WSTA Data Center Seminar:
Keynote Presentation

Data center designers shared their vision of the future.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 23, 2007]

On Tuesday August 7, 2007, I walked down the street from our Manhattan office and attended (as press) a seminar offered by the Wall Street Technology Association (WSTA) called "Next Generation Data Center Challenges and Solutions."

Although the seminar was directed at the CTOs of major financial firms, the issues that these companies face are the issues that ISPs are facing now or will face in the future when they grow.

The keynote presentation came from CS Technology executives James Dow (CTO) and Russell Kurtz (principal consultant). The company specializes in big picture IT planning for large corporations.

Dow said that institutions lack a comprehensive view of the performance of their data centers. He said that data center owners need to know their power density, SAN capacity, and cooling status. "People want better provisioning."

Environmental concerns are impacting data center design. Equipment looks like a refrigerator and draws a similar amount of power. "If people turned off their refrigerators, we could build more data centers," he joked.

CTOs ignore the issue of server proliferation, he said, because each dollar was purchasing more computing power, ignoring the fact that demand was outpacing Moore's Law.

Power consumption is down but servers are cheaper. He said that five years ago, a server cost $30,000 and used 500 W of power. That's $60,000 per kW. Today's server would cost $5,000 and use 200 W of power. Only $25,000 worth of servers would need a kW of power.

The price of conditioned capacity has gone up, from $18,000 per kW (amortized at $1,200 per year over 15 years) to $22,000 per kW today. Today's data centers operate in the 5 to 10 MW range (and are growing).

Energy prices have risen from about $0.11 per kWh five years ago to $0.16 per kWh today.

He concluded that if the IT capital budget is flat, the data center facilities budget has to triple to hold the additional servers that budget can buy.

Short term solutions are available
Hardware and software vendors are touting solutions that will help in the near term. Power management (powering down servers when they're not in use, for example) and low power CPUs can help. Virtualization and blade servers will also slow the demand for servers and power.

But storage needs, driven principally by compliance, will take an increasingly large part of the IT budget and will not benefit from many of these.

"Virtualization," Dow said, "offers a one time relief on the demand curve." Assuming it takes four years to implement, it should keep demand flat over that time.

Replacing old equipment, an idea that now has its own buzzword (Technology Refresh) can help, but the first year, in which you replace the oldest equipment, provides the biggest benefits. Subsequent years of Technology Refresh provide fewer benefits at greater cost.

Change the data center
Dow said that the most significant changes will occur in the design and management of the data center itself. Infrastructure that was built for the future will now be built for the present. It will be designed around business processes, enabling remote management, and obviating the need for annual or weekend downtime. "It has to be available 24 x 7," he said.

There are several new ideas concerning power and cooling, but they are not all compatible with each other, so each needs to be considered separately, he said.

• DC power can help in some cases.
  
  
• Better monitoring can enable more efficient usage.
  
  
• Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software can help designers build data centers around cooling needs and improve efficiency.
  
  
• High density power areas can be segregated with their own special cooling needs.
  
  
• "Free cooling" is the use of the outside environment to help cool the data center. A tower can help dissipate heat in the winter. Cold air from the outdoors can be used to cool the data center, but it needs to be conditioned for humidity so that the controlled environment of the data center is not affected.

The politicians, the environment, and data centers
Politicians and regulators are starting to notice that data centers consume a significant amount of energy. It's 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. electric load (and growing). Although regulators are unlikely to clamp down in the U.S., the EU is working on a code of conduct, including carbon footprint calculations. In the U.S., being LEED compliant will not address all of the environmental concerns associated with a data center.

"Currently, business growth sets the pace and funds IT investment," Dow said. "That's a good thing."

The problems remain. "If a data center is built for 10 MW or 20 MW," said Kurtz, "remember that an electric substation does about 40 MW."

Your data center could use half the local load.

—End