Not so long ago datacentres were on the wane. Distributed computing helped bring about the decline of large data-processing sites that characterised an era of mainframe dominance.

But the tide is turning, driven by a focus on cost containment, the need to improve security and a persistent growth in hardware requirements to deliver software as a service to businesses.

The automation and consolidation of separate business processes ­ human resources, sales and marketing, production ­ previously led to a move away from the central mainframe into a distributed computing model based on industry standards and smaller departmental servers, says Ian Brown, senior analyst at Ovum.

“Designed a decade ago, these distributed systems were created for a different paradigm, one that did not have scale and availability at the forefront,” he says. “Today’s move away from the distributed system is leading to the creation of replacement datacentres.”

Gartner analyst Rakesh Kumar says the prominence of the datacentre to business strategy will increase during the next few years as IT service delivery moves further towards a more centralised model.

“The topology of the future mega datacentre will differ from that of the past,” he says. “Server rationalisation, hardware growth and cost containment are driving the consolidation of enterprise data-processing sites into larger datacentres. This will spur the growth of a more federated, hub-and-spoke datacentre topology for most large user organisations.”

For Royal Caribbean Cruises, an office relocation provided the impetus for a full-scale datacentre refresh to provide the business with the continuity and scalability required to support the UK headquarters and six offices across Europe.

IT manager James Mead says that although the central management facilities have created significant time-saving implications for his staff, reducing server footprint and power demands were equally important.

“The datacentre needed to be accommodated in a fairly restricted space, and had to operate efficiently to contribute to the company’s corporate social responsibility obligations,” he says.

Running costs and operational efficiencies are going to be significant factors in new-style datacentres. With many companies driven by the desire to reduce energy consumption, new server and storage optimisation technologies are being employed.

Ordnance Survey has already achieved a 38 per cent power saving in its datacentre by employing storage management technologies. The system automates the migration of large volumes of data from power-hungry disk storage technologies to removable media that draws no power.

But Dave Lipsey, information systems infrastructure manager, says difficulties in managing and backing up huge volumes of data, rather than power consumption, led the company to look for a better storage solution.

“We collect more than 40 terabytes of photographic data every flying season,” he says. “Backing up the information to disk was impractical, energy-inefficient and environmentally unsound. If we had continued to add new arrays in our internal datacentre at that rate, we would have had to update our power supply and heat removal systems in the near future. Not to mention the impact on space.”

Over the next few years, more companies will be looking to the datacentre to reduce operating costs and provide more help to drive the business. However, 58 per cent of respondents in a recent IBM survey on datacentre use said the biggest challenge for the chief information officer is the cost of operation in terms of power and people.

Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at Butler Group, says increasing demands for disaster recovery and high availability capabilities following recent terrorist attacks and natural disasters are adding to the burden of managing a datacentre. “This focus on cost demonstrates that most organisations are struggling to manage the datacentre efficiently,” he says.

Peter Sturrock, head of IT at data analytics provider Sumerian, says the desire to reduce carbon footprints will also drive the choice of technologies used in the future. “Technologies such as storage networks and virtualisation help us control our power consumption and costs, so any new technologies will always be under consideration,” he says.

The response from vendors has been to start marketing a wide range of technologies aimed at addressing these problems. Gm2 Logistics, a subsidiary of one of the largest paper merchants in the UK, has tackled the issue by concentrating on its datacentre footprint.

According to IT manager John Boyd, adopting the strategy has meant associated energy consumption being reduced by more than 30 per cent.

“Thanks to virtualisation we have eliminated more than a third of our hardware,” he says. “This means we are consuming significantly less power, which is great for the environment and financially beneficial.”

Server virtualisation is already proving to be effective at reducing costs and power requirements through consolidation and rationalisation.

But while many organisations are starting to look seriously at server and even storage virtualisation, most projects are still in the pilot phase and are not being widely used for mission-critical applications.

Complex virtualisation technologies, while able to provide the change the organisation seeks, require multi-faceted management skills. Although the deployment of virtual machines can be rapid, the expertise required by the IT department to manage the virtual world should not be underestimated.

Extracting more value from existing datacentre resources will be the challenge for IT professionals in coming years. According to Illsley, the focus will be on increasing the datacentre’s ability to meet the volume of business in an acceptable timeframe.

Such timeframes have to be met while reducing both costs and power consumption, through the implementation of an infrastructure that helps change the organisation to deliver the demanded added value.