Next-gen data centres go green

Future data centres in SA will need to have sustainable energy frameworks in place and deploy green technologies to combat escalating power costs.

This was revealed by Larry Hinman, HP director and strategist of critical facilities consulting, from the US, who indicated the energy crisis is changing the mindset for developing data centres.

The HP Data Centre Facility Thought Leadership seminar, held yesterday in Johannesburg, addressed issues around energy efficiency, cloud computing and future thinking around the next-generation data centre design.

“A lot of companies are still looking at data centres backwards, and will look at power growth, and try to predict what it will look like over time,” said Hinman.

He revealed that data centres need to look at deploying technologies such as automation, cloud computing and virtualisation to improve efficiency and reduce carbon footprint.

Hinman said the priorities for data centres have changed. “Now it's all about power. Cost of physical data centre space used to be the primary consideration for data centre design. Today, the cost of power and cooling is the biggest consideration.”

He added that the key success to data centre design is the development of a long-term and structured data centre roadmap. “Organisations need to change their mindset and to glue everything together; to centralise, consolidate, streamline, and automate IT.”

According to Hinman, the next-generation data centre will be holistic and modular, and will have fewer servers with more processing power, lower storage costs yet greater storage capacity and reduced bandwidth costs.

Ashton Steyn, CTO of HP Enterprise Group, said the cloud evolution would impact on the data centre design.

“Spending will continue to move from capital expenses to operational expenses, as enterprises look to reduce costs through the consumption of existing cloud services. Cloud will be centred in the context of data centre consolidation and the movement towards sustainable green IT to further capitalise on cost reductions.”

Steyn pointed out that more enterprises will be looking to establish a hybrid cloud model where commoditised services will be deployed in the public cloud, while mission-critical information will continue to be managed on-site in the private cloud.

According to Steyn, into the foreseeable future, enterprises will demand instant-on IT driven by cloud computing, sensors, automation and mobility.

“Companies are starting to reinvent themselves because of this new wave. Cloud business models need to change because customers want services immediately. The future of communications is through consolidation, which needs to be supported across the organisation. This is driving the change of data centre design.”

Enzo Adamo, technical lead for RSA, said manufacturing data centres that are energy efficient, flexible and virtualised will cut data centre costs. He explained how data centre cooling needs to change and that organisations need to look at alternative solutions such as renewable energy.

“Even though servers have become more powerful, power costs have gone up astronomically. There's huge pressure on companies that require large amounts of energy. Big data centres in Europe have to pay additional tax for high power consumption,” noted Adamo.

He added that governments, particularly in Europe, are starting to demand power usage effectiveness documents from data centres to prove they are deploying best practices around energy efficiency.

Some of the ways data centres can reduce costs is by using free cooling, which is using ambient air to cool the data centre without any additional process. He said SA has the right climate suitable for this type of cooling. He also advised data centres to deploy aisle containment strategies using hot and cold aisles for efficient cooling.

Leon Erasmus, HP technical services manager, explained how the company invested in a project from 2007 to transform its data centres. Through acquisitions, HP managed to reduce the number of data centres from 85 down to six and applications from 6 000 to 1 500.

Erasmus said HP was able to spend more time and money on innovation and less on operating costs that were focused on “keeping the lights on”.

According to Erasmus, SA sits with energy provisioning challenges where many data centres are demanding for more energy, yet national electricity provider Eskom says it cannot allocate any more power to these energy-demanding facilities.