Businesses need a new, more flexible solution to make digital transformation far easier, says Daniel Blackwell, Product Manager – Networks & Security, Pulsant Digital transformation can provide businesses with a more flexible approach to infrastructure that simplifies the delivery of services and applications. However, this journey to digital transformation can introduce its own complexities that require a new way of thinking.

It's almost Halloween, and we have a spooky and scary story for you. Don’t jump out of your seat, but did you know that most data centers are haunted and overrun by the undead? That’s right. Ghost servers (also known as zombie servers) are everywhere. In fact, up to 30% of servers in any data center may be ghost servers. Ghost servers are servers that are deployed in cabinets and powered on but are sitting idle without performing any useful function.

You might think that colocation has been replaced by the cloud. But that’s only true in marketing terms. The reality is that colocation and the role it plays in modern edge computing has never been more important or more required. Believe it or not, cloud computing doesn’t happen in the actual sky – it happens in a data centre. And knowing where that data centre is, and how fast it links to your network and the internet, can be challenging with hyperscalers.

When it comes to cloud computing and the migration of services to the public cloud, we’ve been hearing the hype for years. “Just migrate to the cloud and everything will just work. Things will be bigger, faster, cheaper, and better.” The reality is that a migration to the cloud can result in serious disappointment from unrealistic expectations.

Modern data centers are complex environments that often contain many thousands of individual cabling and port components. When the physical connectivity infrastructure is not properly organized, tracked, and managed, you can quickly run into serious problems.

Data center capacity planning is one of the biggest challenges for today’s data center professionals. According to a recent survey by Sunbird Software, 72% of respondents said that capacity planning was one of their top objectives. Proper capacity planning results in the right-sized data centers, efficient utilization of resources, and reduced costs, but it is easier said than done.

A recent Honeywell survey reinforced something many in the MSP world already knew: data centers need managed service providers. 96% of facility managers indicated remote management is important, but only 34% had remote management capabilities in place. That’s surprising in a digital world where data centers enable critical business functions and an epic business opportunity for MSPs looking to enter the data center world.

The world depends on data centers in all aspects of daily life. To meet all-time high levels of demand that continue to grow with no end in sight, downtime is unacceptable for most organizations. The cost of downtime is rising and 40% of businesses report that just one hour of downtime can cost anywhere from $1 million to $5 million, not including the other associated fees. Large companies report that an interruption during peak business hours can cost almost $1 million per minute.

Data center tiers are the Uptime Institute’s classification system of data center performance. Created over 25 years ago, there are four data center tiers that are the established standards in categorizing the performance level of a data center.

Did you know data centers are everywhere? Really! They are everywhere. While you may not see them, millions of data centers are scattered across the globe—in big cities, small towns, deserts, the Arctic, underground, and underwater. Data centers make the internet possible, and every little click and function on the web takes the processing power that a data center provides. Think about it.