DevOps Articles

The case against data center consolidation

Data center consolidation has been a key factor in data center growth and management. The ability to use and share as much as 100% of every server has helped to contain the spiraling costs of hardware, power, cooling and physical data center space.

There is value, but there are some circumstances where a business may want to rethink consolidation and consider the benefits that only more hardware can provide. Placing resources and services outside of the principal data center is a legitimate response to situations where network limitations, scale and redundancy are vital to the organization.

A deployment of some level of computing and storage resources outside of the primary data center and close to the actual facility, location or task at hand can potentially alleviate the challenges of network dependence; this is typically referred to as edge computing.