The Datacenter Decisions That Set IT Leaders Apart
IT leaders can set their organizations apart by optimizing their datacenters for performance, resilience, and efficiency.
Datacenters have evolved from technical to business-critical, and infrastructure has become a platform for innovation. This shift has put increasing pressure on IT leaders to make strategic datacenter decisions. By learning what’s worked well for experts in the industry, IT leaders can leverage infrastructure to gain a competitive advantage in today’s market.
Strategy Over Spend: Modernization Done Right
While there’s always room for nuance, there is a right and wrong way to modernize the datacenter. For example, simply replacing old hardware isn’t efficient. What really works is realigning architecture with business needs and making architecture choices that are strategic and aligned, not just technical.
Andy Heikes, Solution Architect at Paragon Micro, said, “Datacenters have progressed from prioritizing the hardware to prioritizing the workload, in particular, the end user and their experience. While prioritizing the workload has become the most important, hardware on which the workload runs still plays an important role, and how that hardware is designed matters.”
IT leaders have no shortage of architecture choices—HCI, 3-tier vs. 2-tier vs. 1-tier, or hybrid models. The best choice will always be:
- Scalable – As business demands change, datacenter architecture must (not should—must) have the ability to grow, adapt, and shift.
- Resilient – The right infrastructure expects and absorbs failures. It doesn’t just survive them.
- Adaptable – Architecture should respond to shifting business needs and pivot without major disruption or redesign.
Modernizing the datacenter isn’t just about investment—it’s about strategy and how well your decisions are aligned with business goals.
Field-Proven Patterns from Leaders
The best part about modernizing a datacenter is that you don’t have to do it alone. It’s already been done successfully, many times, by experts in the field. These professionals make decisions grounded in architecture that fit the workload, strong planning around storage lifecycle and performance, and environmental and operational considerations.
Architecture Based on Workload Fit
Blending datacenter architectures can be a smart move, depending on workload requirements. Combining HCI with 3-2-1 architecture can give organizations the best of both worlds. IT leaders can optimize cost and performance by mapping VMs based on performance demands, flexibility needs, and storage requirements.
“There are plenty of instances where having both architectures work side by side makes sense,” Heikes said.
Planning for Storage Lifecycle and Performance
Strategic data storage planning isn’t just about capacity—it’s about matching data to the correct storage tier over time. By taking the full data lifecycle into account, IT leaders can develop strategies that balance data growth, cost, and performance.
For important, active data that requires rapid access, flash storage is a solid option. Older data or data that is less-used can be moved to cost-effective cold-data tiering. And by eliminating duplicate data and shrinking files, deduplication and compression effectively minimize storage space.
It’s also key to track stale data so you can make better storage decisions. Don’t hesitate to tier, archive, or delete data when needed. Deletion makes room for storage for active workloads and informs long-term storage investments.
Environmental and Operational Considerations
IT leaders should keep growing power demands and cooling needs top of mind when making architecture decisions.
There has been a steady rise in datacenter energy consumption. A recent article by TechTarget stated that datacenters are some of the highest consumers of electric power. The article mentioned that the electricity consumption of U.S. datacenters increased at a compound annual growth rate of around 7% from 2014 to 2018 and 18% from 2018 to 2023, with a projected 13% to 27% CAGR between 2023 to 2028.
“Power has been a part of all my conversations with customers for the last 2-3 years on every call,” says Heikis. As servers become more condensed and GPUs become more prevalent for performance-intensive workloads, I have seen power be the last consideration, and that cannot be the case. Do not let this be the last aspect of your datacenter architecture considerations.”
In the past, datacenters have relied on air cooling, and that worked well for many years. Things are changing now. As power consumption grows, air cooling is reaching its limits.
Instead of using air cooling, organizations are making the shift to liquid cooling systems. Liquid cooling is superior to air cooling because it removes heat directly from components. This lowers energy use and cuts cooling costs. It can also give IT leaders peace of mind that while hardware becomes more powerful, albeit compact, datacenters will maintain optimal temperatures.
“Overcoming the fear of having liquid in your datacenter is going to be needed if there is no way to re-architect your infrastructure and maintain the requirements for your workloads,” Heikes said.
In addition to cooling innovations, the Open Compute Project (OCP) makes hardware designs more flexible and standardized. An OCP open design is easy to work with and allows datacenters to swap and configure parts, including cooling systems, more cost-effectively and easily. Using this approach, IT leaders can upgrade equipment simply and improve energy efficiency.
How Paragon Micro Enables Datacenter Modernization Decisions
Making decisions about modernizing your datacenter infrastructure doesn’t have to be confusing or intimidating.
Paragon Micro helps simplify these decisions by offering hands-on expertise with both modern and traditional architectures, along with support that includes assessments, design planning, and POC evaluations.
By taking a strategic, non-transactional partnership approach, Paragon Micro can help you build a datacenter that not only meets your needs but also gives you a competitive edge in today’s market.
Infrastructure as Competitive Advantage
Reworking datacenter infrastructure can feel like a big task, but the payoff is worth it. In addition to improving cost and energy efficiency, improving performance, and simplifying system management, it gives organizations that modernize it the right way a sharp advantage.
By maximizing resource utilization and accelerating deployment, modernizing infrastructure empowers organizations to respond swiftly to market changes. This positions them as strong market leaders and sparks ongoing innovation.
IT leaders differentiate through design, not just delivery. Paragon Micro can help your organization design for what’s next—not just what’s now. Let’s talk about your datacenter strategy for 2025 and beyond.