EDITOR’S QUESTION
manner. Degaussing and destroying plays
an important role in data centres.
Research conducted by Coleman Parkes
for Blancco in December 2018, across
600 data centres in Asia Pacific, Europe
and North America, found that inefficient
data sanitisation is costing organisations
hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
For others, more than half of their onsite IT
assets are essentially dead weight, resulting
in loss of efficiency, continuing support and
maintenance costs and non-compliance
with potential security risks. Two in five
organisations that store their data in-house
are spending over US$100,000 to manage
obsolete IT hardware.
Industry experts point out these critical
limits are being breached because there
is insufficient knowledge and operational
practices on how to manage hardware
technology obsolescence. Very few
vendors offer a continuous process of built
in replacement of hardware, and usually
the only way out is a forklift approach. It
is only recently that many vendors have
started to offer an evergreen approach of
built in replacement of their SSD arrays
and retain their customers globally.
GANESH BHAT, HEAD
OF DATA CENTRES,
EHOSTING DATAFORT
ny industrial plant that
runs for years lowers
the efficiency. Data
centres are the IT
industry’s power house
which is expected
to run most efficiently. Data centres
support an organisation’s mission critical
infrastructure or a service provider’s IT
operations, that further supports day to
day business in a 24/7/365 fashion.
A
IT managers do their best to keep IT
infrastructure updated in terms of
software patches and updates. In a similar
manner they also bring in upgrades of
their hardware equipment.
But similar to industrial equipment, large-
scale, sprawling deployments of any IT
working systems face obsolescence of
all manners and need to be replaced.
30
Issue 02
Replacing the hardware systems in a
data centre, whether compute, storage,
networking, power and cooling, can be
especially challenging for multiple reasons.
From an environmental protection point of
view, hardware can be recycled through
specialised agencies if it is made available
through their established channels. It can
also be reused for less critical and offline
operations and therefore has a disposable
asset value, however low in comparison to
the purchase price.
More importantly, IT hardware needs
to be sanitised to remove all traces of
corporate and other data. It is not enough
to delete and reformat the hard disks
and so on. Large corporate and service
providers run the risk of data theft and
planned espionage if their IT assets are not
disposed of in an audited and sophisticated
Any hardware revamp programme needs
to follow these steps – identify the latest
design standards; benchmark current and
future performance expectations; conduct
an internal gap analysis along these
standards; and finally, prioritise all steps
taken to modernise the data centre. Same
goes with facility devices and equipment
to achieve expected, continuous, mission
critical, efficient operation.
DATA CENTRES
ARE THE IT
INDUSTRY’S
POWER HOUSE
WHICH IS
EXPECTED
TO RUN MOST
EFFICIENTLY.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com