A survey
by the Aperture Research Institute (ARI) of more than 600
datacentre facilities worldwide has shown thatdatacentres are
aging and companies are not planning aheador
demonstrating timely investment in new datacentres.
ARI surveyed more
than 100 datacentre professionals in the finance, healthcare,
government, retail, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications
industries and sought to highlight the management challenge faced
by datacentre managers that are increasingly responsible for more
disparate and numerous operations.
More than a third
(38%) of the companies surveyed currently operates more than six
datacentres and over a quarter (28%) has over ten facilities and an
identical number of organisations surveyed said that their current
datacentre was built over four years ago, which says ARI reflects
the
challenge a
lot of organisations have when coping with the intense power and
cooling demands of modern hardware such as high-density blade
servers and virtualisation technologies.
In what is seen as
a worrying trend, the majority of those surveyed, almost two-thirds
(64%), admitted they were not planning or building new
datacentres. The remainder, just over one third (36%), had
predicted the demand for scaling with their operations and are
building and/or planning new datacentres.
Analysing the
results, Steve Yellen, Principal of the Aperture Research Institute
said, “The average time required to plan and build a new datacentre
is typically three or more years, which leads us to a worrying
conclusion about the future of datacentres and the impact of this
lack of foresight.
Datacentre managers are
already facing day-to-day challenges on managing increasingly
complex technologies in old facilities. But adding new technology
to an aging environment is like building a high-rise office complex
in a rural town.
“The small town,
like a legacy datacentre, cannot support the infrastructure
requirements for the office complex to operate efficiently and the
occupants will never realise the benefits of the upgrade they
expected. 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 datacentres, the survey identified an
investment in high density computing with over four-fifths (87%) of
organisations having introduced
blade servers.
Of survey
respondents that were building a datacentre, more than a
quarter
(26%) were
anticipating a build time of between two and three years before the
centre would go live, while 15% had planned more than three years
for builds.
Power demands, one
of the challenges that is creating much discussion about and within
the datacentre industry, is showing little sign of slowing down.
More than half (57%) of all respondents with current datacentre
builds, say their datacentre will consume between one and five
megawatts, with the same level of consumption being expected by
those with planned builds (55%). Almost a quarter (22%) of planned
builds will operate between five and ten megawatts.