By Jim Treadway

When massive computing requirements encounter minimal space and defined budgets, data centers can find themselves between a rock and a hard place. MITRE Corporation of Massachusetts was just such an example. As a federally funded research and development center, they support the vital efforts of numerous government agencies. Their work in national defense, intelligence, homeland security and healthcare increasingly required higher performance analytic capabilities. With those growing demands, MITRE faced an impasse. They had exceeded their limits in both overall capacity and thermal density. Simply put, they had outgrown their traditional raised floor air-cooled data
center.

As a non-profit, federally funded operation, the tens of millions of dollars required to build a new data center was out of reach. Confronted with this and other restrictions, it was a David versus Goliath story in the making. The MITRE team needed to get creative, and fast. As would be expected from a group whose passion is data analysis, they painstakingly researched the most efficient methods to meet the increasing demands of a growing clientele.

A variety of approaches were evaluated. The cost of building a new data center had already been ruled out. What remained where three options: moving to an off-premise commercial data center; moving to cloud-based hosting services; or retrofitting the existing data
center. With initial and long-term cost a primary motivator, an exhaustive analysis was undertaken to assess each option in terms of performance, capacity, and efficiency.