Restructuring the Data Center Industry

How do you address the ever growing challenges with data center cooling, ensure power efficacy, be redundant in components and paths but eliminate redundant costs, manage distribution and consolidation, be resilient, efficient, remain secure and warrant safety, as well as resolve the scarcity of skilled human resources? At the same time, can you differentiate between real clouds vs. virtual clouds, bridge the gap between Information Technology and facilities, segregate site from facilities, source data centers that actually meet your business and application needs instead of snatching resources from a common wealth (common waste) of infrastructure generically assembled regardless of application and industry needs, and finally produce data center topologies that are effectively designed to deliver the application?

Current problems

Regardless of whether you are an airport or a military base you will be prescribed, by today’s “data center standards”, to build your data center the exact same way. Moreover, in all practical terms, neither of you can qualify for high “tiers” because one is not maintaining the required distance to a military compound, and the other is too close to airports—and flight paths! Imagine telling an airport or a defense institution, that deals with people’s lives and exists to preserve our safety, “you are not qualified!” 

Today's standards completely ignore the vital link between IT and facilities (power, cooling, etc.). What is built at the facility layers does not necessarily reflect the requirements of IT and vice versa. 

There is no mention of cloud or even an understanding of such. IT managers “think” they have a cloud whereas in reality all of their IT gear, including both physical and virtual machines, often tends to be hosted at one or two physical sites (sometimes few adjacent racks) maximum. They will only find out that their “cloud” was truly virtual reality when the physical layers fail and prove to be cut off from the compute.

Individuals lack education and skill in the field. People have either grown into their positions or simply latched onto industry buzzwords and literature without really making practical sense of it all. The shortage of skilled workers is compounded as the industry moves too fast for organizations to keep their employees (who are always busy handling day-to-day operations and facilitating growth needs) up-to-date and in pace with their activities.

Efficiency is outsourced to third parties, not addressed by the data center industry closely or directly enough. Being able to qualify for a Tier IV with a PUE of 2 is a vivid example of a current data center trend that must no longer be acceptable in the industry!

How does Infinity work?

The Infinity Paradigm, Infinity for short, is the culmination of a conscious effort to achieve certain main features simultaneously, whose combined effect is far greater than the summation of individual components. The end result… a next generation framework that addresses today’s needs, empowers futuristic data centers and is fundamentally realistic.

 “Application lives, breathes, interacts, and exists only in an ecosystem that supports its purpose. The data center caters to that need by being the infrastructure that supports the Application Ecosystem (AE) and its well-being.” - IDCA

Infinity Paradigm provides the stakeholder, a customizable data center framework granting total control over Availability, Efficiency, Security, Capacity, Operation, and Resilience based on the specific needs of the business.

It is not sufficient to be independently proficient such as, being physically secure, or highly available, efficient and bulletproof on power, or dense on cooling, or robust on the IT gear.  Rather, all of these qualities be bundled together in harmony with complete understanding of inter and intra dependencies and collective use.

The Infinity Paradigm bridges the industry gaps through the understanding that a data center must be viewed as more than just a single facility. It maintains a vivid focus on certain uniquely core values: comprehensiveness, accounting for all physical and logical infrastructure layers of the application ecosystem, the today’s necessity of cloud, being international while localized , efficiency-driven, operational conduciveness, and conclusively  all effective based on clear application-centric agenda, thus never losing sight of the needs of the business.

Infinity breaks through the industry legacy barriers, set by lackluster standards, and corrects the very definition of a data center from a single site into a living system, an ecosystem, with infinite possibilities made up of a finite number of logical and physical nodes with the sole purpose of delivering the application.

This free, open framework will grow and evolve over time through the input and collaboration of its users around the world, redefining the very essence of what a data center is and does. The Infinity Paradigm is the need of today and answer for tomorrow, a revolution in the making by the data center industry for the data center industry!