Consider impact and opportunities

Key trends in space, efficiency, cost of service, business continuity (BC) and virtualisation are influencing data centre strategies and architectures. Enterprises seeking to align their data centre strategies with long-term business goals should look for impacts and opportunities.

So say Gartner analysts Donna Scott and Paul McGuckin, in a report entitled: 'Consider Key Trends When Planning Data Center Strategies and Architectures', published in November 2008.

“Market and industry trends are changing the way enterprises approach their data centre strategies and develop data centre architectures,” says Gartner, which has identified five key trends of which companies need to take cognisance.

Firstly, there's the issue of ageing data centres. Says the report: “The majority of data centres, especially those built before 2002, lack the capacity and operational efficiency to meet the needs of the next ten years. Older data centres are typically configured for 35 Watts to 70 Watts per square foot of power, whereas new data centres are configured for about 125 Watts to 150 Watts, expandable to 250 Watts and 300 Watts per square foot of power for future demands.”

The analysts recommend that organisations with ageing centres should assess their ability to efficiently meet space and energy demands, and assess whether extension, modernisation or replacement/consolidation is most appropriate.

It further recommends that companies implement server virtualisation to extend a centre's useful life, consolidate multiple computer rooms and data centres into a smaller number of more efficient, modern data centres, analyse the termination of expensive outsourced disaster recovery (DR) contracts to help justify the building of new data centre space, and design and build new data centre space in modules or pods.

Secondly, there's energy efficiency. Says Gartner: “In the past, data centres would sometimes consume three times as much power as was ultimately used for powering servers, storage and networking equipment.

“Today, conventional designs often use twice as much power as is ultimately used for powering these items. Energy-efficient data centres use only about 1.25 times the power overall. Much of this efficiency improvement is in the area of cooling; in a conventional data centre, 35% to 50% of the electrical energy consumed is used for cooling versus 15% in best-practice green data centres.

“However, just because you contract for new data centre space, doesn't mean you'll get the most efficient design for power use.”

Gartner recommends that organisations look at best practices in data centre cooling to improve the energy efficiency of existing and new data centres. “Work with design firms to achieve energy-saving objectives,” it states.

Reducing the cost of hosting services is Gartner's fourth key trend. “Typically, hosting costs can be driven down through economies of scale, so there's a tendency to rationalise the number of data centres to what is needed to run the business, and in locations that make sense from a perspective of quality, risk and cost to the business.”

Gartner says companies should examine strategies to reduce the costs of hosting solutions. “If you don't know the cost of the services you provide, then outline a high-level service portfolio, and allocate the costs of hardware/depreciation, software, labour and facilities to them. Then, look across the data centres and see whether there's significant variation in the costs of delivering; this will help identify the best locations from which to host services,” it notes.

Next on Gartner's list are high availability, DR, BC and regulations. “Some industries and certain government agencies regulate BC and DR service-level agreements (SLAs) for specific applications or business functions,” states the report.

“It's essential for data centre planners to understand the regulations and compliance requirements for their respective industries and companies, and to build a data centre strategy that meets business and regulatory requirements.”

Besides regulations, Gartner says other high-availability/DR/BC factors influencing data centre strategies include:

* Assess and tier IT services according to mission criticality, identifying availability and the recovery SLAs and strategies for achieving them.
* Reduce DR hosting costs, implement an architecture that has a primary facility backed up by one that runs development and tests under normal circumstances, and that is also used for DR testing and recovery.
* Implement more granular DR failover strategies so individual applications and groups of applications can failover independently.
* When your data centres are outside synchronous replication limits (around 100km), consider implementing three hosting sites versus two.

Last on the list is virtualisation. “Virtualisation abstracts software from hardware, and enables greater flexibility in processing IT services on different resources at different locations at lower hardware and maintenance costs. In addition, server virtualisation can extend the use of existing data centre space (and the existing power and cooling capacity) and thus increase efficiencies,” the report says.

Organisations with ageing centres should assess their ability to efficiently meet space and energy demands.

Gartner

Gartner recommends that companies “consider investments in virtualisation and their benefits - efficiencies, flexibility in hosting IT services and fast provisioning, both for existing data centres and new ones. Moreover, virtualisation is the foundation of the real-time infrastructure, where business demand for IT services drives automatic and dynamic allocation, and optimisation of IT resources to meet SLAs. Although data centre-wide, real-time infrastructure doesn't yet exist, there are opportunities to lay the foundation when planning new data centres.”

* Report courtesy of Gartner. Information sourced from: Consider Key Trends When Planning Data Centre Strategies and Architectures, Donna Scott, Paul McGuckin, 24 November 2008.