Creating an agile data centre

Co-location alone is not the silver bullet to maximising data centre efficiency and reducing capacity. By Dave Leyland Head of Architecture Data Centre and Cloud at Dimension Data.

  • 10 years ago Posted in

BUSINESSES HAVE BEEN REDUCING data centre budgets for the last couple of years. Many have invested in data centre consolidation and virtualisation technologies to help data centre managers to do more with less, and they are now looking to reap the ROI rewards. However, many have not achieved the ROI they either hoped for or expected. While these technologies worked to help sweat assets, legacy infrastructure and systems – with their poor asset utilisation and a heavy cost burden – have often prevented them from optimal use.Additionally, with the rise of trends such as bring your own device (BYOD), enterprises are facing growing internal and external demands for IT services. Many data centre managers are finding their existing data centres can no longer shoulder an enterprise’s IT burden alone.

In these instances, rather than simply trying to establish a secondary site or do more with existing infrastructure, many enterprises are considering co-location. And co-location – the ownership of servers, routers and other hardware within a non-owned data centre with the option of services on top – is already being borne out in practice. Research by Gartner shows that the total requirement for data centre floor space is declining, and that companies’ spend on their own data centre infrastructures will drop from 80% to 60% by 2016. An IDC study has further predicted that overall spend on converged systems will grow at a compound rate of 54.7% until 2016.

However, data centre managers often use a linear growth model to make decisions about data centre capacity, location or investments. This model does not always take into consideration comprehensive strategies that include the changing technology landscape, cloud-based services, and emerging data centre design trends.

Enterprises should carefully assess their data centre infrastructure, technologies and business priorities before embarking on a journey towards a co-located data centre. Co-location alone is not a silver bullet. An integrated approach that harnesses emerging technologies to create a next-generation data centre that’s responsive to changing business needs can also prevent over-investing in capacity or compromising on service levels.

The inefficiency of legacy infrastructure
The move away from traditional data centre operations towards integrated approaches and co-location is driven by a multiplicity of factors; not least the huge inefficiency of legacy systems. The traditional client-server, application-oriented architectures that have been used – and still are many – notorious for their poor asset utilisation. Estimates have placed this anywhere from just 20% up to a still relatively inefficient 40%. For those looking to upgrade their systems, often a full ‘rip and replace’ is required. This is both costly and likely to incur significant organisational disruption making this an altogether unappealing option to many businesses.

The application-centric approach to data centres previously mentioned, where resources are deployed in a silo-like fashion, has been at the heart of data centre sprawl and rising costs.

Creating an agile data centre through an integrated approach
With the proliferation of cloud services, both public and private, businesses are able to add additional capacity on almost ‘pay-as-you-go’ terms. Where traditional data centres were built from the viewpoint of when they would be busiest – for instance, an online retailer would build their data centres with a view to Cyber Thursday or the week before Christmas – they can now run at mean capacity and use a cloud provider for when they need additional capacity. In situations like this,, businesses don’t need to pay for huge data centres that 95% of the time they will be massively underutilising.

A number of businesses are looking at consolidation of their assets and converged infrastructures that pool resources amongst applications. Not only does this increase asset utilisation – sometimes up to 80% without impacting performance – it helps businesses to rein in their costs on things such as power and cooling.

A number of businesses are also choosing to co-locate in other organisations’ data centres rather than build their own. This offers numerous benefits to the cost-conscious business: delivering all the benefits of scale, green power and the latest cooling technologies that a purpose-built environment brings, all the while removing the risk and cost associated with operating and building out their own data centre infrastructure.

A plethora of new and emerging technologies are also available that enable the creation of a next-generation data centre that is responsive to a business’ needs, does not require over-investment and doesn’t compromise on service levels. The cloud, Virtualisation 3.0 and software-defined everything mean that organisations are able to squeeze that much more from what they already have. For example, enterprises can release up to 40% of the demand on the data centre by simply moving email, back-up and disaster recovery to the cloud. A relatively small change, but one with substantial impact.

Understand your business, maximise ROI
While these new solutions open up new opportunities for cost savings and increased efficiency, they also present new challenges. There is now a constant and rapidly shifting technology landscape that is leaving a lot of companies without the in-house experience or breadth of knowledge required to take advantage of them. It is no longer a case of just adding new and additional servers to improve performance. There is a diverse range of solutions available that can create a more agile network but it’s important to choose the right approach for each business’s needs

To do this, organisations must invest the necessary resources to ascertain their present business priorities so that they can build the network that responds to the most important needs. This means looking at their specific requirements and workloads, and acting accordingly. For instance, if a business is moving towards a mobile workforce and embracing BYOD they will need the infrastructure to support it. Likewise, in the aforementioned example of online retailers particularly affected by spikes in traffic, a cloud solution for ad-hoc additional capacity may be necessary to create their optimum infrastructure.

The range of options now available to enterprises means that they have the opportunity to create agile networks, but the first step on that journey is looking at solutions on offer strategically. From there they can realise the ROI on their investments that they hope for.