The Grass is Always Greener
A combination of forces is poised to wreak havoc in the world of data center operators. As a result, both IT organizations and facilities organizations will be forced to rethink some of their most fundamental operating assumptions and business practices. Like any moment of dramatic change, both risk and opportunity abound.
Data centers are struggling to address a problem that until recently was nowhere to be found on their list of reasons to lay awake at night. The problem is that electrical power, once a cheap and abundant resource, has been transformed into a scarce and expensive commodity that is being consumed at an ever-increasing rate. The impact on the business is being felt in terms of capex, operating expenses, and decreased uptime for key business applications. The problems that need to be addressed in this area fall into three main categories: Space, Power and Cooling.
Facilities Envelope Issue
Imagine an envelope where three of the sides of this envelope are Space, Power and Cooling: the space available within the datacenter, the power required by the data center, and the amount of cooling the data center needs to continue safe operation. Inside of the envelope are the business requirements of the data center — applications with service level agreements and the logical infrastructure they require (data protection, clustering, etc). In a typical data center, each of the three sides, as well as different components inside the envelope is owned by a different set of people. And when the envelope is full, any changes to any part of the envelope will have affects on the other parts. As an example, when the operator decides to solve the current space crunch by deploying a blade solution, the density in a single rack skyrockets, which in turn causes issues both in delivering power to that specific rack as well as the amount of heat that rack begins to create — it pushes out on the cooling and power sides of the envelope.
The envelope issue is merely a representation that the data center is a large, complex system, and since the demands on the data center from the business units are growing at such a fantastic rate, the industry is to a point where there is no slack in any other part of the envelope — all changes to the data center need to be considered in a holistic way, with the entire system taken into consideration. Otherwise “solutions” are merely passing the hot potato from one group to another, possibly exacerbating the overall problems in the process.
Green Movement
The green movement is now present in every aspect of our daily lives, and the data center is no different. Nearly every data center vendor today has a marketing pitch that includes a green angle, and many of the larger data centers are finding themselves with a newly appointed green czar or green committee dedicated to reducing the overall power and carbon footprint of the company.
In Europe, a voluntary program around carbon footprint is being put in place, with everyone expecting this to be legislated in the coming years, effectively forcing a company-wide embracing of the green or eco-efficiency movement. It’s unclear how fast legislation in the States will follow suit, or if it will, but that isn’t stopping companies from moving down the path anyway. As an example, Yahoo has pledged to be carbon neutral by the end of the year! As one of the largest consumers of power in many enterprises, rest assured that the data center will be the target of an increasing amount of ill will from company stakeholders pushing for greater energy efficiency.
Power Cost
One could just reference the current cost of oil and stop there. But the problem is even more complicated for the data center. In the last ten years, the cost of an average server has gone from $200K to $4K. Meanwhile, despite average utilization rates for servers hovering below 10%, the speed and power requirements for these servers have continued to grow, to the point where the power cost of an average server exceeds its capital cost in less than two years.
To add to this, many analysts like Gartner are predicting that power will be nearly 50% of the overall IT budget by the end of 2009. Power has already exceeded new server spend and will soon be the supremely dominant operating expense for a data center.
Of course, the current economic downturn has only put more pressure on the data center to manage cost. So the pressure on the IT organization to understand and reduce power consumption is coming at them from all angles.
Convergence
With all three of these vectors imposing themselves on the data center operator, something has to give.
Data center operators are aware, but ill equipped, to address their envelope issue. They have the unenviable task of addressing rising power requirements, skyrocketing power costs, dramatically increased cooling requirements, company-wide green initiatives, and more stringent up-time requirements for their critical infrastructure. All of these factors have to be viewed against the backdrop of data center consolidation and pressure to control IT costs. When the executive suite is questioning how these issues get solved, the answers aren’t satisfying many people on either side of the fence.
We believe that the complexity of the problem space will expose this as a systemic issue of paramount importance to the entire IT operation. Clearly things must change in order for data centers to continue to be the backbone of IT. That fact alone gives us confidence that things will change — and from that change we expect opportunity.
To discuss this article or opportunities that address these challenges, please contact us at sunil@battery.com or mbicer@battery.com.
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