Too Many Data Centers?

William Van Winkle

3/24/2009

Companies grow, mergers happen, times change. Whatever the cause, many enterprises eventually find themselves poring over a roster of data center locations and wonder just how many are actually needed—especially when the economy turns south. But deciding on whether and how to pare down the number of facilities can be a challenging process.

Figures First

First off, question the assumption. Should you consolidate? At the Gartner 27th Annual Data Center Conference, in the presentation “The Data Center Scenario: Planning for the Future,” researchers noted, “As far as the number of data centers [goes], most organizations have too many, but some, especially midsize organizations, have too few and put their business at risk as a result.”

Knowing whether you need to expand or contract starts with looking at a collection of three key location costs: human resources, property, and any services feeding the data center. All three of those things probably can and should be optimized. Once the sum of these three is determined, you’ll have better odds of not consolidating to the most expensive site. Ideally, the goal is to eliminate expensive sites and consolidate to the least expensive locations, but not before taking the local skill set into account. As Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, points out, “Often, the cheapest site is the site where nobody wants to live.”

Enderle advises enterprises to examine if sites that could potentially be closed might have certain geographic dependencies. For example, some projects have to remain in close proximity to the groups working on them. Such sites are better candidates for optimization rather than outright consolidation.

“Users generally need to work in close proximity to a blade center because of latency issues,” says Enderle. “Chances are that the latency issues you’ll introduce by consolidating the blade center to a more distant site will overcome the cost advantages that you would gain by doing the consolidation. You might consolidate to the site that has the latency dependency, but you might not consolidate away from it. Those dependencies will probably play a bigger role than comparing the costs of the individual sites.”

Latency can also inhibit international consolidation. Gartner researchers point out that it's "fairly rare" for global organizations to consolidate data centers across oceans because of the "unacceptable response time levels for worldwide applications." Conversely, when applications aren’t terribly time-sensitive, a single data center should be able to service the entire world.

Also, be sure not to overlook the hazards of a given geography. Few enterprises would want to sink a data center into an area that floods regularly or take on the shaky prospects of proximity to a fault line. The land may be cheap, but cheap can turn expensive in a few seconds.

Optimizing

Whether it makes sense to consolidate or leave facilities where they are, the inevitable tendency is for data centers to strain their resources. After all, cramming two otherwise similar data centers running at 50% resource capacity into a single facility is asking for trouble. Four of the most common (and interrelated) pain points found in data centers are processing horsepower, storage, infrastructure footprint, and energy consumption.

Particularly in older data centers, server racks based on slower, less efficient, single-core processors can strain under or prove insufficient for modern workloads. Virtualization running on current-gen servers is a common way of consolidating legacy server systems and saving space, but extended far enough, and hosting the right applications, it could assist in consolidating multiple data centers. Charles King, principal analyst at PundIT, believes that most SMEs have yet to take proper advantage of virtualization.

“For a company in the 250- to 1,000-[employee] range,” he says, “typically that sort of organization has data center personnel on site, and they should be able to effectively design, deploy, and manage a virtualized environment. The payback for virtualization begins almost immediately. You have the potential of significantly reducing the number of servers in your data center. Ideally, you’re going to be using less electrical power and paying less for that every month. Having fewer physical machines also means that your data center staff will have less to do each day on management and maintenance tasks. In some cases, companies have used that as an excuse to reduce staff, but I’d rather see it as an opportunity to have them do other things that might provide greater value.”

On the storage side, the brute force way of consolidating resources is to dump lots of little drives into much higher-capacity drives—easy enough with 4TB models on tap for 2011, according to Hitachi (www.hitachi.com). But rather than pushing the problem forward by investing in ever-larger hardware, what about pursuing a reduce/reuse philosophy with data deduplication? Essentially, “deduping” strips away the rampant extra copies organizations keep of files, preserving one master copy and leaving shortcut pointers in place of the others. King notes that enterprises are saving up to 50% more capacity space year over year through deduplication at a time when capacity needs are doubling every 18 to 19 months. Major storage vendors now offer deduplication services. Combining this with higher-capacity systems and virtualized storage technologies could enable considerable storage resource consolidation.

Another risk of older data centers is energy waste and insufficiency. Gartner reports that older data centers (pre-2002) were built to deliver 35 to 70W per square foot. Newer data centers target 125 to 150W, and many now scale up to 300W per square foot in anticipation of future demands. If this weren’t bad enough, Gartner goes on to state that older data centers could consume up to “three times as much power as was ultimately used for powering servers, storage, and networking equipment.” Today’s most efficient data centers consume only about 1.25 times the energy required by IT equipment, and much of this improvement comes from superior methods, such as in-row cooling. All other things being equal, the more power-efficient data center should be your go-to consolidation location. By the same token, a “green” makeover could save a location from untimely termination.

by William Van Winkle for Processor.com

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Too Many Data Centers?

William Van Winkle

3/24/2009

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Too Many Data Centers?

William Van Winkle

3/24/2009

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