IT and Data Center Management Best Practices: From the Perspective of an Expert
There used to be a time when all of a company’s data centers were within the same building, always in a room chock full of different devices with heat emanating from within. It was usually very expensive and complex, and often included a host of complications and safety hazards. With the advent of technology, a lot of those issues have been eliminated. Companies now partner with facility managers with deep knowledge and access to resources to help set up and manage different types of data centers. These range from enterprise, managed services, edge, colocation, hyperscale, and cloud data centers—the latter being the main topic of discussion in today’s podcast.
What does the current state of IT operations and data center management look like today based on a cloud-first mentality?
Device42 opened up the discussion on today’s episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT. Host Michelle Dawn Mooney was joined by Pete Sacco, the CEO and Founder of PTS Data Center Solutions, to talk about the state and future of IT and data center management best practices.
“I founded PTS some 23 years ago before data centers were a thing. We are a design-build services company with one division in which we provide facility-design capabilities for mostly enterprise clients and also colocation and hyperscale facilities as well as IT services,” Sacco said.
Mooney and Sacco talked about various topics in the data space; three of them are listed below:
- Critical components for effective IT operations and data management programs
- How strong the linkage is between the organizational structure of an IT operation and data center management and the actual business that it supports
- Sustainability for IT teams
“If we go on the premise that we have four attributes that keep something at the edge, we now have to have an effective tool at our disposal in order to figure out where it should reside within the hybrid data center stack.” “What is the characteristic of something that needs to be on the edge vs. something in colocation vs. something in the cloud? There has to be interconnectedness. “For me, the edge is where performance matters; colocation is where aggregation of data takes place – it serves as a conduit between my edge and cloud; and the cloud is where elastic deep thinking happens,” Sacco added.
Mooney closed the episode by asking Sacco for a piece of advice he’d like to give IT managers, and he said: “You have to not be afraid to go against the conventional wisdom. I’m not anti-cloud; everything has its place. Cloud is not without its problems; it is expensive and widely overprescribed. It’s becoming a budget line item. The IT managers should think about them holistically and start by mapping what their workloads are and their dependencies, and then ask themselves, ‘How are you going to manage that lifecycle in a series of glued-together, highly-integrated softwares that make sense?’ They should leverage people like PTS that have done it before and get away from the idea that one model at one site fits all.”
Pete Sacco is an entrepreneur in the data center, IT, microgrids, blockchain, and crypto industries. Common to all is Sacco’s belief in a return to a decentralized world—including data centers, IT, energy, currencies, the internet, workplaces, and more. Sacco is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. He is also an Accredited Data Center Tiers Designer (ATD) as certified by the Uptime Institute. Ultimately, Sacco has a unique blend of business and technical knowledge across both IT and facility-based technologies. In 2013, he was selected as a finalist in Ernst & Young’s New Jersey Entrepreneur of the Year.
You can reach out to Sacco through PTS Data Center Solutions. psacco@ptsdcs.com
