The Power of IT: Data Center Efficiency and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Topics Discussed:

• Trends driving data center efficiency, including how data centers can accommodate growth, how to protect critical systems, and how to satisfy customer demands.
• How Hurricane Sandy demonstrated that good continuity planning involves redundant data centers, where equipment is located, and how to handle generator systems.
• Balancing the claims that the cloud has enormous economies of scale (and therefore is less expensive) and the efficiencies already achieved for some resources, such as computer storage
• Why a recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO) needs to be incorporated into disaster recovery (DR) plans to determine and to understand what happens if a particular process or application goes offline
• While disaster-recovery plans often focus on bridging the gap where data, software, or hardware have been damaged or lost, they should also take into account what happens if personnel is not available.
• While power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a starting point for measuring a data center’s efficiency, other considerations such as carbon emissions, water-usage effectiveness, and energy sources are also important when determining how green a data center really is.