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After years of alternating decentralization and recentralization of information technology (IT) budgets and control, IT equipment has ended up spread all over the place in many organizations. Today, there is growing acceptance from IT and business management alike that, if they can be located there, the data center is logically the best place for IT resources. Not only can they be better controlled and managed but the powering and cooling of IT equipment can be done more efficiently in a data center than in an uncontrolled office environment. Centralizing equipment also offers the opportunity to consolidate and rationalize; replacing multiple out of date servers with fewer, newer machines that require less power can result in big savings on maintenance.
However, all the good things that come from pulling equipment back into the center are predicated on one assumption—that it is a well managed environment. If the office is the wild frontier of IT, then the data center has to be one of the genteel cities back East where folk speak properly and mind their manners. However, all the evidence is that, typically, data center management is haphazard—more like Dodge City than Boston or Baltimore. With the focus (quite properly) being on responsiveness to the business, there is a danger that IT organizations may lose sight of the future of their data center. As each business unit gets to decide what applications it wants to implement, IT departments dutifully keep buying hardware for the new applications until eventually the data center fills up or hits power supply problems. It is not unusual for large companies to have thousands of servers in several centers, each server being utilized on average at 10% to 20% capacity.
The aim of this report is to highlight the issues regarding data center asset planning, including managing complexity in the data center; how companies are dealing with space and power constraints; and the organizational and cultural barriers to the adoption of good practice regarding power saving and green issues. It also takes a look at some of the measures that companies are implementing to save energy in the data center. As a background to this, interviews were conducted with people responsible for, or who have active involvement in, data center management at 301 companies across the US, the UK, Germany, France and the Benelux countries (see APPENDIX A).
The report should be of value to business and IT managers who want to make better use of their data centers to drive business benefits, and yet, at the same time, improve energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint.
IT at a breaking point?
The old adage “The only constant is change” holds true for today’s data center. As they respond continuously to business needs, stability is a luxury enjoyed by very few data center managers.
Server sprawl is a well documented, if undesirable, aspect of the distributed computing revolution that has taken place since the early 1990s, yet it is one that data centers are still grappling with. Although a quarter of organizations are managing to shrink their server portfolio through consolidation, almost a half reported that server numbers are still growing, and for a significant number it is growing by more than 50% per year (Figure 1). This is more likely to be due to the management of the data center being out of control rather than due to growth in their server load.
This shows that there are still a significant number of businesses that are failing to realize the benefits of virtualization by consolidating multiple applications and operating systems on Intel-based servers.
At the same time as they are handling this growth, data centers are under the almost perennial pressure to deliver more for less. 87% of budgets are restricted in some way— either shrinking, stationary or not keeping pace with inflation (Figure 3).
The budgetary pressure appears greatest in France and, possibly as an early knee-jerk response to the current economic meltdown in the USA, where over a third of data centers’ budgets are shrinking (Figure 4).
Typically, 75–80% of the IT budget is spent just on keeping the show on the road. virtualization and data center automation can help to reduce this through consolidation and reduced labor costs.
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