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Q. What is a data center?
A. A data center is a place where business operate the part of their IT infrastructure that requires the highest grade of power, bandwidth, air conditioning, monitoring, and technical support.

Recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure put IT on the front lines for ensuring a business is complying with regulations, notably Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Not only is it necessary to store key data for longer periods, but being able to retrieve information at a granular level - right down to specific emails - is now an IT responsibility, so a data center that is not handled properly could result in a trip before a judge.

There are 10 key issues for IT managers to keep up with: virtualization; the data deluge; energy and green IT; complex resource tracking; consumerization of IT and social software; unified communications; mobile and wireless; system density; mashups and portals; and cloud computing.

Five issues IT managers must consider to ensure smooth data center operations are as follows: Regulatory compliance, disaster recovery/business continuance, power, Hosted Solutionscooling, and IT as a service will be dominant themes in the coming year as companies work to manage their IT assets to support business goals.

Server virtualization is the masking of server resources (including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems) from server users. The intention is to spare the user from having to understand and manage complicated details of server resources while increasing resource sharing and utilization and maintaining the capacity to expand later.

Desktop virtualization enables a centralized server to deliver and manage individualized desktops remotely. This gives users a full client experience, but lets IT staff provision, manage, upgrade and patch them virtually, instead of physically.

The cost of restoring the lost information or restoring a computer to operation after a hardware or software failure is high due to the costs of technical support and lost employee productivity.

Within the Cisco UCS M71KR-E, M71KR-Q, and M81KR adapter types, the Cisco Unified Computing System can enable a fabric failover capability in which loss of connectivity on a path in use will cause remapping of traffic through a redundant path within the Cisco Unified Computing System. In determining the adapter type to use to support the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series, the interface count available to the VMware ESX host is a key factor.

Even though Green IT has become a hot topic in 2010, its roots run back to early 90's. In 1992, the Energy Star program was launched by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This program encouraged new electronic devices to be more energy-efficient by lowering energy consumption, efficient design and reduced use of hazardous material. The Energy Star program was revised in 2006 and now includes much stricter efficiency requirements and a tiered ranking system for approval.

High availability is a system design protocol and associated implementation that ensures a certain degree of operational continuity during a given measurement period.

Next-generation data centers have specific server networking needs, and the Cisco Nexus 5010 one-rack unit (RU) switch provides an Ethernet-based unified fabric that's designed to meet those needs.