Although it started life as a back-office support
function, thedatacentrehas transformed from a
"glorified computerised filing cabinet" (in many people's eyes) to
a major consumer of resources. The big question now is how to
rationalise it. There are several business and technical
options.
Roughly 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions are generated by
the IT industry, according to Gartner research in September 2007.
Worse still, 23% of that share could be blamed on the power needed
to run and cool servers in datacentres. Until fairly recently,
power consumption has never really been an issue. But suddenly we
appear to have reached a tipping point, socially at least.
"These days companies can be assessed on their corporate social
responsibility," says Una Du Noyer, head of infrastructure
engineering at consultant Capgemini. "Judgements on reputational
risk are likely to seriously affect a company's share price."
As
datacentres grew, organically, in response to increasing
demands to manage ever more voluminous and eclectic data, they have
typically produced an inefficient mish-mash of hybrid technologies
that often span several generations. These consume all kinds of
expensive resources, including office space, manpower, equipment
and electricity. A combination of business and technology solutions
is being mooted to combat the problems created by the datacentre's
hunger for ever more expensive (and rare) resources.
The manpower problem, for example, could be tackled by a
business strategy, such as outsourcing, or a technical solution,
such as autonomic computing, in which datacentres manage
themselves.
The consumption of power has several solutions. If the price of
electricity is a problem, outsourcing of datacentre functions to
other countries, where power is cheaper, would help. "India is a
popular destination for obvious reasons," says Roy Illsley, senior
research analyst at the Butler Group. "The US has cheap power, and
its reduced manufacturing sector means it often has the resources
to house a datacentre."
On the other hand, if the datacentre's electricity consumption
is an environmental concern serious enough to merit action, there
are technical remedies. A raft of new technologies is emerging that
will offer faster, more fuel-efficient computing - from solid state
disc (SSD) and 64-bit computing at the server level, through to
new-generation mainframe technology, such as IBM's recently
announced Z10.
But the development that renders all other datacentre advances
insignificant is
virtualisation. This decoupling of information from the
underlying hardware complements all other advances in datacentre
technology, says Dennis Szubert, principal analyst at market
researcher Quocirca.
"Virtualisation will have the biggest impact of any technology
on datacentre computing over the next few years, as there are so
many good things that result," he says. "From consolidation, to
automation, to green computing - virtualisation has its finger in
all these pies."
By partitioning each physical server into a number of virtual
servers, datacentre managers can halve the number of machines they
need to run, so they require less office space and consume less
power. In October 2007, Gartner research predicted that
virtualisation would be the top strategic technology for 2008.
"The widely accepted figure for the current number of servers
virtualised today is 10%, but we think it may be more like 24%,"
says Szubert. "This is a trend that will really take off. The main
server suppliers are all shipping servers with VMWare pre-installed
in flash memory."
Virtualisation would be a huge step toward efficiency for many
datacentres, but few datacentre managers have been able to document
every single move and change to their computing infrastructure as
it has grown organically. So there are many ghost machines out
there that are not actually needed and run no applications. This is
why rationalisation must precede
virtualisation. Rationalisation tools, such as Tideway's
Foundation, which map out the IT terrain and identify redundant
hardware than can be removed, may prove every bit as significant as
virtualisation.
As the de-facto method used for server consolidation,
virtualisation can claim responsibility for some incredible
power savings. As part of its virtualisation strategy, BT
recently managed to reduce 700 racks of servers down to 40, cutting
power consumption from 2.1MW to 240kW, not including cooling and
power distribution.
The rise of virtualisation will, of course, bring its own
management problems. As creating a new server becomes a moment's
work, virtual servers may mushroom in number - if the unmanaged
growth of all other kinds of IT are a precedent. In which case,
management of virtual servers may become the next pain point, says
Szubert. But that day may be some way ahead.
