WSTA Data Center Seminar:
Sabet Elias, Lehman Brothers CTO

The issues that the CTO of Lehman Brothers faces are similar to those you face in your data center, except for the all the buy and sell orders each day.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 24, 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.

For example, Sabet Elias, the CTO of Lehman Brothers, is coping with trading volumes that set records almost every month, sometimes every week. This problem is similar to what ISPs face, with internet usage, spam, and e-mail size and volume growing every day.

"Planning used to be two dimensional," said Elias. "We planned for software and infrastructure. Building a data center was like building real estate."

That's changed. "We are experiencing exponential growth. We are no longer experiencing linear growth."

So you cannot plan to add next year what you added last year. You'll have to add more.

Solutions
There are some "low hanging fruit" solutions, but they don't solve all the problems.

Blade servers help, but are not suitable for all applications. They are especially unsuitable for Elias' biggest headache, which is handling an ever increasing volume of real time trades.

Grid computing, virtualization, and power management, Elias said, are now part of the design. "They are becoming requirements. They are no longer 'nice to have.'"

Process
Enterprises need to plan better.

IT is now allowed to buy servers when needed, but such purchases must be coordinated with data center staff. "We sometimes forget the ripple effect of buying servers," Elias said. "We need to keep TCO in mind."

IT planning has a time horizon of three to five years, but data centers are built with 15 years of use in mind, even though it is impossible to anticipate enterprise IT needs over that time span.

The ISP opportunity
In our opinion, this presents an opportunity for ISPs who own data centers. Even the largest of businesses are likely to experience unanticipated needs in the future. Assuming that there's no recession, and that energy prices don't stunt the use of IT and the IT budget, such businesses will need to outsource functions to a data center provider or at the very least rent additional data center space in a premium environment.

If you have contacts at Fortune 500 businesses, that's great, but you won't need them. Instead, you'll need a long record of providing excellent service to your existing customers.

—End