Data centers today are operating in a very dynamic environment and undergoing a paradigm shift in the current information age. Some key dynamics governing the state of data centers include faster emergence of new technologies, rapid business growth, acquisitions, explosion of data and increased security concerns, thereby leading to the growing complexity of the data center environment and decreasing asset utilization rates. All this, in turn, is leading to a change in priorities of CIOs and newer trends to look out for, including green of data centers.

What CIOs have implemented in the last 5-10 years worked fine, but they have started to struggle with all kinds of resources in the last one year. However, the one guiding force with respect to building and maintaining data centers remains constantthe need to do more with less.

As data centers evolve in India, the key requirements that CIOs are expected to deliver on an on-going basis are: maximum flexibility for responding to rapid business change; ability to easily upgrade and expand; consistent application service levels and 24x7 application availability; meeting stringent SLAs; and consolidation; ensuring high productivity of IT administration/management processes to reduce IT management costs.

As expectations of CIOs increase, so do challenges. Among the key challenges that CIOs face with respect to building and maintaining data centers are: explosion of data; IT management costs; meeting the requirements for high availability and disaster recovery; capacity utilization, space, power and cooling constraints; increasing complexity of IT infrastructure; accelerated business demands; real estate costs on the rise; and finding the right skilled staff.

With high-density blade servers and switches, heat management has become a major challenge. This is apart from the considerations on higher data transmissions requirements of 10 Gb and more and higher levels of reliability.

Getting the Basics Right
Broadly, the basic requirements for building a data center are location, material used in construction, physical infrastructure like power supply, surrounding environment and related factors like cooling, connectivity infrastructure like phone lines, datacom links and technical infrastructure like hardware, software, network, applications, storage and IT management.

Recommendations
Going beyond the basics, the very nature of data center requires meticulous planning to be able to build an edifice. The key lies in striking the right balance between cost and performance. Overall, the fundamental aspects a CIO must consider are reliability, scalability, manageability, performance and cost effective deployment. A data center should be designed to lower the total cost of ownership, support future growth, reduce risk of downtime, maximize performance and improve the ability to configure.

It is recommended that the CIOs right size the infrastructure, even while planning for the future. It is necessary to not just look at the acquisition cost of any component but to also look at the running cost over a period of time.

The best practice is to have a modular design where each requirement can be implemented with its least common denominator and can be upgraded as the requirement increases. It is also recommended for CIOs to simplify the infrastructure design and eliminate complexity, rather than trying to manage it.

Another consideration to be kept in mind is application availability, which is a key requirement in a 24x7 business world. CIOs need to look at technologies that provide resiliency at all layers of the IT stackservers, storage, networks, power supply, and telecom links.

Security invariably is an indispensable aspect of the data center and thus, avoidance to adopt state-of-the-art security requirement may cause crisis in the future. Information security is the biggest issue in data centers today. It is no more about anti-virus and firewalls. As the information is becoming more and more the life blood of organizations, CIOs should be looking at implementing information security at the bottom of the stack since it is created till it is no more required.

The Maintenance Key
The CIO doesnt want to end up complicating the data center environment and would rather look at simplification of management. From that perspective, manageability is a very important parameter in a data center.

There should be a separate area dedicated for a centralized management of the entire data center. There should be a Network Management System to monitor the health of servers and data storage arrays.

The data center design itself is crucial to ensure ease of maintenance. Zero downtime maintenance is critical in todays 24x7 work environment. This can be achieved by having atleast N+1 redundancy in all the key components, viz, power, cooling and network. This ensures not only higher uptimes but flexibility to do maintenance by shutting the one component after other.

It is also critical to have up-to-date documentation, which can enable the facilities team to know which live systems will get impacted in case of maintenance failure. Also, preventive maintenance needs to be planned in advance during minimum business load. Based on criticality of data center components, appropriate levels of support should be maintained with the vendors.

How Green is it?
According to IDC, the overall power density of the data center is increasing by 15% per year. Data centers use fifty times the energy per square foot than an office does. As energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is pushed to the brink, energy provisioning and consumption are emerging as critical concerns for todays CIOs especially so in the data center environment.

The concerns finally boil down to the cost versus performance debate at the end of the day. Today, the major focus is on how the running costs can be kept down. The three pillars of these running costs are real estate, people, and energy. Therefore, the focus of CIOs is to get the following three things right to move toward more cost efficient performance of data centerscomputer performance per square feet, per person, and per watt.

Shipra Malhotra
shipram@cybermedia.co.in

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