Meanwhile, faster and more
energy-efficient technology is set to appear on the market. SSD
flash-based data storage technology is not only fast, but it fits
in with the two overriding requirements of any datacentre manager -
it takes up less space and consumes less power than the previous
generation of machines. Because it has no moving parts, SSD
hardware is faster and more reliable. It is more shock resistant
and need not be kept in the rarefied atmosphere needed by
traditional datacentre equipment - which could possibly be crashed
by smoke or dust particles. It also creates less heat that an
old-fashioned hard disc drive. So it consumes less energy while
processing, and needs less energy to cool it and keep it working.
The only possible drawback at the moment is cost.
Ian Osborne, project director at grid computing trade
association Intellect, predicts that although the benefits of
virtualisation could extend to storage and networking, big
challenges lie ahead. These hidden obstacles, and the ability to
overcome them, could shape the
datacentre's future. Moving running applications across
physical servers and dynamically starting new servers will be
pretty radical steps, says Osborne. "The needs of a flexible,
virtualised computing infrastructure are a little more challenging
when it comes to assuring service delivery."
In old-fashioned data silos, where resources were static, it was
easy to test how a datacentre could cope under extreme loads. The
licensing and configuration of software applications were
relatively simple too, with control maintained by physical
components. In the new, virtualised, flexible datacentre, such
matters will be a lot more complex.
Grid computing goes hand-in-hand with consolidation. By
standardising equipment, consolidating servers, storage and
applications, and automating management, businesses can see a rapid
return on investment in grid computing technologies. Cross-industry
efforts to build a unified enterprise grid infrastructure that can
outperform traditional SMP systems more cheaply, continue to
trundle along. Dell, Oracle, EMC and Intel linked up to form
Project MegaGrid, which offers a single, validated set of
deployment best practices for grid computing.
Meanwhile, some datacentres have serious Big Iron legacy issues.
The public sector has particularly difficult issues here, says
Capgemini's Du Noyer. "Everyone wants to consolidate, but there's a
massive backlog of kit to get rid of, but it runs applications that
are not documented, written in ancient languages that nobody knows
how to transcribe."
The process of putting on web front ends to access mainframe
data still continues apace, 10 years after it was mooted as a
temporary measure. Back then, it was presumed that, by now, all
mainframe data would have been converted.
Mainframes still have inherent advantages, which is why
non-western economies such as India, China and Brazil are
increasingly using them, says the Butler Group's Illsley. "They
have got a small footprint and they are great for the green
economy," he adds. New machines, such as IBM's V10, are built for
virtualisation too.
So will Big Iron die in the datacentre? "Almost certainly not,"
says Quocirca's Szubert. "It is still at the heart of many of the
world's top enterprises. And it is not certain it will die any time
soon. But, in a growing market, it is not growing."
With enterprise servers and cheaper X86 servers providing the
flexibility mainframes lack, the jury is still out on which
operating systems are best to cater for this new, flexible
environment. While the notion of an all-Windows datacentre in a
company of any size would have seemed absurd to all but Microsoft
die-hards a few years ago, recent releases of Datacenter editions
of Windows Server have provided a solid foundation for business
workloads.
Meanwhile, Unix has stagnated, says Szubert. "Most of the new
growth is in Linux installations," he points out.
Virtualisation will eventually pave the way for remotely
controlled autonomic computing, says Illsley, but don't expect
anything from IBM and the rest of the autonomic remote management
control camp for at least half a decade. "It still requires an
enormous leap of faith," he adds.
But virtualisation still has some way to go before it enables
autonomic computing. Matt McCormack, systems consultant at
researcher IDC, says, "The majority of storage infrastructures were
not designed for virtualisation and they do not have the
input-output capabilities."
Gartner analyst Rakesh Kumar adds, "The first two generations of
datacentre designs are not appropriate for current and future
needs. New datacentre designs need to be based on flexibility and
high levels of monitoring, and to incorporate a mixture of power
and cooling technologies alongside virtualisation and management
tools."
Kumar says new datacentres should be less static and more like
an "agile, living organism that evolves as the server and
infrastructure changes".
That's easy for him to say. Whether virtualisation delivers a
"living organism" remains to be seen. Gartner confidently predicts
that by 2010, all PC and server shipments will be virtualised. But
analysts have been wrong before.