The single biggest challenge facing datacenter managers today

Datacenter construction is predicted to rise over 8% year on year through 2021. This is forcing datacenter managers to keep pace with the steady growth in demand due to, in part, the increasing use of advanced technologies worldwide to gain competitive advantage.

Datacenter managers are left with a series of conundrums from the growing complexity of datacenter operations, including demands on energy and network infrastructure. The market is alive and well with hardware and services in response to the growth in demand.

This has led to decision fatigue amongst IT infrastructure staff. How do I choose the right partners? What’s the best mix of products and services? And are we truly ready for failures and incidents?

Practicing decisions

You may have heard the term ‘decision fatigue’ from Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg talking about how they simplified their daily routines to remove smaller choices. Decision fatigue can be defined as when ‘your ability to make the right decision is reduced because you have expended some of your willpower earlier’. If you’ve ever struggled to choose what to have for dinner after a long day, you’ll already understand what this is.

Jack Butler applies this to infrastructure decisions in a post on LinkedIn, writing that with each alert or prompt ‘the considerations are enormous and seemingly endless, and with each comes another decision’. He goes on to suggest that there are two solutions: make simpler decisions or make fewer decisions. Actually, we believe there’s a third, more intuitive solution: model your decisions first.

The experience gap

Datacenter staff are often highly knowledgeable, but the key obstacle is finding the right mix of products and services to meet their organization’s objectives and maximise profitability. That’s where learning through simulation comes in. You may have seen Edgar Dale’s ‘Cone of Learning’. It’s an educational model that suggests that we tend to remember 90% of what we say and do through simulating the real experience. Compare that to 10% of what we read (such as a textbook or product manual), 20% of what we hear, and 30% of what we see.

Is Simulcation Datacenter the solution?

It’s clear that simulation is the future of education – learning by doing. Simulcation Datacenter mimics the challenges faced by datacenter professionals on a daily basis with incredible precision. Choose from a wide roster of real-life products and service agreements to furnish your virtual datacenter, and train and motivate your simulated IT staff to run it effectively. Then take a trip to the shop floor to see the effect your decisions have on the customer experience, or head up to the board room to analyze your productivity in the company’s overall profit and loss. The ultimate aim is to expand your virtual empire by achieving optimum efficiency with your datacenter decisions – an engaging, competitive environment that’s designed to keep IT professionals motivated beyond other learning methods.

Your infrastructure choices use virtual components and products that are actually available. This means that you can effectively translate your decisions from the screen to your real world datacenter, giving you confidence. In a competitive global market where IT professionals can feel that their voices aren’t heard by senior management, having a simulated view of the impact of your decisions can be powerfully persuasive.

We’re launching later this year. Preregister now to be one of the first to build your virtual datacenter.

About Simulcation

We believe learning shouldn’t be laborious. Simulcation Datacenter is an engaging, competitive environment that simulates the complex challenges faced on a daily basis by IT infrastructure professionals. Preregister now to be one of the first to experience it – or contact us to find out more.