The mainframe of yesteryear has morphed into the datacentre of today – ­ one big centralised powerhouse that is at the heart of today’s enterprise.

No longer a single machine, it is today typically a state-of-the-art space crammed with rows of server storage and connectivity, with an ever-increasing appetite for power and cooling. The datacentre has also evolved from being solely the province of the IT department to being a key topic on the boardroom agenda.

Technological advances have also had a major impact on the datacentre landscape. Multi-core processors, virtualisation and 10Gbit/s Ethernet are helping to create a next generation datacentre that is less power hungry, makes better use of resources, costs less to run and improves service delivery. For IT leaders, server virtualisation and storage centralisation and consolidation have been the big developments over the past few years.

Nigel Barratt, IT technical services manager at Bassetlaw District Council in Nottingham, says adopting virtualisation was a lot less painful than he expected.

“We have improved our server and storage use, achieved better energy efficiency and have an effective backup and business continuity strategy,” he says. “All this was achieved despite budgetary, power and hardware constraints, and we are now able to deliver improved IT capacity to the business.”

These improvements have been so significant that Bassetlaw is now able to consider bringing back in-house services that were originally outsourced due to lack of capacity.

For most organisations, moving to a virtualised server environment has been a transformation. But Irene Blaston, head of corporate IT at international payment and ATM specialists Vocalink, is quick to point out that virtualisation is not a panacea for every application or area of the business.

“We process more than nine billion transactions a year securely, and that includes more than 90 per cent of UK salaries and 70 per cent of household b ills,” she says. “Some areas of our business are so critical that these newer technologies are not appropriate, but where possible, for example on the corporate side, we do implement them.”

Whenever a server needed replacing, Vocalink has consolidated, virtualised and used blade technology to maximise service delivery while reducing its carbon footprint.

“As well as saving four million kWh of electricity over the last three years, we now have an environment that is much easier to manage,” says Blaston. “In the virtual world you can just pick up a server and move it, which is much harder to do when the server and its services are tied together.”

Blaston believes that in future the datacentre and its services will diverge even further as hardware becomes decoupled from applications.

One of the big issues for IT teams over the years has been the management of corporate data. Often dispersed across the organisation and held departmentally or, even worse, on local hard disks, this has been a nightmare to manage, secure and maintain.

Ryan Sclanders, IT infrastructure team manager at credit information specialist CMA, says that moving to a centralised storage area network (SAN) has saved the company at least £300,000 over a six-month period.

“We made the move from servers with attached storage to a virtualised server environment with a Compellant SAN,” he says. “We now have 250 virtual servers running on 35 machines all looking at the SAN. Our footprint may now be larger, but our capacity has also grown significantly and none of our systems is idle.”

The big trends in datacentres are around power efficiency, virtualisation and reliability, according to Tom Howard, chief technology officer at datacentre operator Qube. “If you have thousands of transactions per second hitting the server and it falls over, you have a big problem. Reliability is key,” he says.

Power, certainly in the London area, is still high on the agenda. “Docklands has run out of power,” says Howard. Many companies, including CMA, have horror stories to tell of the day the power went out.

“Before we chose our co-location partner, I did some quite serious analysis of a lot of datacentres and they are all struggling to supply the power to run their operations in the London area,” says Sclanders. “It’s a common problem that is not going to go away overnight.”

However, Sclanders still chose a London location because of accessibility, admitting that being able to physically visit his equipment was part of his personal security blanket. “There are benefits in being able to get to the equipment. Not long ago, when our datacentre had an outage from the public side, I was able to get in there and manually reroute our traffic,” he says.

The London School of Economics (LSE) solved its datacentre issues by splitting its provisioning in two and outsourcing half of it to SunGard. Adrian Ellison, assistant director of infrastructure services, admits it was one of the best decisions he has made. “We still have local issues with power and air conditioning, so I’m thinking of outsourcing some more,” he says. “We now have a co-location strategy that mitigates the risks associated with our location in central London.”

New entrant to the datacentre services market, NGD Europe, has solved the power problem in what it claims is Europe’s largest datacentre by housing it in the £100m building in South Wales that was built for electronics firm LG’s manufacturing, but never occupied. With its own electricity substation on site capable of generating enough power to run a small city, it is confident power will never be an issue.

“With fibre connectivity from three main providers, incredible physical security and sufficient power, we offer a tier-3 environment at half the price of a London datacentre,” says Simon Taylor, NGD chairman. “Even when the building is fully populated, we will still have plenty of power left.”

While virtualisation, consolidation, blade technologies and centralised storage have turned today’s datacentre into a streamlined powerhouse at the heart of the enterprise, there are still plenty of concerns to address. For example, green issues surrounding datacentre costs are high on the agenda.

“It’s hard to talk about datacentres and green in the same sentence,” says LSE’s Ellison. “While there are lots of initiatives for making the datacentre environmentally friendly, we’ve gone for an obvious one and increased the operational temperature from 20°C to 25°C.”