AS Asia's financial institutions, technology companies and service providers continue their build-out of data centres here, three key trends - automation, virtualisation and energy saving initiatives - will be key priorities for data centre managers, according to IT vendors and analysts recently interviewed by BizIT. The rising demand to automate IT processes in the data centre stems from growing complexities in the data centre. Rachel Lo, senior research manager, Asia-Pacific Networking Research at IDC said: 'The top priority for IT managers is how to better manage with automation tools in order to reduce manpower costs and improve efficiency.'
Cutting down the level of human intervention in the data centre also makes good economic sense because IT labour is expensive, said Savio Saldanha, director, mainframe business unit, CA Pacific. He noted that between one-third and two-thirds of an organisation's total IT budget is spent on labour today, which makes it the most costly part of managing and maintaining the data centre. 'With labour costs rising, more Asian data centre managers will look to such automation,' he said.
CA, together with BMC, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, plies in this thriving market, which has seen a tide of consolidation and partnerships in the last 12 months. In April, CA partnered with Opalis Software, while BMC, EMC and HP recently snapped up niche vendors BladeLogic, Voyence and Opsware respectively. Today, chores in the data centre that can be automated include the tracking of computing hardware and software, installation of new applications and provisioning of resources.
A second emerging priority for data centre managers is virtualisation. Ms Lo said: 'The key priority for organisations in Asia today is to increase the utilisation of existing servers and virtualisation is definitely getting its awareness with many data centres now adopting server and storage virtualisation,' noted IDC's Lo.
Like automation, virtualisation offers an easily understood cost-saving proposition. Solutions offered by Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell and EMC subsidiary VMware have been shown to reduce the capital cost of buying and upgrading servers in the long run. This is because virtualisation allows data centre managers to easily carve out multiple virtual servers in a single physical server. With the majority of servers in data centres under-used most of the time, virtualisation allows organisations to do more computing with less hardware.
Virtual applications are also easier to use. Lee Poh Wah, regional consulting manager, Asia South, VMware said: 'Virtualisation creates a standardised platform that makes the applications running in a virtual machine much easier to manage.' This is because virtual machines are basically data files and hence can be easily moved between locations, for say, backup or consolidation.
Virtualisation is closely associated with a third key priority in data centre managers today: energy conservation in the IT environment, nowadays called green computing. Working his maths using a mainframe example, CA's Saldanha calculated that over 90 per cent in annual energy savings can be achieved through the application of virtualisation in a mainframe data centre environment.
Since high-end distributed servers can consume several hundred kilowatts of power and generate millions of BTUs (British thermal units) of heat, the total cost of the power needed to run and cool large numbers of these servers can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, he said.
On the other hand, a single mainframe system supporting an equivalent computing workload using virtualisation techniques is likely to draw less than 20,000 watts and generate less than 70,000 BTUs - an annual energy savings of over 90 per cent. Left to conventional data centre technologies, data centres can incur frightful power costs in future. The increased computing demands on data centres and rising real estate costs exacerbate the problem for organisations in Asia, said VMware's Lee. 'Computing requirements are ever increasing and enterprises are packing in more and more physical servers to meet that demand,' he further noted.
Ram Singlachar, manager, IT solutions of Verizon Business, Asia-Pacific, echoed similar sentiments. He said that the increasing energy requirement of new servers may be the 'most important' challenge facing data centres today. 'These new servers require power footprints that are many folds higher than the current design capabilities of some data centres, which may not be designed to handle such high power and heat requirements.' He is seeing more companies offloading data centre duties to specialist data centre vendors as a result.
A new McKinsey & Company study on data centre efficiency reflects the worsening energy equation facing organisations today. The global management consulting firm estimated that server deployment in data centres in the US, in terms of rack space height, will grow at a CAGR of 9.9 per cent from 2006 to 2010. Worse still, power consumption per server is expected to grow at an even faster rate because newer servers are invariably more power-hungry.
This means that for businesses drawing up next year's IT budget, adopting green technologies, even if the upfront costs of these new-fangled technologies are higher, looks a good bet in the long term.
This article was first published in The Business Times on Jun 9, 2008
