Emerson's 'CIO Playbook' resource guides on critical IT infrastructure

Emerson Network Power (NYSE: EMR) has released its "CIO Playbook." Entitled Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business, this PDF document resource is designed to help IT decision-makers learn how to cost-effectively build an infrastructure that can adapt to meet business needs. In many cases, a lack of resources -- investment in new or existing facilities or infrastructure, or lack of time to optimize existing systems -- is the primary factor limiting organizational growth, contends Emerson. The CIO Playbook poses questions and offers strategies to help IT decision-makers overcome some of those impediments.

“Limitations to the physical infrastructure -- power, cooling and space -- will always exist, but CIOs and data center managers have greater visibility into their networks and infrastructures than ever before,” comments Peter Panfil, vice president, global power, Emerson Network Power. “With a more accurate understanding of the network’s true capacity, utilization and load criticality, CIOs can deploy technologies to more cost-effectively prepare for their future business demands.”

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The Playbook explains that a deep understanding of the IT load, i.e. its criticality and available capacity, can help businesses put together a plan that considers three key strategies for creating a more scalable, adaptable infrastructure. According to Emerson, these strategies are as follows:

-- Use advanced technology or software to unlock existing capacity and scale up or down. Today’s power and cooling technologies have the capability to scale up and down as needed, or to support various applications that might be ramping up when others are cycling down. Understanding these patterns and optimizing utilization rates dramatically improves facility-wide energy efficiency and helps avoid bloated data centers.

-- Scale up with building blocks. The introduction of self-contained, integrated and modular power and cooling systems -- including everything from row-based UPS and cooling systems to large containers with complete infrastructures -- makes incremental investment in infrastructure capacity possible. In some cases, that level of convenience and flexibility is enough to overcome some sacrifices in terms of capital and operational expenses.

-- Just do it. If a data center has (a) reached the limits of its existing capacity; (b) exhausted its options for unlocking more; (c) run out of physical space to grow; and (d) eliminated outsourcing as an option, then the time has come to build a new facility -- one with infrastructure technologies that enable intelligent, efficient IT growth that meets current and future business needs.

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See also: Emerson advises on data center management best practices