COLOCATION
“ We need to be agile and flexible to meet future challenges ”
MATT PULLEN MANAGING DIRECTOR EUROPE ,
CYRUSONE the globe naturally led to some supply chain issues and challenges delivering at pace , owing to reduced volumes of workers able to coexist on site at any one time .”
These challenges may actually come to be viewed in hindsight as a dry run for a problem that ’ s looming over the industry like Hokusai ’ s Great Wave : The Silver Tsunami . Coined by an Uptime Institute report from January , the term refers to an alarming trend which is seeing a large number of data centre industry employees with specialised skill sets all due to reach retirement age at around the same time , without enough staff to even come close to replacing them . The industry ’ s skill shortage has already been a serious pain point for operators for several years , with more than half of the respondents to the Uptime Institute ’ s 2018 staffing survey reporting that they were having trouble finding and retaining qualified staff .
One solution to this issue may point towards a new kind of data centre : the fully− or near-fully automated facility .
Thomas Harrer , CTO of IBM Technology EMEA ’ s Server and Storage division , is a big believer in automation ’ s ability to help data centre operators overcome challenges like these . “ When data centres have the right
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