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.
