What factors and best practices should be considered in developing a data center strategy and architecture while balancing risk, cost, quality and agility? Gartner Research analysts Donna Scott and Paul McGuckin offer their perspectives at the Gartner Data Center Conference Dec. 2 at the MGM Grand Hotel.

LAS VEGAS—Few IT managers ever get the opportunity to put together a well-written, well-researched strategy with detailed architecture to build a fresh new data center.

What is most likely to happen in the real world is that a manager will inherit an older data center—one in which the inventory increases over time due to business initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, shadow IT, and business growth.

Then, depending upon budgetary allowances, the manager may occasionally start a project to rationalize the value of the data center—typically driven by a large fiscal-year savings he or she may have achieved after consolidating a bunch of servers, thanks to virtualization software.

This scenario was reported as a typical one in a survey taken at the November 2007 Gartner Data Center Conference, where nearly three-quarters of the attendees said they were in the process of a physical data center consolidation project. This is still pretty much status quo today.

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