centre players."

According to Gartner, the most popular data centre trends revolve around companies, in that space, using technology that maximises space and power usage for the data centre, and those that use hyper-efficiency in their data centres.

It, therefore, means moving towards data centres that are services-oriented and are economically efficient using cloud-based software, adds Gartner.

Efficiency and consistency in keeping the "always-on" servers up will become critical, says Mbokane.

"Another upcoming trend is the focus on the energy-efficient data centre, with higher power densities, using renewable energy like liquid cooling, data centre infrastructure management tools and co-location. This is the future of data centre technology."

The most pressing issues for CIOs that manage on-premises data centres include ensuring uptime, efficient use of power, operationalising the hardware and reducing the cost of technology, he notes.

Mbokane, who previously worked at PPECB, uses a PPECB case study from the FMCG sector to illustrate this issue: "We wanted to consolidate and deploy new application workloads supported by hyper-converged infrastructure to replace aging server and storage technology."

Scalability, highly responsive IT environments that can easily expand and contract as dictated by business requirements, were 'hot potato' issues for the company, says Mbokane.

All efforts that looked at PPECB's environmental hot potatoes were based on ensuring it resolved issues in order to drive business efficiencies and address business-specific needs, he adds.

The data centre modernisation project did not stop at the virtualisation of workloads and software-defined infrastructure, but looked at the backup/recovery and disaster recovery, says Mbokane.

Data Centres: The Next Frontier 2015

The Data Centres: The Next Frontier 2015 conferencewill help re-examine the cost of data centre ownership in South African organisations and find out new ways to save money in data centre infrastructure and operations. Click here for more details and to register.

Having been in IT for over 18 years, Mbokane believes "there is a constant demand on constrained IT resources, particularly in the public sector".

He notes the challenge is many organisations still use old infrastructure, and in recent times, cloud technology was a hot potato in government because of uncertainty around where the data centre in the cloud is located.

Therefore, many government entities are slightly behind in adopting trendy data centre concepts and the cloud.

The changes in technology are driving businesses to look into agile solutions that will ensure their competitiveness, profitability and efficiency. The bottom line is that IT departments will continue to have to do more with less, says Mbokane.

He believes the time for IT as a box-pushing function within the organisation is over - CIOs and IT leaders must get out of the basement and take their place around the boardroom table as technology business leaders.

Mbokane will share his experiences and foresight on three major frontiers for data storage that will change the face of the data centre, using the business case of PPECB, at the Data Centres: The Next Frontier 2015conference,to be held at The Forum, in Bryanston, in three weeks' time.

Click here to find out more and register.

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