Improving Data Center Relations - IT vs. Facilities

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Based on the popularity of an eBook entitled "IT Pros Are From Venus, Facilities Pros Are From Mars" we asked Senior Technology Editor of Searchdatacenter.com, Steve Bigelow, to create a webinar on the same topic so that we could share it with you. Steve brought in Matt Stansberry, Executive Editor of Searchdatacenter.com and Facilities expert, Julius Neudorfer, CTO and Founding Principal of North American Access Technologies for the webinar.

Steve kicks it off by saying "Communication and lack of lack of cooperation between departments or groups is certainly nothing new. Every company can probably identify opportunities with better collaboration within their organization. When IT and facilities groups have trouble together the business and its bottom line can really suffer."

Matt adds "Organizations are plagued by miscommunication between the IT staff and facilities department and these kind of miscommunications can have serious ramifications for a company, not just these departments. Companies that can't add additional computing resources because of the budget or they cannot have servers because of cooling, they don’t have any cooling capacity left. They can’t physically accommodate these kind of computer resources and the consequences of these kinds of miscommunication problems is that its harder for the company to grow and its harder for them to project growth."

Julius says "one of the problems is, of course, that specifications such as power requirements are requested of the Facilities department ... that may not be the actual running power that the systems uses ... but what happens is that things become over-engineered and overly expensive because they are looking at the actual nameplate label rather than the reality."

Unfortunately, we hear tales like this all the time when we talk to data center management. The good news, is that we built Viridity EnergyCenter software to give both IT and Facilities managers a deep understanding of their power consumption and equipment utilization so that they can increase data center energy productivity.

If you're interested in learning more about how to identify the pitfalls IT and Facilities can avoid, read the transcript from the "Improving Data Center Relations" webcast.