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It appears that we are living within a throwaway society, where it seems that the cost of buying new outweighs the time and investment of renovating the old; a case of ‘out with the old, and in with the new’. Not to mention the negative impact this social mentality is having on the environment with the increase in landfill demand, it is also not always easy to dispose of everything due to potential chemical pollution.
Nothing unfortunately lasts for ever and that then lends us to ask the question to replace or repair, but how about upgrade? That could be an option when it comes to your outdated data centre with its end of life equipment.
The data centre market is booming with the UK being forecasted as the biggest market in Europe by 2020 according to a report from Tariff Consultancy Ltd, which also predicts that data centre space and power in Europe will increase by almost 20 percent from 2015 to 2020. Feeding this demand can seem like an impossible task, whilst the industry is concentrating on building new facilities what about the sites that could be upgraded.
All I.T equipment within a data centre has a definitive lifespan and requires an asset management schedule to be adhered to if unplanned downtime is to be avoided. The lifespan of individual pieces of equipment can vary from every three to perhaps ten years, but they will also need regular maintenance during this time to ensure that they perform to their full potential.
Building a new data centre can sometimes feel like the ideal solution when equipment starts coming to end of life, but this is subject to space and money therefore data centres situated in large cities are more likely to have upgrades due to the lack of available space. A new build would need to be completed in parallel to the operation of the existing data centre. It is likely that the existing data centre is live and therefore must be kept online, 24/7/365 so to completely shut down a data centre is not advisable and not possible. Upgrading a live site comes with its own set of challenges due to active power systems being worked on and the risk to human life.
However, updating pieces of equipment following a planned asset management schedule with the utilisation of temporary equipment enables your existing equipment to be either upgraded or replaced in stages. This provides minimum disruption to operation and enables a company to spread the cost of the upkeep of their existing data centre over a period of years rather than a single one-off CapEx investment into a new facility.
By upgrading equipment, it is likely that it will benefit from modern technological advancements which could result in lower energy costs helping to offset the cost of the upgrade over time. It is hopeful that the data centres built today will be more upgradable in the future. An old, outdated data centre can be brought back to life, it doesn’t necessarily have to decommissioned. By putting into a place an upgrade schedule, it can continue to operate effectively, taking advantage of new energy efficient equipment for many years to come.
Workspace Technology offers data centre upgrades and proactively alerts clients to end of life equipment so that they can budget accordingly and ensure that payments are spread out in a manageable way. More importantly the regular programme of upgrading prevents unplanned downtime!