Afcom Sets Standards

Lack of effective standards is still a source of frustration for IT managers as they seek to develop more muscular data centers.

Managers face a major challenge expanding initial data center sites to meet the increased demands from business, because standards are not yet in place to ensure that different manufacturers' gear plays well together.

But user group Afcom hopes to plug this gap at its Data Center World Conference in Atalanta, Ga. later this year.

The data center manager's organization has just announced that David Pultorak, president of service management consultancy Fox IT, will be the keynote speaker at the October event. Pultorack will use his speech to discuss the importance of the IT Infrastructure Library, which is an emerging data center standard.

Essentially a framework for IT service management, ITIL has recently been attracting a great deal of interest from data center managers, according to Afcom president Jill Eckhaus.This library covers provision of IT services and the data center infrastructure needed to support them. Data center standardization seems to be a hot topic with a lot of the Afcom members at the moment – so this really hits on that,” she says.

Afcom will also be offering some new “virtual data center” tours at the fall conference, following on from their success at the group’s recent Las Vegas conference. (see The View From Vegas). Attendees will be able to take a virtual tour of Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA)’s Global Command Center and also Georgia State University’s Network Operations Center, without even leaving the comfort of the conference hotel.Eckhaus says, “The attendees prefer the virtual tours – when they do the live tours it’s not the type of environment where you can have an open discussion about what’s going on.”

During Afcom’s spring event, the user group offered virtual tours of the data centers at Charles Schwab and Warner Brothers.

The fall conference will take place from 3rd through 6th October.

James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum0