Data centres: old and unsuitable

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 19 December 2007 08:28

Your IT - Home IT

More than a third (38 percent) of organisations surveyed said that their current data centre was built over four years ago. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) admitted they were not planning or building new data centres. The remaining 36 percent had predicted the demand for scaling their operations and were building and/or planning new data centres.

Steve Yellen, principal of the Aperture Research Institute, said: "The average time required to plan and build a new data centre is typically three or more years, which leads us to a worrying conclusion about the future of data centres and the impact of this lack of foresight. Data centre managers are already facing day-to-day challenges on managing increasingly complex technologies in old facilities."

According to ARI "Installing state-of-the-art equipment in an aging facility will limit the benefits that can be delivered by the new technology, and in some cases, will overload the infrastructure to the point of failure. Despite the age and unreadiness of current data centres, there is already an investment in high density computing, with over four-fifths (87 percent) of organisations having introduced blade servers."

Blade servers are, it says, of particular concern. "Although a single blade server may not use more power than a conventional server, a full rack of blade servers consumes much more power than a rack of conventional servers, because more blades fit into a rack. As a result, the demand for power and cooling is far greater when blade servers are widely deployed...Data centres over four years old are highly unlikely to have been built with enough power and cooling capacity to support the full potential of blade servers. Where blades are being used in older data centres, there is a significantly greater risk of outage, particularly if power and cooling are poorly managed."

The Aperture Research Institute claims to be the first organisation dedicated to researching data centres, their challenges, and best practice management. It was established by Aperture Technologies, a global provider of software for managing the physical infrastructure of data centres.