Learning to cope with data deluge

Australian
Tuesday 21/4/2009 Page: 29

IN 2006 market analyst Gartner sent a chilling warning to data centre operators: act fast or be held hostage by power and cooling problems. Gartner said about half the world's data centres would be functionally obsolete by 2008 because of insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment. In fact, power and cooling are among the issues on which the federal Government has asked industry to provide feedback.

The Government, as part of the Gershon review, is developing a co-ordinated approach to managing agency data centres. It is not looking to build or buy data centres but it hopes to guide departments and agencies on how to pursue their data centre needs into the future. Government and large enterprises in Australia, like their worldwide counterparts, are grappling with data deluge and looking for the best way to consolidate their data centres.

The global financial crisis has thrown a spanner in the works for organisations hoping to spend heavily on data centre upgrades. Dell vice-president of power and infrastructure solutions Dr Albert Esser says improvements can be made without high costs. Esser says government agencies or any organisation manning a data centre should follow one simple rule: know exactly what each server is doing.

Dell's global power and cooling guru is advising some US government departments and agencies on their data centre strategies. Internally, Dell plans to save $US52 million ($72 million) over three years through data centre consolidation and virtualisation. Esser says up to 20% of servers are sitting idle at customer data centres, the most common excuse being "we forgot to decommission the servers".

The most elementary yet critical point that users should be aware of is their levels of data centre use, he says. In the short term, users should have an inventory of what is in their data centres, he says. He warns that the notion of a "free server" equipment given to the organisation as part of a contra deal or otherwise is a fallacy.

They have this rationale that because the server was free, because they didn't have to pay for it, then it doesn't cost the business anything," Esser says. "That's simply not true. That free server still takes up power and cooling." Server huggers (people who cannot bring themselves to part with such machines) are a bane to any business, he says. "They can't let go and so you have these really old servers in data centres using a lot of power unnecessarily," Esser says.

The next piece of advice he offers is to conduct a comprehensive audit of the applications used and to identify which ones can be virtualised. He says some customers have had a 20% reduction in the number of servers required and this has drastically lowered power consumption bills. "That will give you some breathing space and give you time to map out the next steps," he says.

Government departments and agencies should start asking themselves which applications can run in the "cloud" (services deployed over the Internet). They need to determine how much privacy and security each application needs," Esser says. He cites payroll, where most organisations seek external help. "Payroll is delivered in the cloud ... most companies outsource this service, so it does show that sensitive information, handled in the right context, is already outsourced."

This basic checklist would influence the size of the data centre to be built or whether a new facility is even required. Another key issue is the type of power supply. Esser says as part of its data centre consolidation exercise, Dell decided to go with wind energy and landfill gas. "This has had a huge impact on reducing our carbon footprint." But what should local organisations do? "If you have dry air, like in Australia, you can cool your data centres with water, so you don't have to use gas ... or use wind energy," Esser says.

But no matter how much energy is saved or the number of servers used in virtualisation, there is no substitute for running IT in a more efficient manner. Esser uses the analogy of a bus company trying to go green for all the wrong reasons. If only three people take the bus, what is the point of ditching the gas-guzzling beast for a green-friendly alternative? "You need to get more people on that bus and then think of green energy," he says.

Fran Foo travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Dell