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stored on their premises,” he says.

“You are often left with some residual data that

people don’t want to take off site; perhaps for

security reasons, or perhaps they don’t want to

transfer security camera video over fibre optic cable

because it can be very expensive.”

Robert says many companies are using inefficient

systems and even though they may have only a few

servers, operational costs are still high.

“You can have a small data centre running at

200kVa with 200kW of cooling and they are only

taking a load of 35kW, so they are very inefficient,

but nobody wants to spend the money on the

infrastructure because it’s already a sunk cost. They

don’t want to downsize but they have these big bills

and are missing the real estate that the racks are

taking up.”

Robert says a big mistake he sees people making

is skimping on the cost in the initial set-up phase

of on –site data centres and this can have adverse

consequences down the track, not just with

operational costs but also in emergency situations.

After working with helping clients to implement

good practises so they are ready when faced with

a massive power outage, Robert says the right

infrastructure needs to be in place from the start.

He says the cost of losing data or having

your servers go-down in a black-out or similar

circumstances far outweighs the cost of having a good

initial server set-up; and he mentioned the experience

of Southwest Airlines as a cautionary tale.

Southwest Airlines had a data centre outage

which lasted an hour. The initial cost that could have

prevented the outage was predicted to be a few

hundred thousand dollars and the estimated cost of

the outage was around $62 million.

Installers and sellers of these solutions are

constantly driven to push the price down and that

presents a real challenge for the industry, particularly

when offering higher rates than competitors can

result in loss of business.

Consumer demand to access information reliably

and instantaneously has resulted in increasing

pressure to deliver distributed computing where it’s

needed. Robert says the market needs to embrace

converged infrastructure solutions even though it

may come at a larger initial cost.

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