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Cloud drives power-hungry DCs

Lezette Engelbrecht
By Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb online features editor
Johannesburg, 09 Apr 2010

With local companies increasingly adopting cloud computing services, the need for data storage will skyrocket, leading to more power-hungry data centres being built.

“Because cloud computing provides an easy way to provision storage and services to clients, it will accelerate the already huge data storage requirements,” says Johan van Huyssteen, GM of services operations at Business Connexion (BCX).

This translates into a significant increase in space required for data centres, he adds, noting that BCX has already added 1 000 square metres, with plans to increase this for the provision of cloud services.

“Cloud computing will certainly demand more electricity and this will have an impact on the carbon footprint,“ says Van Huyssteen, adding that service providers will have to focus on greening their data centres and running them more efficiently.

In a Greenpeace report released last week, the organisation highlights how the uptake of cloud services is fuelling huge streams of data, resulting in the roll-out of bigger data centres by some of the world's major tech companies, including Facebook and Yahoo.

Greenpeace cites figures from a 2008 study by The Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, called Smart 2020, which forecasts the global carbon footprint of the main components of cloud-based computing - data centres and the telecoms network - would see their emissions grow, on average, 7% and 5% respectively each year between 2002 and 2020.

The agency adds that large players in the cloud computing market must advocate for policy change at the local, national and international levels to ensure that, as their appetite for energy increases, so does the supply of renewable energy.

George Sithole, Dimension Data pre-sales manager for data centre solutions, says the growth in demand for storage and computing is only partially coupled to the cloud. “Cloud computing, in the form of software-as-a-service and more recently infrastructure-as-a-service, has the ability to bring services to the market quicker to service the demand spurt.”

He cites Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and Office Live as some of the services where accelerated growth is most publicly evident. “With the maturing multimedia offerings and communications, the demand curve will continue exponentially.”

Sithole says the energy required to power the infrastructure will undoubtedly accelerate accordingly. “Some organisations opt to abate the accompanying carbon footprint by choosing renewable energies, finding innovative ways to reduce the power consumed for cooling, or to relocate the entire data centre for a combination of those considerations.“

However, Sithole points out that cloud computing has two distinct aspects that work in its favour, the first being a virtualised, consolidated and optimised environment. “Because cloud computing is offered by specialised companies - and the computing and storage sold as a utility - they will maximise the usage achieved from the physical infrastructure,” he explains.

“Server utilisation factors are typically much higher compared to corporate in-house environments, where dedicated servers are still the norm, with the majority idling at low utilisation while still consuming the power and requiring the cooling.”

Secondly, notes Sithole, cloud computing has the diversity factor. “Global cloud computing providers typically have a broad customer base, which has its peak demands for the service at different times of the day or month. So the total number of servers installed and running at a given time in the cloud environment is substantially lower than if the same computing utility were delivered in dedicated corporate environments.”

Pierre Marais, acting MD for Telkom's data centre operations, says the move towards a more centralised environment will enhance data centre capabilities, both in terms of floor space and power and cooling.

Lean, green machines

Van Huyssteen says the message has to get across to CIOs that cloud computing is a reality, and that they will all be expected to have a cloud strategy in place.

In SA, says Sithole, two trends are being observed regarding the advent of cloud computing. “The first is a massive growth in data centres by organisations anticipating acceptance of cloud computing, both locally and from the rest of the continent (with connectivity explosions imminent).

“The second is that some entities that have built large data centre spaces for their in-house demand are considering to on-sell capacity.”

According to Sithole, the energy shortage will undoubtedly impact the selection of sites for new data centres, and good practice would dictate that efficiency criteria are met before the power feed is granted. “For SA this means a rigorous approach to optimised data centres given that the business can migrate elsewhere if conditions here are not met.”

Van Huyssteen adds that manufacturers are putting in a lot of effort into making equipment more compact and efficient, and that replacing old equipment with new versions can bring significant power savings. To keep in line with global data centre best practice, says Marais, service providers will have to implement green philosophies. This involves making use of techniques like free air cooling, hot aisle/cold aisle configuration, efficient cable positioning, variable speed fans, and water chiller plants.

According to Van Huyssteen, there's no real viable alternative to using electricity provided by Eskom at the moment. He adds, however, that BCX is considering using gas turbines for one of its Johannesburg data centres, because there's a gas pipeline running close by. In places like the Western Cape, one could possibly look at using alternatives such as wind power, he notes.

Teraco MD Lex van Wyk notes that as new data centres get built with more modern technology, they should have fewer requirements for utilities, resulting in savings. “As the pressure stays on the power grid, the pressure will remain on hardware vendors and data centres to design and build more efficiently.”

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