Who are the main stakeholders interested in the data center?
While the data center must provide the necessary resources for end users and enterprise applications, the provisioning and operation of a data center is divided (sometimes by force) between IT, facilities, and finance, each with its own unique viewpoint and responsibilities.
YOU: The IT manager is responsible for the company's IT group, making decisions about which systems and applications are needed to support business operations. IT will directly manage the aspects of the data center that are directly related to IT systems, while Facilities will handle the provision of power, air conditioning, access, and physical space within the data center.
Facilities: The Facilities team is generally responsible for the physical space—for its provision, operation, and maintenance—along with other building assets owned by the company. The Facilities group, in general, will have a good understanding of the overall efficiency of the data center and will have a grasp of the IT data load and total energy consumption.
Finance: The finance group will be responsible for aligning short-term and long-term capital expenditures (CAPEX) to acquire or improve physical assets and operating expenditures (OPEX) to execute with the set of corporate financial operations (balance sheet and cash flow).
Perhaps the greatest challenge these three groups face is that, by its very nature, a data center will rarely operate at or near its defined optimum range. With a typical lifecycle of 10 years (or perhaps more), it is essential that the data center design be flexible enough to support increasing power densities and varying occupancy levels over a significant period. This inherent flexibility must be applied to power, cooling, space, and network connectivity. When a data center is approaching its power, cooling, and space limits, the organization faces the need to optimize its existing facilities, expand them, or establish new ones.