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SA's engineered data centres pay off

By Tracy Burrows, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 10 Feb 2014

With SA's engineered data centre pioneers having piloted and tested the new approach for the past 24 months, they are now reporting significant returns on their investment, says Gary de Menezes, regional director at Oracle Africa.

Enterprises around the world are now looking to the engineered data centre for three key reasons, says de Menezes. "There is an ever-increasing need to increase their storage footprint; there is the question of how to manage and interrogate this uncontrollable explosion of data; and - critically - there is a need for IT to balance costs yet progress business in an environment of flat economic growth."

De Menezes says the engineered data centre answers these challenges, delivering simplified, improved and more cost-effective data centres.

"The data centre is at the heart of the business, so the revolution has to start in the data centre. Enterprises are looking to radically change the way they have structured and run their data centres for the past 20 years."

This change, he notes, is being described as the 'third platform' for data centres. "In the past, enterprises sourced best of breed components from multiple vendors and then had to integrate them. Thanks to consolidation in this sector, vendors may now own IP across the entire stack, allowing them to integrate products at an engineering layer. Oracle has invested heavily in integrating all layers of the data centre over the past four years."

Locally, a handful of large enterprises in the financial, telecoms, retail and public sector spaces have rolled out engineered data centre systems over the past two years. "The results have been impressive," says de Menezes.

"On average, they are reporting a reduction of up to 30 times their storage footprint, a 20 - 30 times increase in performance and up to 40% reduction in their direct TCO." In addition, the pioneers are seeing improved efficiencies in operations and are able to repurpose resources to drive business value, instead of carry out maintenance.

Although the early adopters were large enterprises, the benefits of the engineered data centre aren't limited to large enterprise, says de Menezes. "The systems can be scaled down to midsize enterprise too," he says.

Oracle will host a free Executive Forum in Sandton on 27 February, where the trends, strategies and benefits around engineered data centres will be explained. One of SA's early adopter clients will also deliver a case study, outlining the process and outcomes of a move to an Oracle engineered data centre.

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