Jonker harps on building fast data center

SYSTEM engineer and HPP Accounts Manager at the American Power Conversion (APC), Mr. Barend Jonker, has outlined how best to build a data center faster by organizations.

Speaking at the recently held fourth ICT for government, which took place in the capital city of Accra in Ghana, he said that organizations could build a data center faster and cheaper, mostly with a higher level of overall available and resilience through looking at the Network Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI).

This, Mr. Jonker said incorporates power, cooling, racks and physical structure, security and fire protection, cabling and data centre management.

He declared that today, increasing numbers of companies are centering their strategic initiatives around the perception of standardisation and consolidation.

Stressing that nowhere is this more applicable than in the data center, although he recognized that traditional approach to data centre architecture forces enterprises to build out to full projected capacity from day one.

The outcome, he said, is a long deployment schedule and millions of dollars spent on an under-utilised infrastructure.

As a result of which, it is rarely, if ever, adaptable enough to keep up with today’s changing IT needs, he said.

The accounts manager also pointed out that by taking power protection to the next level, companies are changing the way that data centres are deployed.

In his contribution, country general manager for Africa at APC, Mr. Carl Kleynhans, said that by rightsizing the data centre architecture, "companies would only incur the infrastructure costs actually required at a given time".

According to him, to achieve the theoretically available cost savings, the ideal data centre architecture would only have the power and cooling infrastructure needed at the moment.
"It would only take the space that it needed at the moment and it would only incur service costs on capital infrastructure capacity that was actually being used. It would be perfectly scaleable," he said.

APC which offers a wide variety of products for network-critical physical infrastructure including InfraStruXure, its revolutionary architecture for on-demand data centers, as well as physical threat management products through the company’s NetBotz division.

These products and services, the manager said, help companies increase the availability and reliability of their IT systems.

The aim of ICT for Government (ICT4Gov) is to encourage processes in building capacity within the various arms of government, namely federal, state and local so as to harness ICT for the socio-economic development and improvement of the delivery of public services through eGovernment.