IT concerns spike as power dips

By Leon Engelbrecht for BMC Software
Johannesburg, 28 Jun 2007

SA's increasingly wobbly power supply has impacted on IT-spend, says industry. Most businesses are investing heavily in business continuity means, such as generators and disaster recovery and business processing outsourcers (BPO) relocating infrastructure.

"I know for a fact that BPO companies are scouting around for areas with the lowest outages, or that are supplied by power [sub]-stations that are not at the limits of their capacity," says BMC Software SA country manager Arjen Wiersma.

Power supply is critical to IT, adds Wiersma, "because if it is not reliable, you cannot deliver business services to your customer, which may result in penalties".

"Everybody is concerned about energy and unhappy with the assurance of supply," adds SA Chamber of Business spokesman Bill Lacey. "Yes, it is of concern to our members and they are looking at alternative methods of energy [such as] gas and power generators. It is very expensive but it does ensure business continuity."

Powerless without IT

IBM is one company that admits to power supply playing a major role in the placing of a business continuity centre. The global giant's south and central Africa MD Mark Harris last Friday opened a R110 million high-capacity business continuity and resiliency services centre in Cresta, in western Johannesburg.

"We wanted to be on a dissimilar power grid to our clients, who are mostly in Midrand and Sandton," Harris said at the event.

"Initially customers would only ask us about telecoms nodes, but this time we found the power grid was a great consideration. We've had 12 fallovers from our customers to ourselves so far this year, and most of them have been because of power issues."

Jeanine Osborne, business continuity head at Hewlett-Packard SA, says: "The power grid is absolutely an important consideration for putting down data centres."

She says a data centre should be connected to at least two independent power grids and two telecommunications nodes - and a swimming pool or storage tank for backup water is useful too.

"Today, you have to test your data centre backups, uninterruptible power supply and generators continuously. Until recently, a check every six months or so was fine, but times have changed. Because of power grid issues, we are now more reliant on generators than in the past."

Power, but not to the people

Carl Kleynhans, Africa GM for APC, the power solutions provider, says: "We have seen an upturn in our UPS [uninterruptible power supply] market over and above the normal growth. I have no doubt that is driven by the fact that power quality has decreased.

"Power has always been bad in SA; not as bad as in Nigeria, but not as good as in London. Power supply is always on the CIO or CTO's agenda. In recent times it is just more critical."

Electrical engineering consultancy partner Andy Rawlins, of Rawlins Wales & Partners, has also noticed the trend with his clients. Rawlins agrees the issue is not a shortage of power, but a lack of security in its supply. Quality, meaning dips and spikes, is also an issue.

"The major outages this winter won't be Eskom's fault, but that of local municipalities who have not invested in infrastructure maintenance," says Rawlins. "There is also overload in places such as Bryanston, where cluster complexes have sprung up without the existing infrastructure being upgraded to cope."

Kleynhans says this has created a new consumer market. "Many consumers are buying a UPS for the home. I have three at home myself."

Clover SA has designated IBM's Cresta site as a backup data centre. Clover IT facilities manager Willie Beukes says power outages impact the company quite badly at present. "It is definitely a concern. We can't afford to be down with a real-time invoice system, otherwise we can't run our trucks. It is very serous for us.

"Power is going to be a problem for most IT people. Now is a good time to go into the generator business," he adds.

BMC Software's Wiersma notes these generators can be "frightfully expensive", which means companies also need to take steps to cut power usage. He says greater virtualisation can substantially reduce the size of a server farm, requiring a smaller - and cheaper - generator. He is also noticing a renewed interest in water-cooling as opposed to air-cooling, which requires massive banks of power-hungry air-conditioners.