Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

I attended the 2009 IT Roadmap Conference in Atlanta,
Georgia this week and sat in on the presentation by
Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes Research, entitled
“Building a Resilient Dynamic Data Center.” The presentation
was a summary of hundreds of hours of discussions
with data center operators and enterprises with data
centers.

The information was summarized and presented in the
framework of trends- from old to new. Of the data
centers investigated, the ages were approximately
18 years old and the youngest around eight years old.

Beginning
with the older sites, this vintage data center was
built favoring reliability over responsiveness to
change or business agility. The rate of growth within
the data center was low, HVAC and power were relatively
static, and there was little network infrastructure.

During
the 1990’s, the there was explosive growth of faster
and cheaper computing platforms. The personal computer
proliferated and the computing services of the data
center appeared on every desk. With the prolific availability
of computing platforms, we saw an ignoring of the
operational ethic normally associated with a data
center. Utility closets, basements, and wiring closets
suddenly were home for computers. These “data closets”
now coexisted alongside the robust data center facility
within the enterprise. The LAN and WAN also were now
critical to the business.

Leading
up to the turn of the century, the corporate data
center tended to be purpose-built, inflexible, power
hungry and over-cooled. Above the white space, computing
systems were complex and layered, often simultaneously
over-provisioned and underused… creating capacity
issues with the data center itself.

After
the turn of the century, new computing and IT governance
paradigms cast a light on how data centers were designed
to serve the business. Users are now everywhere… and
quite often not at all in the vicinity of the data
center. The importance of the WAN now comes to the
fore and consolidation of the IT footprint gains momentum.
There is recognition of the level of resiliency of
the facility that needs to be aligned with the risk
management posture of the enterprise. This amplifies
issues of facility infrastructure design, site selection,
and security. Above the white space, IT architecture
increasingly adopts virtualization, providing agility,
flexibility, and on-demand IT services. The exponential
increase in silicon density creates urgent issues
with utility costs and the ability to thermally manage
the IT environment. Green initiatives and data center
automation have achieved momentum and are top of mind
for facility operators.

Now
that we’ve taken that walk down memory lane, we can
look at some actionable statistics… again the result
of the work by Nemertes Research.

Of
the firms interviewed over the years of this study,
93% are implementing virtualization technologies,
and 21% of those say they’ve achieved full virtualization
of the O/S layer. These firms tout benefits in terms
of cost savings, the ability to provision services
quickly, and improvements in Disaster Recovery. Regarding
those DR improvements, there has been a 74% increase
in firms reporting sub-one-hour recovery. ‘Not bad
at all.

When
it comes to the computing platforms, blade servers
account for 26% of servers (and growing), and 56%
of all systems are quad core. The average memory per
server is now 32GB. Storage today is 55% Fiber Channel
and iSCSI accounts for 27%, but iSCSI use is growing
quickly.

Fewer
than 20% of the firms interviewed are using cloud-based
services, but this is expected to increase significantly
over the coming years.

The
most concerning statistic is regarding awareness of
power consumption. As many as 87% of the firms interviewed
do not know what the power consumption of their IT
footprint is. This could lead to interesting circumstances
as these firms move toward colocation.

While
the trends mentioned above are not breaking news to
those in the data center world, it does set a useful
context to the statistics mined by Nemertes. The consolidation
of the IT footprint and the use of increasingly dense
and hot computing platforms is on track to continue
forward toward the planning horizon. Users will continue
to be geographically diverse, increasing the dependence
upon high speed WAN services. The explosive growth
of data and the use of that content is accelerating
at rates none of us could imagine, and portends even
greater pressure on the design dimensions discussed
above.