While the topic of green datacenters tends to hold the attention of myself and other datacenter folks and the various changes in the datacenter facility model have captured the majority of the ink on datacenter issues in 2011, a look back really does show that other topics have actually had more impact on the everyday lives of IT and datacenter operators. My non-public favourite of these subjects is the huge increase in cell users and its hidden effect at the datacenter.

Look at it this way; who do you know that doesn’t have some form of mobile device that they use to check email? I can’t imagine any major company that is email dependent that doesn’t have users who have their own email access.It was that electronic mail used to be something that used to be closely applied all through industry hours, but almost quiescent after the worker went home for the day. in this day and age, the employee almost definitely has a sensibletelephone or perhaps a feature telephone that has a whole e-mail client, and electronic mail interactions with the company datacenter now turn out to be an important 24/7 workload.

And while individual emails aren’t large, when you consider the huge number of emails sent by a business in a day, you begin to see significant bandwidth use. Add that to the change in what used to be regarded as email etiquette, the place e-mail senders minimized the content in their email messages to take pity on the ones with diminished bandwidth, nowadays’s model, the place the whole lot and anything gets hooked up to electronic mail messages, irrespective of dimension, and the impact on bandwidth and even storage turns into even more important.

Datacenter operators and IT also need to be prepared to support mobile access; not just the traditional ability to allow remote or casually connected user to access corporate resources with their notebook or desktop computers, but to also support the ability to deliver necessary content to users on smartphone and tablet devices, making sure that the data is received in a well-organized, easily read, most importantly, easily utilized format. This signifies that the datacenter needs to be able the middleware parts that deliver those products and services to cellular customers.More software that needs to be supported with appropriate hardware and IT support.

The list goes on. Mobile has changed the way that many organizations do business, affecting both internal business processes and external customer facing resources. Let me know how supporting mobile has affected your organization.