The focus is back on the heart of IT – the data centre. But although the data centre as we know it is shrinking fast before the industry eyes, it sure is packing in a punch. Significant change is clearly at hand and the team at TEXPO has its aim set firmly on helping clients keep data centre’s in pace with growth.
We are not just saying that, the market is. A recent report from leading industry analyst Gartner says four key forces are pushing ahead for bringing significant impact on data centres in the next five years. According to the report, these four forces - smarter designs, energy efficiency pressures (or green IT), the realities of high-density environments, and the potential of cloud computing - operating in the market today could result in data centrer space requirements that will shrink dramatically before the decade is out.
"In the world of IT, everything has cascade effects, and in data centres the traditional methods of design no longer work without understanding the outside forces that will have an impact on data centre costs, size and longevity," says David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for infrastructure at Gartner in his report.
However, when you look at reality, the critical success factors that will work in your favour will be about applying innovative designs, reducing capital costs and operating costs, increase long term scale, and keeping up with the business.
The TEXPO Research Team couldn’t agree more and reached out to ask our CEO Dr Safaraz Alam what it means for the data centre business. “The days of owning a giant data centre that you hope to grow into are over. Today’s data centre decisions pivot around managing energy efficiency and building in modularity that helps keep investments in pace with growth,” Dr Alam says. “Good data centre planning gives the organisation a clear path for growth and TEXPO has been showing customers how they can achieve that,” he adds.
Good planning also means understanding the today’s customers are beginning to view the data centre in a more holistic manner and taking a more strategic approach to technology buying and procurement is critical to success. “But the buck does not stop here. Service providers also need to start re-defining their approach by broadening the offerings,” says Dr Alam.
What he says makes absolute sense and validates TEXPO’s stand as a key service provider for the data centre market; yet another interesting fact that Gartner recognises. According to a second report we have on hand from the analyst, data centre service providers would do well to expand their view of the competitive landscape. Let’s look at what they had to say:
"If you are selling into the data centre, you are no longer just competing head-to-head with familiar competitors selling like products," says April Adams, Research Director at Gartner. "Today, you have increased competition not only in your specific area of technological expertise, but for overall enterprise mind share, as well. Providers will need to expand their view of the competitive landscape and consider alternative ways to go to market in order to highlight their strengths and maximise their sales potential."
The analyst then also goes one step further to recommend six ways for service providers to go to market including: Competing as a specialist; Going to market as a traditional portfolio provider; Partnering to achieve a portfolio offering; Developing a converged offering; Hedging your bets by using multiple approaches and Selling data centre technologies as a service.
For us at TEXPO we see this analysis as being spot-on and completely reflects the route we are taking by positioning ourselves as an end-to-end partner for a full range of data centre solutions including developing ready to move-in dedicated data centres. What we offer our customers today is a breath of expertise that includes working with them to plan, design, engineer, construct, monitor and maintain data centres, computer rooms or server farms that integrate the best of breed critical infrastructure technologies.
What we also believe in is delivering an always available, scalable and manageable data centre solution for customers are some of the key services offered include offering complete data centre infrastructure build up; drafting open IT architecture models to drawing up energy efficient designs for data centres.
Considering these trends as part of your forward-thinking, go-to-market planning will also assist your organisation to make thoughtful decisions that are based on understanding your company’s strengths and weakness areas and dynamically evolving in a fast changing market to maintain competitive advantage.
It’s certainly interesting time for all, especially TEXPO. Talk to us.
The four factors
Gartner recommends that data centre managers who are trying to determine how to optimally design and plan for the leading-edge data centre of the future focus on the following four factors:
Smarter Designs: Traditional methods of designing data centres were created during the mainframe era, and, because of their high costs, many mainframes were targeted for average performance in the mid-90 percent range during production time slots. As a result, there was minimal variation in the operating temperature or power consumption during long periods of time.
Today's data centres have many different demands on mechanical/electrical systems, depending on workload mix, function and age of equipment. New designs have taken this into account by adding different density zones for different workload types. This zone might employ directed cold air, or even in-rack cooling to support very high density workloads with minimal disruption, or impact, on the rest of the floor. Secondary zones would support steady-state applications that consume a consistent amount of power and produce manageable heat loads, while low-density zones would be designed to support low-power equipment (perhaps telecom and storage).
Green Pressures: Most data centre managers paid little attention to the "greening of IT," unless they were pressured into it by senior management or the public. However, as awareness has increased, there has been a constant uptick in the attention paid to energy consumption in data centres, and new data centre managers take a hard look at energy efficiency in both design and execution.
Conquering Density: With smarter designs and green pressures, data centre managers and designers have begun to focus on the compute density in their environments. Most data centres are woefully underutilised from a space perspective. The physical floor space may be nearing capacity, but in many cases, the actual compute space within racks and servers is very poorly used, with average rack densities approaching just 60 percent worldwide.
Newer designs focus on this issue and are developed to allow optimal rack density, often approaching 85 to 90 percent, on average, thus increasing the compute-per-square-foot ratio dramatically. The advent of private cloud environments and resource pooling will provide methods to enhance vertical scalability in the data centre, while at the same time improving the productivity-per-kilowatt ratio.
Cloud Computing: Data centre managers are beginning to consider the possibility of shifting nonessential workloads to a cloud provider, freeing up much-needed floor space, power and cooling, which can then be focused on more-critical production workloads, and extending the useful life of the data centre. Shifting workloads is not new; many companies use collocation facilities as an overflow mechanism. However, the difference is that, with collocation, the compute resource is still owned and managed by the application owner. With offloading services to the cloud, ownership and management of IT assets is shifted to the provider, essentially outsourcing the service to someone else.
As this practice increases in popularity, the landscape for what remains of the corporate data centre will change significantly. Only core business functions — those that differentiate a business from its competition, or are truly mission-critical — will remain in the primary data centre. All other noncritical services will eventually migrate to external providers, having the long-term effect of shrinking physical data centre requirements. Gartner predicts that by 2018, data centre space requirements will be only 40 percent of what they are today. The focus of these data centres will be on core business services, and, as those services continue to demand more IT resources, the shrinking size of servers and storage (and telecom equipment) will more than offset that growth.
TEXPO Research Team
10th December 2011
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