New challenges for data centres The power crisis is forcing large corporations in SA to decentralise their data centres - contrary to the worldwide consolidation trend - says Symantec country manager Patrick Evans."IN SA, we have a power problem, and the power problem manifests itself in data centres," says Evans. "It`s only x amount of power that can be delivered to a data centre. So whereas in the rest of the world you have some organisations centralising, consolidating their data centres, some of our large corporations are having to decentralise and build additional data centres because they can`t get enough power into their data centre rooms that connect new technology."

PARTNERING FOR AVAILABILITY

Symantec recently forged a partnership with enterprise storage and high availability company Merit Technology Solutions, which entails Merit`s appointment as consulting delivery partner for Symantec in SA and the rest of Africa and the Middle East.

Evans says the partnership is strategically important for Symantec and involved several months` groundwork, although the parties have a relationship that goes back 14 years.

While Symantec is known to many people as an antivirus company, the multinational is also active in the data centre environment, he explains. Symantec plays roles in backup and recovery, storage, and protecting information.

Merit`s own experience in high availability, disaster recovery and storage management technologies have been cited as the key reasons for the appointment.

THE AFRICAN WAY

Evans says companies with data centres face many challenges.

"Sometimes those challenges are not understood until they are brought home and contextualised in the African sense. My market is the whole of Africa, and if you look at Africa, we have different countries in different stages of development. On the one hand, we`ve got countries that have been ravaged by war, that have no infrastructure whatsoever. I was in Rwanda a couple of weeks ago. I walked into their major telco building, and it was an experience. I`m used to walking into Telkom, Vodacom, our major players here, and this was a funny little shack, the generator was sitting in the middle of nowhere.

"They had computers in a room. They told me they were building a data centre somewhere but they already had to provide services so they`d have to just put them wherever they could."

At the other end of the scale is a country such as SA, with a sophisticated infrastructure and relatively high-speed networks.

"And then we have the vast majority of African countries that are somewhere in between. Some countries are a little more advanced than others, but most of them are building infrastructure - consolidation isn`t yet necessarily a word that they use substantially. But they`ve got their challenges."

Evans says people in SA have learned in the past year that they face similar challenges to those in the rest of Africa.

"If you today are a major service provider building a data centre that started last year in Midrand, and you think everything is hunky-dory, things are going great, you`ve been promised that you`ll have a certain amount of power available to your data centre, and then the load shedding starts. Suddenly there`s a wake-up call that says: `There will not be enough power to power your planned data centre, but if you want it, we can give you enough on the other side of the Ben Schoeman [freeway].`

"That`s the reality of what we deal with in SA today. And honestly, as a technology provider, when my customer comes to me and says, `Help me`, I have to have available, right there and then, the resources that I can trust, that I know will add value to that organisation, it has done this before not just once, not just twice but many times and has a successful track record doing it."

He describes Merit as a specialised delivery partner that will be fully trained in Symantec`s technologies and methods, and will work closely with the company and its partners.