Research by Global DataCenter Management (GDCM) has
concluded that after years of uncontrolled growth, many datacentres
face a crisis as they run into space and power
constraints.
The survey of 301 senior IT influencers and decision makers,
conducted by Quocirca, found
that even though remedies to the problems exist, current typical
business practices concerning datacentres do not encourage the
prioritisation of power reduction within one of the most power
hungry areas of a business. It also warned that lack of awareness
of the key datacentre issues may result in firms not being able to
deploy the IT resources required to support business growth.
Alarmingly, just over a quarter of firms didn’t know how many
servers they had with three in ten also being ignorant of how many
devices they had connected to their network. Another fifth knew,
but only at room level, not being able to say what cabinet
contained what rack devices etc.
Firms’ ability to locate their network equipment was equally
worrying: a fifth replied that it would take over a day and 22 %
would take up to a day with a taking up to half a day. Only 26%
said could do it in minutes or seconds. The research however did
not take into account what types of services were being run on the
server nor the criticality or loads placed on them.
Utilisation was also a problem indicted by the research. Nearly
half (47%) of firms said that they didn’t measure utilisation, and
when asked to estimate what percentage of resources were being
used, the majority such respondents believed that their servers
were over 75% utilised. “This is dreamland,” commented Quocirca
analyst Dennis Szubert for whom a reasonable industry average was
15%.
The other key issues in the report were space concerns and power
usage. Quocirca found that 11% of firms will run out of datacentre
space this year and a further 8% didn’t know when they would run
out of datacentre, a critical issue said Szubert, as was power
supply.
“The lead times in new datacentre build is measured in years so
firms need to have a good idea of what space usage is and when run
out. 14% have reached a power limit and cannot feed any more power
into the datacentre. It’s is a common situation in a lot of metro
areas where some datacentres have space but cannot deploy any more
IT equipment because of power constraints.” This could seriously
hamper firms’ ability to grow as in some areas it may take up to 18
months to lay new cable into a datacentre. Putting this into
context, Szubert estimated that datacentre power consumption had
doubled in the last five years.
In a warning to senior IT mangers,
GDCM managing director Michael Evans told ComputerWeekly that
immediate steps were necessary. “For a long time we have suspected
that the datacentre industry is grossly inefficient. The datacentre
industry is now believed to generate as much CO2 as the
airline industry. There is outrage at ghost flights by airlines
flying planes with no passengers around the world so that they can
keep to schedules; what we’re seeing in the datacentre industry is
the same thing all the time, effectively running servers with no
users or just running at such low capacity that it’s the equivalent
of airlines flying around the world with two passengers on.”
Evans added that tools need to be sought which can provide
support in addressing these challenges and that with just with a
few proactive management techniques, firms could combat this
situation.