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In a 2014 white paper on “The Cost of Retaining Aging IT Infrastructure,” technology research firm IDC writes, “[I]f a transition to new technologies has been deferred too long, then the time comes when the system has fallen far behind the performance and cost-efficiency levels being offered by multiple vendors in the marketplace today.”
IDC analysts were talking about servers, but the principle applies to data center power and cooling equipment. Aging data center infrastructure can be unreliable and costly to maintain. Outages can seriously disrupt a business, while power and cooling replacement parts can be expensive and hard to find.
In other words, aging data center infrastructure can undermine an enterprise’s investment in and reliance on technologies such as mobile apps, collaboration tools, tiered data storage, data analytics, and other emerging IT solutions that are mission-critical in today’s digital economy. After all, when the data center goes down, most of those competitive tools stop working or become inaccessible.
For organizations unwilling or unable to allocate capital spending toward new data center equipment, modernization – or “retrofitting” – is an increasingly attractive option. Retrofitting can help organizations preserve their infrastructure capital investment while ensuring that their current and future data center power and cooling needs are met.
Another key benefit of retrofitting an aging data center infrastructure is that the facility will use energy more efficiently, thus saving money and aiding the environment through a lower carbon footprint.
For example, if the data center is running on a 100kW UPS, each 1% gain in efficiency translates into $1,000 in energy savings annually, based on a rate of 12 cents per kilowatt hour.
In addition, an experienced data center power and cooling infrastructure vendor such as Schneider Electric can dispose of the old equipment in an environmentally safe manner.
Data center infrastructure doesn’t last forever, but customers that strategically upgrade their power and cooling equipment to meet the demands of modern computing and storage can extend the value and usefulness of their investment while helping their organizations compete more effectively and better serve their own customers.
For more information about choosing the best solution for modernizing your data center infrastructure, see this brief (and entertaining) video by Schneider Electric on UPS modernization services.
