Data centres ill-prepared for clouds & virtualisation

Stuart Corner
Friday, 04 November 2011 14:07

According to Frost & Sullivan white paper, Australian data centres are ill-equipped to handle the shift to virtualisation and cloud computing.

The whitepaper, entitled Not all Data Centres are Equal - Understanding Global Best Practices of the Data Centres that Power the Cloud was commissioned from F&S by Macquarie Telecom. It "examines the industry issues, business factors and technology enablers, which CIOs need to consider to support an organisation, as the IT industry undergoes a paradigm shift in the way computing resources are being procured and delivered."

The white paper says: "While virtualisation solves a number of IT challenges, it also creates numerous problems for the underlying data centre infrastructure in areas such as power and cooling systems. Although significant changes in IT equipment and technology such as servers are occurring, the underlying infrastructure in most data centres is often not keeping pace with these developments. In many cases, key components of the data centre infrastructure, such as power and cooling systems, are still outdated, requiring massive upgrades to match the new IT technology'¦

"Cloud computing has a two-fold impact on data centre demand. Firstly it significantly increases demand for data centre space as cloud matures as a technology and as an increasing number of IT service providers start offering cloud based services. In captive data centres, cloud computing will result in a massive centralisation of infrastructure, creating the need for additional data centre space. Secondly, cloud computing leads to improved server utilisation through the use of virtualisation and greater consolidation of storage infrastructure, thereby resulting in reduced demand for space in the long run (considering the spatial advantages gained through virtualisation)."

According to Macquarie Telecom, "Apart from identifying the issues, the whitepaper has been designed as an aid to decision-making for Australian businesses who have or are investing in cloud and virtualisation technologies and facing buy vs build decisions for their infrastructure requirements."
 
Arun Chandrasekaran, research director of F&S's ICT Practice, said, "The report examines global best practices in data centre management, the main factors driving a transformation in the data centre environment and the resulting impact on the 'build' versus 'buy' decision. It also offers recommendations to IT decision makers on how to select the optimum hosting provider if they decide to outsource data centre hosting to a 3rd party."