Data Centre Specialist Group

The DCSG were invited to give the closing presentation for the Information Age http://www.information-age.com Future of the Data Centre conference this week, see http://www.fdc2007.com for details of the conference agenda and speakers.

We were asked to give a talk that covered the current significant themes in data centre design and operation and brought these together to provide some idea of the future for the data centre in the UK. The conference had already covered virtualisation, the growing energy efficiency issue, and the increasing difficulties in power and cooling so we tried to bring these themes together to demonstrate the need for change and provide one possible part of the solution.
The issue we hear most frequently from our members is the difficulty of forecasting the requirements on a data centre 5-10 years ahead, we took an alternative approach to this in the presentation, we have proved that we cannot forecast this so we need to find another solution to this problem.

Our presentation covered the business and technical demands on the data centre and the opposing technical, commercial and regulatory constraints to identify the rapidly shrinking gap within which data centres operate.

We then presented some of the efforts already underway and new technologies available to our industry on improving energy efficiency within the data centre including virtualisation, 'fresh air cooling' and combined heat and power.

As data centre capital and operational costs are becoming more visible and under more pressure the next part of our presentation investigated how IT could re-connect with the business by building IT platforms and data centres that actually match the business requirements. In this way the costs can be directly justified in business and financial terms, not technical. We took a brief look at reliability and questioned whether there was any real requirement or business justification for expensive, high availability Tier 4 data centres.

The final part of our talk explored how we could 'virtualise the data centre' by breaking it down into cheaper, more manageable parts and developing a continuous rolling programme of capacity delivery continuously linked to the business requirements. The key part of this approach is the planned recycling of floor space to sweep out old equipment as part of the 'crop rotation' approach. This allows us to stop trying to use a crystal ball to predict demand on the data centre and respond effectively to technical, regulatory and business demand changes.

The presentation is available for download with this message.

We will be discussing 'Fresh Air Cooling' further at the next DCSG meeting on the 16th July, please see the Events page for details.

Liam Newcombe
Secretary DCSG


Post edited by: liamn, at: 2007/06/14 22:39