The data centre is the beating heart of all large, modern corporate IT infrastructures. Home to ever-increasingly powerful hardware, it is not only the place in which billions of transactions are processed daily, but it also serves as the organisation’s memory, where vast banks of vital data are amassed and stored. As such, this often invisible facility provides the information resource pool and power by which the entire IT estate – and indeed the wider business – is able to operate.
Nonetheless, data centres – dusty, dirty and unglamorous – have traditionally been situated at the bottom of the IT value chain, says Steve Wallage, managing director of data centre specialist-research house BroadGroup. “It’s one of these things that gets stuck between the IT, building facilities and management departments. All IT departments are reliant on it, but no-one’s quite sure what goes on down there.”
