Data centres "suck money", says Nic Rouhotas, a system engineer at Cisco. Rouhotas was among the speakers at the APC/ITWeb business briefing on successful data centres, held in Johannesburg yesterday.
Discussing business-ready data centres, Rouhotas said research had shown that between 50% to 75% of IT-spend went on data centres. Yet few, if any, data centres performed in a way that justified this spend.
To prevent a data centre from eventually consuming the entire IT budget, increased manageability and utilisation through standardisation and automation was essential, he said.
"Data centres have become isolated islands of disparate technologies, not necessarily with binding architecture - which makes optimising their use rather tricky," he said.
He cited an example of a chemical company that had consolidated 24 data centres down to two, and saved $32 million in gross operating costs. "This isn`t a one-off. This is a trend," he said, adding that a local example of this was Telkom. The telco had recently reduced its number of data centres significantly through consolidation, he said.
Other issues receiving attention were protection and resource optimisation. A Data Centre Institute survey had shown that power outages in 2003 had seen 23% of data centres suffering downtime-related costs of over $100 000, underlining the need for a reliable backup solution.
Network-critical infrastructure
[VIDEO]Rouhotas said the issue of resource optimisation was being addressed by a "slow move" to services-oriented architecture, where the network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) would become application-oriented rather than packet-oriented.
Carl Kleynhans, regional GM for APC Africa, stressed the importance of a reliable network-critical NCPI. "The NCPI is the base level of your network infrastructure. Companies are built on people who rely on processes that rely on technology that relies on a reliable NCPI."
Investments in NCPI were significant, he said. The total cost of ownership of a rack over a 10-year period ranged between R320 000 and R500 000. The various NCPI components from a budget perspective included electricity (27%), engineering and installation (19%), space (17%), power equipment (17%), service (13%), cooling equipment (6%), and racks (3%), said Kleynhans.
[VIDEO]It has been shown through various surveys that 60% of data centre downtime can be attributed to human error. APC`s modular, solution-based approach helped to significantly minimise this, he said. This modular approach also enabled APC to deliver on new client requirements much faster than a traditional, component-based offering.
It also cut back on wastage. Kleynhans said customers traditionally over-estimated the amount of capacity they would require. APC`s modular approach enabled customers to add more capacity on demand, rather than have to do forward-looking predictions and build for anticipated loads.
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