The Hidden Risks of Legacy Infrastructure and Tips to Modernize Your Data Center

Many businesses (maybe even yours) overlook the limitations of a legacy data center facility, built to address the requirements of a different time and now facing a long list of complex and costly upgrades. Such infrastructure can’t keep up with the constantly evolving demands of ever-higher computing workloads including artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid multicloud architectures.

Identify data center pitfalls before they sneak up on you

Legacy data centers have more than a few drawbacks:

• High operational expenses: Legacy data centers suck up your IT budget with maintenance, repairs, and increasing energy costs rather than new technology.
• ‍Power and cooling struggles: As you’d expect, modern power and cooling infrastructure is more energy-efficient and reliable than what was used in the past. What’s more, older cooling systems were designed for much lower power densities and are now unable to adequately cool today’s high-density equipment.
• ‍Inflexibility and poor scalability: Scaling legacy facilities is hard and expensive, be it because of building permit challenges, power availability, or environmental concerns.
• ‍Performance bottlenecks and downtime: Relying on on-premises data centers can create bottlenecks in network access and responsiveness — especially as customer and partner expectations for real-time performance continue to rise. Without better connectivity and a cloud-optimized architecture, your business may struggle to deliver the low-latency, always-on experiences of modern digital services.
• ‍Perceived control versus actual security and resilience: Many enterprises believe their on-premises data centers offer greater security and resilience, simply because they’re physically close and directly managed. But this sense of control can mask real vulnerabilities, like inadequate redundancy, inconsistent patching, and exposure to localized disruptions.

Drive performance, efficiency, and AI readiness with a high-performance data center

Digital infrastructure purpose-built for today’s hyperconnected world can handle AI workloads, provide low-latency access to your resources in the cloud, and support your sustainability goals. Here’s what to look for as you consider migrating to a high-performance data center:

• AI-ready capacity: Ability to support high-density AI workloads, adapt to changing digital infrastructure requirements, and scale as needs evolve.
• ‍Connectivity: Access to a rich network service provider (NSP) ecosystem for interconnecting users and external resources.
• ‍Cloud access: Low-latency connectivity to public cloud environments to support digital infrastructure strategies that combine private and cloud-based resources from many providers.
• ‍Power systems: Fail-safe and continuous power to keep data available 24/7.
• ‍Proper cooling: High-density cooling systems to keep equipment cool and happy.
• ‍Proper space management: Racks that optimize space and allow for proper cooling and effective cable management.
• ‍Sustainability focus: Opportunity to balance business goals while reducing environmental impact and enhancing efficiency.

How to future-proof your data center strategy

Here’s a handy five-step plan for optimizing and future-proofing your data center:

1. Use a hybrid multicloud model that combines your private infrastructure with public cloud services for flexibility and scalability.
2. ‍Position your private data and compute closer to public cloud on-ramps to support low-latency multicloud networking.‍
3. ‍Implement software-defined solutions, including software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) and highly adaptable hybrid multicloud networking solutions.
4. ‍Choose a resilient high-performance data center that meets the extreme power and advanced cooling requirements of AI workloads. Don’t forget to find a data center that is responsibly managed and helps you progress toward your sustainability goals.
5. ‍Find a high-performance data center solution with a global footprint, so you can scale and adapt to changes in location requirements quickly and easily. Also check to see that any solution offers a densely populated partner ecosystem, so you can tap into additional resources, capabilities and expertise when your business requires it.

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