Toward a Smaller, Smarter and More Efficient Data Center | WPN World People News

To meet demands for new services, IT departments for years have been adding servers and storage devices at an unprecedented pace. And even with the adoption of virtualization, the general state of many data centers is one where equipment sprawl is on the rise, energy consumption grows and more space is required to keep operations running.

These condition need to change. Most organizations can no longer afford the luxury of simply throwing equipment at service problems. The costs to manage and maintain equipment remains high, energy prices are rising and data center real estate is expensive.

However, help is at hand. Gartner believes there are already four forces in place today that are driving changes that will result in smaller, smarter and more efficient data centers.

Specifically, Gartner recommends that data center managers who are trying to determine how to optimally design and plan for the leading-edge data center of the future focus on the following four factors:

Smarter Designs: Traditional methods of designing data centers were created during the mainframe era, and, because of their high costs, many mainframes were targeted for average performance in the mid-90 percent range during production time slots. As a result, there was minimal variation in the operating temperature or power consumption during long periods of time.

Obviously, today's data centers have many different demands depending on workload mix, function and age of equipment. New designs have taken this into account by adding different density zones for different workload types. One zone might employ directed cold air, or even in-rack cooling to support very high-density workloads with minimal disruption, or impact, on the rest of the floor. Secondary zones could support steady-state applications that consume a consistent amount of power and produce manageable heat loads, while low-density zones would be designed to support low-power equipment.

Green Pressures: Most data center managers paid little attention to the "greening of IT," unless they were pressured into it by senior management or the public. However, as awareness has increased, there has been a constant uptick in the attention paid to energy consumption in data centers, and new data center managers take a hard look at energy efficiency in both design and execution. The development and marketing of power utilization efficiency (PUE) by the Green Grid continues to gain ground in the market, and many new data centers are being developed with specific PUE targets in mind, for the energy-efficiency advantages and the public relations impact.

Conquering Density: With smarter designs and green pressures, data center managers and designers have begun to focus on the compute density in their environments. Most data centers are woefully underutilized from a space perspective. The physical floor space may be nearing capacity, but in many cases, the actual compute space within racks and servers is very poorly used, with average rack densities approaching just 60 percent worldwide.

Newer designs focus on this issue and are developed to allow optimal rack density, often approaching 85 to 90 percent, on average, thus increasing the compute-per-square-foot ratio dramatically. The advent of private cloud environments and resource pooling will provide methods to enhance vertical scalability in the data center, while at the same time improving the productivity-per-kilowatt ratio

Cloud Computing: Data center managers are beginning to consider the possibility of shifting nonessential workloads to a cloud provider, freeing up much-needed floor space, power and cooling, which can then be focused on more-critical production workloads, and extending the useful life of the data center. Shifting workloads is not new; many companies use collocation facilities as an overflow mechanism. However, the difference is that, with collocation, the compute resource is still owned and managed by the application owner. With offloading services to the cloud, ownership and management of IT assets is shifted to the provider, essentially outsourcing the service to someone else.

As this practice increases in popularity, the landscape for what remains of the corporate data center will change significantly. Only core business functions—those that differentiate a business from its competition, or are truly mission-critical—will remain in the primary data center. All other noncritical services will eventually migrate to external providers, having the long-term effect of shrinking physical data center requirements.

Due to these driving forces, Gartner predicts that by 2018, data center space requirements will be only 40 percent of what they are today.

Source: Smarter Technology