Site and facilities

Where information technology and the building meet

Taking on the data centre crisis

Increasingly efficient, high-density computers provide an opportunity to get more value from every square foot of space in your data centre. But powerful blade and "pizza box" servers consume a lot of energy, which grows more expensive every year. And they generate heat, which can cause servers to shut down and limit your ability to add much-needed equipment.

The demand for more computing power and electricity, better cooling solutions, and facilities that can grow with an organisation is creating a crisis in data centres around the world. Simply adding more servers and turning up the air conditioning is not feasible. Instead, numerous organisations are planning to cope with this crisis by building new facilities or making significant changes to their existing sites. They are aiming to optimise their data centres - not only to accommodate more hardware, but also to meet business objectives that include:

• Reducing costs
• Responding to increasing demand for data centre capacity that helps increase productivity
• Enabling continuous technology change to implement new business processes
• Improving resiliency and security to help protect data and address corporate and governmental mandates

Site and facilities services - responding to the demand for flexible, scalable technologies and reducing costs

IBM's?site and facilities services?are ready to help you take on the data centre crisis.

Our portfolio of services provides expertise to assist you with evaluating, designing, implementing and managing your IT infrastructure and physical environment.

• Data Centre and Facilities Strategy Services - helping you to identify your requirements, capabilities and capacities, and to define your best "green" and high-resiliency options
• IT Facilities Assessment, Design and Construction Services - helping you to create stable, security-rich, future-ready data centres and enterprise command centre facilities
• IT Facilities Consolidation and Relocation Services - helping you to make optimal investments that deliver availability, scalability, recoverability and agility throughout your data centre transition
• Specialised Facilities Services - providing the IT and industry knowledge essential for project design and integration relevant to intelligent building and green building construction, as well as factory automation, clean room, trading room and facility management control systems (FMCS)

To help you address power and cooling issues, IBM determines how your current facilities can support the deployment of next-generation IT infrastructure components and identifies thermal solutions to address heat-related issues in your computing environment. We work with you to plan, design and implement scalable and flexible racking systems designed for optimum manageability and minimum maintenance costs.

Our extensive - and expanding - selection of services can help you make the transition to a reliable, security-rich, customised IT infrastructure. Addressing areas ranging from the layout of physical facilities to the equipment, utility services and environmental systems, IBM can enable even small organisations to create or modify a data centre in an accelerated timeframe.

The anticipated benefits

IBM's site and facilities services can help your organisation to:

• Align IT with business requirements
• Lower total cost of ownership
• Mitigate operational risk
• Limit downtime and extend business continuity
• Support compliance with regulatory mandates and privacy laws
• Build data centres and facilities that support growth
• Manage all aspects of facilities planning, design and construction

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