Traditional data centre models have been re-evaluated as financial services firms rethink how and why they build them. This has resulted in many firms turning the old models upside down as they adapt to today's business demands.

"In the legacy model, you used to build an application and you would create the infrastructure to accommodate it," Peter Ahrens, the managing director and chief technology officer at JP Morgan, said in an interview with Information Week.

"So the applications themselves created the infrastructure design."

With such an approach, the bank builds the infrastructure and the application is designed to fit the existing environment. The advantages of this method include availability on demand and a lower cost to run.

One of the biggest challenges firms traditionally face when they build new data centres is that the facility often represents a long-term investment. IT professionals for some firms must try to envision the company's power, server and storage needs for the next 10 years or so before they start putting it together.

However, with technologies and storage and data requirements evolving very rapidly, what the firm requires now may differ wildly from what it will need in two years' time.

As an example of the current changes affecting data centre planning, the overall mix between the number of servers and storage capacity has shifted. The capacity and flexibility of servers today means businesses need fewer servers in the data centre than before, Ahren said..

"Five to eight years ago, you would have had a small number of storage devices and a large number of server racks," he said.

"Today the trend is toward more space consumed by storage and less by server racks."

Written by Chris Tate

Data centres must be ready for evolving needs