Data centre: 'The inside story'

BANGALORE, INDIA: While, virtualisation and data centre consolidation are often adopted as part of an enterprise Green IT agenda, both have a positive impact on the data center cost structure and are seen as necessary strategies in dealing with spiraling energy costs.

Vamshi Krishna Mokshagundam, technology analyst, Datamonitor, says, “Today’s enterprises typically sport a long roster of business applications that demand extensive computing capabilities, generating large amounts of content that necessitate an elaborate storage infrastructure. Server and storage virtualisation technologies, with their ability to rationalize the data centre infrastructure, have increasingly been featuring on the power optimisation radar”.

“Power costs form a very large component of data center operating expenses, with those stemming from cooling and processing requirements accounting for than half of the expenses pie. Research initiatives at some of the world’s largest vendors in IT space are increasingly focusing on optimizing both power consumption and operating costs in data centres. We believe that the way forward for a majority of data centre practitioners is a combination of consolidation, virtualisation and optimal data centre design,” he avers. 

“Major data centre players in India are indeed rethinking their business strategies, especially as ‘green practices’ are increasingly being viewed as an important consideration by clients and prospects. A majority of global players with data centre operations in India have begun to incorporate Green IT into their core business agenda, with a view to both promote their eco-friendly credentials and reap significant cost saving associated with going green,” he adds.

“While there are some inherent security concerns entailed by virtualization, a majority of these stem from incomplete planning and management of virtualization rollouts rather than the technology itself. Virtualisation technologies, when deployed optimally, can actually help increase application security in multiple ways. The application isolation capabilities offered by virtualisation helps minimize the domino effects that usually precede an application crash. The P2V (physical-to-virtual) migration capabilities help improve disaster recovery times and minimize non-availability due to security incidents,” he notes.

“Asset under-utilisation has long been an incumbent practice in data centres – the server inefficiencies and management overload directly resulting in higher power consumption and operating costs. The advent of blade computing and virtualisation technologies provides a ready solution to this problem and many data center practitioners have indeed adopted these technologies.” 

“Blade computing alleviates the problem of under-utilization by providing data centre administrators with the capability for flexible provisioning of servers – blades can be added or removed with minimum fuss to match the load (peak, sub-peak). Blade server racks, however, are very dense and entail special cooling requirements that can be addressed through optimal data centre design,” he signs off.