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After years of uncontrolled growth, many data centers face a crisis as they run into space and power constraints. While remedies exist, present business practices do not encourage the prioritization of power reduction within one of the most power hungry areas of a business— the data center
* Operational issues have data centers at a breaking point
The server sprawl that has been taking place for years is still continuing in a lot of companies, putting pressure on data center managers who have to manage increasing numbers of servers with restricted budgets; the IT budgets of 87% of respondents are not growing in real terms.
* Data center management is suffering
Under these pressures, data center management is not as tight as it could be; 28% do not know the exact number of servers they have and 22% said it could take up to a day to find a server that had gone down, and another 20% taking longer than a day. In addition, space and power constraints are beginning to hit; 11% of data centers will run out of space this year, while 14% have already hit a power supply limit.
* Organizational and human issues contribute to the problem
Human factors, such as a lack of communication between different groups, contribute to the crisis. Groups such as facilities, commissioning, infrastructure etc. need to work together if the organization is going to achieve common goals such as saving power. Organizational barriers also exist—less than one in five data center decision makers have financial responsibility for data center power consumption, and 55% are not even aware of what the power cost are.
* Company executives need to act
Companies need to ensure that corporate goals, such as carbon footprint reduction, are communicated to all employees and are passed on to power hungry areas of the business such as the data center. In addition, the charging structure for power needs to be changed to incentivize the data center to reduce power consumption.
* IT management needs to invest in technologies that save power
Power-saving approaches, including virtualization and automation, exist in abundance but they require up-front investment before the savings can be realized. If data centers had to pay for their electricity consumption (and passed it on to the business through chargeback) it would be relatively easy to make a business case for these investments.
* Data center managers need to be given the proper tools to manage their domain
Data center managers need all the help they can get with managing the complex environments that exist today. They need to have a clear view of their entire server portfolio—mainframes, towers, racks and blades—as well as storage, networking gear, universal power supplies (UPS) and power distribution systems. They also need insight into the cooling capacity, electrical supply and floor space availability of the data center. Good asset planning tools help take the guesswork out of managing IT assets and help with planning the future growth of the data center in a controlled and optimized way. They need to be able to accurately predict when the data center will run out of resources, whether that is space, electricity or cooling. Conclusions All parts of the organization—from the board and executives through the IT Director and data center manager to data center operators—have a part to play in regaining full control of the power and real estate costs that are beginning to run out of control. With power costs rising sharply and increased public and corporate focus on environmental issues, such as carbon footprint, the techniques exist to tackle power inefficiencies in the data center—it is more a question of if the will exists. The underpinning for all this is asset management tools that maintain good visibility and control of the data center and all its assets.
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