The changing face of the datacentre
Pressure on organisations to cut capital expenditure, reduce energy consumption and slash emissions is giving rise to a new generation of leaner, cleaner datacentres
Howard: If you have thousands of transactions per second hitting the server and it falls over, you have a big problem. Reliability is key
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.”
The changing face of the datacentre
Pressure on organisations to cut capital expenditure, reduce energy consumption and slash emissions is giving rise to a new generation of leaner, cleaner datacentres
Cloud computing is also set to have an impact on datacentres, but it is still in its infancy and has yet to prove its capabilities.
“The latest buzzword does seem to be cloud computing,” says Blaston. “At the moment, it hasn’t got the security wrap around it, but at some point it will and then it will become a very interesting proposition.”
Five trends that are transforming datacentre computing
Server virtualisation
Swapping multiple dedicated servers with attached storage for one high-performance machine that can be subdivided into several virtual servers running at optimum operating capacity has made sense for many organisations. Saving money, energy and physical datacentre space, these virtual machines are rapidly growing in popularity. Once configured, management is significantly reduced, and in case of failure the virtual server simply reconfigures itself on another piece of available hardware.
Storage centralisation
Centralising storage requirements through the provision of a storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) allow enterprises to take control of their storage devices and manage the corporate data more effectively. Sharing storage simplifies management, increases availability and supports disaster recovery processes. Once centralised, techniques such as virtualisation can be deployed to further increase utilisation and ease management.
Blade technology
Developed in response to a critical need in the datacentre, blade technology provides additional server performance and availability, without dramatically increasing the footprint or power requirements of the machine. Consisting of a single, integrated chassis into which blades containing servers, communications and other peripheral components can be slotted, blade technology offers up to 45 per cent higher server density with reduced power requirements. Once a blade server chassis has been installed, adding more server power is easy – simply slot in an extra blade or two.
Datacentre-in-a-box idea
Coming to a field or empty building near you, these containerised datacentre pods will be arriving on the backs of lorries, ready to be slid or stacked into place and plugged in, ready to go. These are not a new idea, having been promoted as the ideal disaster recovery or expansion solution to existing bricks and mortar datacentres. The novelty is that these unmanned units could be stacked together in a physically secure environment to provide the datacentres of the future.
Natural cooling
With energy costs and environmental issues firmly on the global agenda, datacentres are looking for new ways to reduce power consumption and cooling costs. Natural cooling – using the outside atmosphere to improve cooling efficiency and lower energy bills – is becoming fashionable. Datacentre operators are now looking for cooler locations such as underground caves and mountain areas, and geographical regions such as Iceland and Scandinavia.