Space and real estate issues push data centers to consider new solutions for storage

Space limitations are a problem that has plagued the data center industry since its inception, and these issues have only grown progressively worse as more and more sectors come to rely on data centers to operate their businesses. Adding additional hardware to optimize space can easily worsen server sprawl before alleviating it - IT teams may have to rethink their storage strategies if they wish to overcome these growth hurdles. This issue is especially relevant for companies operating data centers in cities with limited space to add new buildings for data centers.

Urban environments put a premium on expansion
New York City provides a perfect case study of the extra challenges faced by IT teams as they consider expanding their company's data center operations. According to Datacenter Dynamics, real estate prices in the densely populated metropolis are quite high, a factor contributing to the slow addition of new space for data centers - only 115,000 square footage of data center white space has been added to New York City since 2012.

Office rental prices in The Big Apple are among the most expensive in the entire world, ranked sixth overall. This problem led IT teams in the past to ramp up rack density inside their current space. Unfortunately, the subsequent need for greater cooling capacity agitated another one of the major issues standing in the way of data growth in major metropolitan areas. With densely populated areas come high power consumption and excess costs when the demand for electricity is at its highest during the day. Rack density will continue to increase in New York City, and IT teams can expect the complications associated with running a data center in a similar environment to keep rising as well.

Diverse solutions available to meet unique IT challenges
Data Center Knowledge pointed out that there are a variety of ways that data centers can step up to the challenge of increasingly costly expansion. Taking advantage of advancements in software-defined storage is a popular strategy - adding the software layer provides IT teams with the ability to organize and aggregate data with more precise controls. Companies in need of greater storage can also circumvent the city problem in general by opening up their next facility at the city's outskirts. Gear like remote console servers would make it easy to share resources between the new and old facility, though the potential commute may pose its own challenges to your staff.

Perle's wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers and network administrators with secure remote management of any device with a serial console port. Plus, they are the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market with the advanced security functionality needed to easily perform secure remote data center management and out-of-band management of IT assets from anywhere in the world.