Efficiency, Reliability and Continuity. Ingredients to the future of Japan’s data centers.

Japanese data centers represent some of the most advanced facilities in the world. Furthermore, understanding the importance of moving towards greener facilities and commercial properties, the forward thinking Tokyo Municipality had already taken steps that would further encourage companies with high power usage data centers to improve their energy efficiency through its own carbon reduction scheme.

The devastating affects of Tsunamis and Earthquakes this year, regulated power consumption reductions and the possibility of rolling blackouts across Japan have therefore only accelerated the Japanese data center community on the path it was already on by amplifying the risk to reliability in a country facing possible power shortages this Summer.

In line with the global themes, our 2^nd Annual DatacenterDynamics Tokyo event will focus on the most pressing data center issues this year. Strategies to improve energy efficiency in a time of unreliable power supply and the strategic decision to outsource data center and Business Contingency Planning to improve reliability and security are high on the agenda of data center operators and strategic IT professionals alike.

Last year 391 data center business leaders joined us in Tokyo to discuss, network and learn from some of the most important players in Japan’s data center market. Join us this year to develop concrete strategies on how to ensure the continued uninterrupted operation of your IT services.

From site selection and construction through to cooling and power availability, and data centre automation, Design, Build, Operate sessions at DatacenterDynamics are must attend for any organisation intending to build a data centre or running existing facilities.

Not too long ago data centre facilities were designed for constant loads and steady availability, now they are dynamic. The transition from single tier, to multi tier to dynamic tier. Application, hardware and physical infrastructure are following this rule: from servers that power down, to distributed applications, even to variable frequency drive fans.

The focus now is on scalable and modular data centre design to reduce energy consumption. DatacenterDynamics  will demonstrate how to plan for and build data centres , taking into account all the component parts and their configuration.

Depending on the size of the enterprise, outsourcing is rarely an all or nothing proposition. The challenge for CIOs, CTOs and data centre management is to decide what it makes sense to outsource and what is so strategic that you must keep it in house, and how to optimise the management of owned data centre infrastructure with capabilities that are in the cloud, at a collocation provider, or with a managed services operation. 

Ultimately, the optimal solution for an in-house and outsourced data centre services mix is a function of likely utilisation rates of servers required to run applications, the capital cost of hardware and infrastructure, and the mission-critical nature of data storage, processing and dissemination. Any decision to outsource will require an analysis of the contractual obligations offered by third party providers in their service level agreements. 

Enterprises continually need to evaluate their data centre requirements and decide on how best to accommodate growth and the changing way in which business operates and uses IT. The efficiency of the facility is only half the equation – optimising all the systems that run within it is crucial, from processing to storage to network to application.