Data Center Solutions - Call PBM IT Solutions at (888) 233-6471


Q. What is a data center?
A. A data center is a place where business operate the part of their IT infrastructure that requires the highest grade of power, bandwidth, air conditioning, monitoring, and technical support.

Data centers are the biggest challenges facing IT executives in the coming years.

There are 10 key issues for IT managers to keep up with: virtualization; the data deluge; energy and green IT; complex resource tracking; consumerization of IT and social software; unified communications; mobile and wireless; system density; mashups and portals; and cloud computing.

Recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure put IT on the front lines for ensuring a business is complying with regulations, notably Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Not only is it necessary to store key data for longer periods, but being able to retrieve information at a granular level –right down to specific emails –is now an IT responsibility, one that if not handled properly could result in a vacation with the local municipal system.

Virtualization can be viewed as part of an overall trend in enterprise IT that includes autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment will be able to manage itself based on perceived activity, and utility computing, in which computer processing power is seen as a utility that clients can pay for only as needed.

Virtualization was first introduced in the 1960s by IBM to boost utilization of large, expensive mainframe systems by partitioning them into logical, separate virtual machines that could run multiple applications and processes at the same time. In the 1980s and 1990s, this centrally shared mainframe model gave way to a distributed, client-server computing model, in which many low-cost x86 servers and desktops independently run specific applications.

To qualify as a true enterprise solution, a storage management system must be able to scale across the entire enterprise. This means it must be able to handle multiple servers spread across wide geographical areas. The solution should further leverage technologies such as clustering and load balancing to support hundreds or even thousands of client computers. It also must support various network infrastructures and firewall configurations.

Improve IT responsiveness to rapidly changing business demands with the Cisco Unified Computing System. This next-generation data center platform accelerates the delivery of new services simply, reliably, and securely through end-to-end provisioning and migration support.

The Green IT approach can include several different phases in the lifecycle of a product – the development, production, usage and disposal of IT. Development must grant consideration to the environment; the production must take place using environmentally friendly production methods; the IT solutions must be used in an environmentally friendly manner; and finally, IT waste must be disposed of in an environmentally correct manner. All of these phases are supported by research and innovation in Green IT.

An effective High Availability (HA) data solution must address both unplanned and planned causes of downtime to achieve a truly fault tolerant and resilient IT infrastructure. Unplanned downtime is primarily the result of computer failures, data failures and human error. Planned downtime is primarily due to data changes or system changes that must be applied to the production system.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V provides real-time coordinated configuration of network and security services and maintains a virtual machine-centric management model, enabling the server administrator to increase both efficiency and flexibility.