Efficiency is the watch word  

WHILE THE PAPERS PRESENTED at the conference varied greatly in content, if there was one theme to emerge from the day, it would have to be that of ‘efficiency’. While predicting the future of IT is notoriously difficult, there seems to be a general acknowledgement that the ever-increasing, underlying costs associated with data centres and the equipment that they house, cannot go unchecked indefinitely.

Hence, the focus of all interested parties (data centre designers, owners and operators, the infrastructure manufacturers and providers, and the hardware manufacturers and the software developers) on ensuring optimum efficiency – so that any piece of kit (infrastructure, IT hardware or software) does the best possible job for the least operational cost.

On the positive side, current practices in all areas affecting the data centre seem to be well below the optimum – servers can be much more efficient, software can occupy much less ‘space’, data centre designs are still, in general, very inefficient and there’s very little re-use of waste heat, for example. So, there’s a great deal of opportunity to improve data centre efficiency and save massive amounts of energy and money.

On the negative side, the journey towards the ultimate, efficient data centre is not an easy one. The likelihood is that, for almost all businesses, there needs to be a fundamental re-think of how their data centres are designed, how they operate, and what IT equipment they should contain. Subsequently, there’s a better than even chance that almost all aspects of the data centre/IT equation will need to be upgraded and/or replaced. A time-consuming, complex and expensive process.

And, of course, we are just at the start of the Digital Age. The Internet of Things is on the horizon, but has not yet become a major presence in the IT landscape, Similarly,
while many parts of the world are relatively mature technology-wise, plenty more are
not.

Combine a major increase of IT use with a major increase in IT users and the glass half empty fraternity is convinced that there won’t be enough power to go round; while the glass half full folks are convinced that technology will always keep one step ahead of the power limit. However, both parties recognize the need to focus on energy efficiency moving forward, at all levels of the data centre and IT stack, from the smallest component to the biggest data centre or IT infrastructure.

As DCT Manchester demonstrated, there is plenty of innovative thinking, research and practical developments already addressing the energy efficiency imperative, so there’s no excuse for anyone to sit on their hands and do nothing. We may run out of power one day, but if the issue is addressed right now, that day can be postponed for a very long time.

Of course, the suggestion that there should be some limit on all the data being produced is unthinkable!