Gartner Paper: US Data Centers – The Calm Before the Storm

This research outlines why energy and floor space constraints will cause considerable disruption to U.S. enterprise data centers during the next three years. Users must plan early and change rapidly to avoid costly delays.
Key Findings

    * The U.S. data center collocation market will grow rapidly during the next few years and should be considered as an alternative to internal data centers.
    * Upward-spiraling infrastructure demands and increasing energy costs mean that the energy proportion of IT costs could double by 2012.
    * Advanced monitoring and modeling tools will change the nature of data centers from static entities to dynamic "living organisms" during the next five or more years.

Recommendations
    * Users must start monitoring the energy consumption of their data centers, and modeling the floor capacity available for future growth. This information should be used quickly to make strategic decisions about the nature and importance of the data centers.
    * Projected major changes to the capital or operational part of an IT budget must be quantified quickly and appropriate provisions established, such as securing funding to build a new data center.
    * Technologies such as virtualization and dynamic workload management must be implemented quickly to improve the use of assets and defer the procurement of new hardware as a mechanism to optimize floor space and energy costs.
    * Where data center refurbishment or new builds are required, users must ensure that they and their engineering partners use the evolving modeling and monitoring tools.
    * If hosted data center space is required, then users should move quickly to avoid rapidly rising costs, and should secure mid- to long-term contracts (three to six years).
    
Analysis
CIOs of large U.S. organizations must prepare for a period of rapid changes in their data centers. The disruption will be accompanied by a significant increase in capital and operational expenditures. Failure to respond quickly and appropriately to the changing market conditions and technologies will result in needlessly high energy bills, expensive service contracts and delays in implementing new technologies.

During the next two or more years, three main issues will come together and cause the disruption:

    * Legacy data centers won't have sufficient power and cooling requirements for the next generation of high-density server and storage equipment.
    * The volume growth of IT infrastructure will exceed the available data center floor space for most organizations.
    * The need to manage upward-spiraling energy costs through optimization tools and modeling techniques.

Gartner estimates that more than 70% of the world's Global 1000 organizations will have to modify their data center facilities significantly during the next five years. The U.S. has the biggest concentration of large (greater than 50,000 square foot) data centers, the majority of which were built more than seven years ago. Their design envelope is insufficient to handle servers' current and future energy needs.

These legacy data centers typically were built to a design specification of about 35 to 70 watts per square foot. Current design needs can vary from between 150 to 200 watts per square foot, and by 2011, this could rise to more than 300 watts per square foot. These figures for energy per square foot represent just the energy needed to power the IT equipment; they don't include the energy needed by air-conditioning systems to remove the heat generated by this equipment. Depending on the tier level and future equipment density plans in the data center, these cooling needs can increase the overall power requirements by an additional 80% to 120%. For more details about these types of calculations, see "The Impact of High-Density Server Growth on Data Center Power and Cooling Metrics."

The implication is that most current data centers will be unable to host the next generation of high-density equipment, so CIOs will have to refurbish their established sites, build new ones or look for alternatives (such as using a hosting provider).

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2011, more than 70% of U.S. enterprise data centers will face tangible disruptions related to floor space, energy consumption and/or costs.

In August 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that U.S. data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2006 (1.5% of all U.S. energy consumption) and cost $4.4 billion to operate. The report also estimated that this could increase to 100 billion kWh and $7.4 billion by 2011. The EPA's assumptions are rather conservative, however; we believe that a projected 15% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of the high-volume, high-density servers could add another 10% to 15% to these figures.