Nonproduction IT can hinder mission-critical operations

Separating production and nonproduction assets should be an operational requirement for most organizations. By definition, production assets support high-priority IT loads — servers that are critical to a business or business unit. In most organizations, IT will have sufficient discretion to place these assets where they have redundant power supplies, sufficient cooling and high levels of security. Other assets can be placed elsewhere, preserving the most important infrastructure for the most important loads. However, business requirements sometimes require IT organizations to operate both production (mission critical) and nonproduction environments in the same facility.

In these instances, facility managers must be careful to prevent the spread of nonproduction IT, such as email, human resources, telephone and building controls, into expensive mission-critical spaces. While nonproduction IT generally does not increase risk to mission-critical IT during normal operations, mixing production and production environments will reduce mission-critical capacity and can make it more difficult to shed load.