What’s new about the New Data Center

Over the past few days, I’ve been working with the keynoter and speakers for our upcoming New Data Center Technology Tour. And the same message has threaded through our conversations: It’s time to get past re-engineering what you have and think about your network in a new way. This means, they say, preparing yourself to go after budget money from your managers.

The New Data Center tour kicks off in September and features eight presenters, as well as our keynoter Andy Schroepfer, president of Tier 1 Research. In speaking with Schroepfer about his morning address, it became obvious that the data center will be a launchpad for new products and services.

What I mean by this is that for the past few years we’ve been talking about taking what you have and getting more from it. The New Data Center asks you to stop thinking in those terms and start embracing new applications and infrastructure that can help you do business more securely and more efficiently. The benefits will be a selling point for the corporate bean counters.

Most of the company representatives who will be speaking on the tour seem to agree. Look for Cisco, Concord, EMC, Force 10 Networks, Foundry, Inkra Networks, Nauticus Networks and NetScaler to show you how to implement and manage “data center-specific” products and services.

Some presenters expect to directly address the issue of why developing data center architecture is so different from developing traditional network architectures. Suddenly, technologies like 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which IT managers have been balking at, make sense and can add tremendous benefit to the environment.

The discussion will also include consolidation and address how you can pack multiple functions into a single box. And for those who already have multiple appliances, virtualization becomes essential to see all the resources in the network as one entity. Expect several speakers to tackle this topic, as it is key to the success of the data center.

Finally, look for a discussion on new storage approaches that you’ll have to take to achieve the greatest effect in the data center. Rather than having islands of storage, the new data center allows you to pool your resources and deploy them as necessary.

As you can see, we’ve got a lot to talk about during our four-city tour, and I look forward to you joining the discussion. To register for this event, please head to https://www.nwfusion.com/events/datacenter/index.html