By Ron Bednar, Manager, Marketing & Customer Insight, Liebert Products, Emerson Network Power

The data center as we know it today started to take shape as the dot-com bubble expanded in the late 1990s. Growth slowed when the bubble burst, but by 2003 the pace of change was accelerating again as IT organizations scrambled to meet demand for computing and expectations for 24x7 availability. In the absence of management tools to help predict future capacity, data centers routinely were built to handle capacities two to three times the initial requirements.  

At the same time, we saw a new issue emerging: energy consumption. According to the Uptime Institute, data center energy use doubled between 2000 and 2006 and the Institute predicts it will double again by 2012. With this in mind, as an industry, we started to turn our attention to reducing energy consumption.

The declining economy proved an added incentive to our energy efficiency efforts, and we began to look seriously at IT energy efficiency in terms of cost savings and not just environmental responsibility. This is reflected in survey data compiled by the Data Center Users’ Group (DCUG). DCUG members surveyed in 2005 did not include energy efficiency in their top five data center concerns. In spring of 2008, efficiency made the list at No. 5. In spring of 2009, efficiency had moved to the second position.

Now, on the cusp of this century’s second decade, we find ourselves too often trying (and failing) to balance efficiency and availability in the data center while computing demand and energy costs are increasing and IT budgets are contracting.

We’ve all read about several of the well-publicized data center outages of the past 18 months. This understandably led to speculation that cost-cutting was resulting in increased downtime. In the wake of those outages, respondents to the fall 2009 DCUG survey showed a renewed respect for availability. It jumped from the fourth most important concern just six months earlier to the number one concern—the first time it occupied that top spot since the DCUG formed in 2004. And it’s no wonder—one significant outage can be so costly that it wipes out years of savings achieved through incremental efficiency improvements. The challenge for data center managers now is to maintain or improve availability in increasingly dense computing environments while reducing costs and increasing efficiency. No small feat, right?

To meet these sometimes conflicting objectives of reducing costs and increasing availability, our data center industry must enter a new stage of maturity. That can be accomplished by establishing data center infrastructures that leverage four distinct opportunities to enhance efficiency without compromising availability. These are the opportunities that will drive data center infrastructure design and management in the coming years. They are:

1. High-density design. Industry estimates put the average cost to build a data center shell at $200-400 per square-foot. By building a data center with 2,500 square feet of raised floor space operating at 20kW per rack versus a data center with 10,000 square feet of raised floor space at 5 kW per rack, the capital savings could reach $1 - $3 million. Operational savings also are impressive – about 35 percent of the cost of cooling the data center is eliminated by the high-density cooling infrastructure. Data center professionals are discovering the efficiency gains enabled by high-density environments. Sixty-three percent of the respondents to the fall 2009 Data Center Users’ Group (DCUG) survey indicated they plan to make their next data center new build or expansion a high-density (>10kW/rack) facility.
2. Ensuring Availability. As we mentioned, a number of high-profile data center outages seemed to refocus businesses on the importance of availability. In that fall 2009 DCUG survey, availability was a major concern for 56 percent of respondents versus just 41 percent in the spring 2009 DCUG survey. Understanding that a large percentage of outages are triggered either by electrical or thermal issues, the challenge is optimizing the efficiency gains related to power and cooling approaches while understanding IT criticality and the need for availability. Making smart choices in terms of UPS topology and configuration, prudent use of economizers for cooling, and holistic, proactive service strategies can ensure availability and eliminate the often sky-high costs associated with data center downtime.  
3. Providing Flexible Support. IT demand can fluctuate depending on everything from holiday buying seasons or Wall Street fluctuations to strategic organizational changes and new applications. Responding to those swings without compromising efficiency requires infrastructure technologies capable of dynamically adapting to short-term changes while providing the scalability to support long-term changes. Previous generations of infrastructure systems were unable to adjust to variations in load. Cooling systems had to operate at full capacity all the time, regardless of actual load demands. UPS systems, meanwhile, operated most efficiently at full load, but full load operation is the exception rather than norm. The lack of flexibility in the power and cooling systems led to inherent energy inefficiency. Today, there are technologies available that enable the infrastructure to adapt to those changes. Where previous generation data centers were unable to achieve optimum efficiency at anything less than full load, today’s facilities can take full advantage of these innovative technologies to match the data center’s power and cooling needs more precisely, regardless of the load demands and operating conditions.
4. Visibility and Control Enable Optimization. If you can’t monitor and control infrastructure performance, you can’t improve it. Management systems that provide a holistic view of the entire data center are key to ensuring availability, improving efficiency, planning for the future and managing change. Today’s data center supports more critical, interdependent devices and IT systems in higher density environments than ever before. This fact has increased the complexity of data center management – and created the need for more sophisticated and automated approaches to IT infrastructure management. Gaining control of the infrastructure environment leads to an optimized data center that improves availability and energy efficiency, extends equipment life, proactively manages the inventory and capacity of the IT operation, increases the effectiveness of staff and decreases the consumption of resources. The key to achieving these performance optimization benefits is a comprehensive infrastructure management solution.

During the data center’s next decade, opportunities to improve efficiency and optimize performance will exist throughout the data center lifecycle—from design and deployment through operations, management and planning. If you want to succeed in this effort, you will need to look beyond energy when considering efficiency and take every opportunity throughout that lifecycle to achieve efficiencies without compromising performance and availability.