Flexibility in power, cooling, floor space eliminate barriers associated with change in the data center. Outsource data center facilities eliminate these barriers to change, along with many data center compliance and certification problems.

Hospital data centers may not be ready for the demand that more patients and digital information will create, according to a survey of hospital IT executives at small and midsize hospitals in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, France and Germany conducted by HIMSS Analytics on behalf of Dell.

The Healthcare Enterprise Survey showed that while many of the health care centers anticipate increased spending on IT next year, they also describe data center challenges including a lack of standards, security, extended server refresh cycles, and complexity created by a large number of servers and vendors and limited use of virtualization.

Dell officials say the lack of data center standards complicate the information sharing within and between hospitals necessary for diagnosis, decision making, and coordination and management of patient care. With refresh cycles of five years or more, small and midsize hospitals rely on servers that are less efficient and cost more to run and manage as they prepare for a significant increase in data over the next two years

more of the eWeek article from Roy Mark