Supplemented by 160 luxury suites, the Staples Center's configuration has about two-thirds of its seats (including club seats) in the lower bowl portion of the arena.

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The good news for CIOs is that a growing amount of vendor investment has been drawn to this market, which Gartner has named Data Center Infrastructure Management. nlyte software, for example, provides a modeling, monitoring, and management suite for understanding power and cooling in a data center and optimizing placement and configuration of racks and servers.

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What is coming is a new way of running IT made possible by two forms of data center automation: scripts and model-driven configuration.

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Rob Gardos, chief executive of GridApp Systems, a company that helps automate the deployment, configuration and management of databases, says that one large data center he encountered took 18 months to fully install an Oracle quarterly security patch across the enterprise.

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