Emerson Network Power has released a CIO Playbook titled, “Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business.”

The latest in a series of free-for-download informational guidelines designed for CIOs, the playbook helps IT decision-makers to cost-effectively build an infrastructure that can adapt to changing business needs.

Lack of resources—investment in new or existing facilities or infrastructure, or limited time to optimize existing systems—in many cases, is the primary factor limiting organizational growth. The playbook poses questions and offers strategies to help IT decision-makers overcome those hurdles.  “Understanding the data center’s true capacity will help the CIO strategize how to best make improvements within the facility, “said Tony Gaunt, internet data centres director for Emerson Network Power in Asia. “Through infrastructure monitoring, CIOs are better placed to determine which equipment to upgrade, whether to replace or just make improvements, to more effectively allocate business resources.”

The Playbook explains that a deep understanding of the IT load, its criticality and available capacity can help businesses put together a plan that considers three key strategies for creating a more scalable, adaptable infrastructure:

• Use advanced technology or software to unlock existing capacity and scale up or down. Today’s power and cooling technologies have the capability to scale up and down as needed, or to support various applications that might be ramping up when others are cycling down. Understanding these patterns and optimizing utilization rates dramatically improves facility-wide energy efficiency and helps avoid bloated data centers.
• Scale up with building blocks. The introduction of self-contained, integrated and modular power and cooling systems—including everything from row-based UPS and cooling systems to large containers with complete infrastructures—makes incremental investment in infrastructure capacity possible. In some cases, that level of convenience and flexibility is enough to overcome some sacrifices in terms of capital and operational expenses.
• Just do it. If a data center has (a) reached the limits of its existing capacity; (b) exhausted its options for unlocking more; (c) run out of physical space to grow; and (d) eliminated outsourcing as an option, then the time has come to build a new facility—one with infrastructure technologies that enable intelligent, efficient IT growth that meets current and future business needs.

With a whole spectrum of choices available, budget-conscious businesses will use all the information available to them with today’s advanced technologies to ensure they make the right choice.