Bringing FM and IT together Volume I

A series of articles brought together from Quocirca s writings for SDC during 2013
January 2014

Quocirca continued to write articles for SearchDataCenter throughout 2013, looking at how facilities management (FM) and information technology (IT) professionals were needing to work together more closely than ever. This report pulls those articles together as a two-volume set for ease of access.

Clive Longbottom Quocirca Ltd Tel : +44 118 9483360 Email: Clive.Longbottom@Quocirca.com

Copyright Quocirca 2014

Bringing FM and IT together Volume I

Bringing FM and IT together Volume I

A series of articles brought together from Quocircas writings for SDC during 2013 The green(washing) of data centres
It may well be that Green for Greens sake has bitten the dust. However, this has not stopped many organisations from flying the green flag when all they are really doing is saving money. It is time to bring a halt to such greenwash . Energy continues to be one of the highest costs when it comes to paying for an IT environment. There are many options as to how to gain the most from better energy deals but maybe it is time to think even a bit further rout of the box? The UPS has moved on from being just something that kicks in to keep the main IT running when the main power drops out. This article looks at some of the newer areas of what a UPS can do and why they should be seen as being important. Cooling the data centre can be expensive, if standard approaches of using computer room air conditioning (CRAC) systems continue to be used. There are many different alternatives out there maybe one of these would be ideal for your datacentre? There are many things that need to be taken into consideration when looking at where a data centre facility is, or will be, geographically situated. This article considers some of these, and discusses why you should be aware of them.

Powering the data centre Bringing the UPS into greater focus. Putting data centre cooling on ice. Where and why geography is important for data centres Sharing data centre service capabilities

A one-organisation data centre may not be the way forward. Some co-location facilities offer a new type of service: the aggregation and brokerage of services from others within the same facility, or fully managed services across facilities. This opens up new opportunities to those within these facilities. The age of the build-your-own rack systems may be on the way out. New, highly-engineered systems are now being offered by all the main players that bring together server, storage and network components into a single converged system. Are these for you?

Modules and appliances the future is better engineered. ITLM playing economics to gain the optimum IT platform High availability Mirage, chimera or reality?

IT lifecycle management, when used correctly, could provide a state-of-the-art platform at manageable cost. To understand how this is possible needs an understanding of how the economics work, and why a partner with the domain expertise and smarts may be key.

Everyone wants a high availability IT platform. However, many see it as being too expensive. Can changes in technology now place a highly available platform in the reach of the general user?

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The green(washing) of data centres

As the perception of data centres as energy hogs increases, more technology vendors are positioning their products as being more sustainable or green in the context of their use in the data centre. Even large data centre owners are making claims around how green their facilities are yet some of these claims should probably be taken with a large dose of cynicism. The biggest claim that tends to be made is that any item is carbon neutral. This is supposed to mean that the overall amount of carbon used in the creation or operation of an item is being offset in some way. In essence, the same amount of carbon as is released through owning or using the device is being trapped through other means under the control of the vendor or operator. The main way of doing this is through the planting of trees which is good, but is it all it seems to be? Well, firstly, what possible carbon output is really being measured? If it is the total amount of carbon used in the manufacture of any piece of IT equipment, then it is doubtful if this is being offset completely. IT equipment is made from a range of materials, ranging from petro-chemicals through rare metals to silicon. Gaining the raw materials for each of these is not particularly carbon efficient, and it is doubtful if anyone could carry out the necessary modelling in order to calculate just how much carbon has been used in gaining the raw materials for a single server or network switch. So, lets be a little looser with the definition lets just look at the carbon used in operating the equipment. This then just comes down to a simple calculation of energy usage by the equipment, surely? Yes and no. Energy usage within the equipment itself is just one part of the equation there is also the other equipment that is dependent on the item or that the item itself is dependent upon. So a 150W server running in a data centre whose power usage effectiveness (PUE) is 2 would require a carbon offset of at least 300W. However, as more IT functionality creeps outside of the data centre itself, how about the proportion of energy that is used by other data centres that are being used by the organisation that are cloud-based; by the servers and systems running the internet; by the bring your own device (BYOD) devices used by the employees? And what about the carbon offset side of things? If this is based on planting trees, is the amount of carbon being captured based on an adult tree, an actual amount based on a tree in year one, two, three and so on, and average over its lifetime or the totality of carbon held in a tree over the life of a tree? Does it take into account the 70% or greater rate of failure of planted trees? What happens when the tree dies and releases all that carbon back into the world and now two trees are required to continue the offset put in place so many years ago? Then, there is the claim that a facility is powered by renewable energy. In some cases, this can be demonstrably true. Certain data centres are either built in a country such as Iceland where the vast majority of energy is provided from hydro or thermal sources and is, therefore, renewably generated. Some facilities are built right next to specific hydro or other renewable energy sources (such as many in Colorado) and only tap into the grid energy network should there be problems with the main renewable source. But for the majority, it is a case that their energy contract is with a company that is investing in renewable energy but that does not mean that the energy a facility gets comes from those investments. For example, take the UK where for the vast majority of people, all energy comes from the National Grid and a specific electron cannot be forced to a specific place from any particular generator. Therefore, although a facility owner may be paying on a renewables contract, the energy can be coming from nuclear, coal, gas or oil just as well as it could be from wind, hydro, solar or any other system. In fact, with the UK currently having less than 10% of its overall energy being provided via renewable means, there is a 90% chance that the power is not coming from renewable sources.

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Indeed, in one case in the US, a data centre facility that boasted of its green credentials through having a contract with a local wind farm shows how the figures can be massaged. The wind farm was built to provide over 300,000 homes with energy but the data centre has taken most of this, so making it that the homes should no longer be viewed as green (as was the idea) unless double accounting for the energy is used. Finally, there is power usage effectiveness (PUE). On its own, this is an indicator that can be easily massaged. It is a measure of the proportion of energy used in powering a data centre facility against how much is used to power IT equipment. A facility where 1 Watt of energy is used in areas such as lighting, uninterruptable power supplies and other peripheral areas to every 1 Watt at the server will have a PUE of 2 (2 Watts of data centre power against 1 Watt of IT equipment power). In theory, a data centre with a PUE of 1.5 will be more energy efficient than one with a PUE of 2. However, what happens is you virtualise all the IT servers so that 80% of existing servers can be turned off, but do not change the operation of the peripheral equipment? The overall IT equipment wattage has dropped by 80% - but the peripheral wattage has stayed the same. There is now an IT platform that is far more utilised and far less energy is being used, but the PUE has risen appreciably which has to be wrong. Dont get me wrong: energy efficiency in data centre facilities is very important. But, dont get sucked in by promises that cannot be fully supported or statements that are too glib to be tr ue. Dont be green as in wet behind the ears, dont fall for greenwash. Make sure that green claims are provable and that you can stand by them yourself.

Powering the data centre

For many, powering the data centre is a standard case of using a national grid for the primary power source and backing this up with uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs) and auxiliary generators. However, as energy prices continue to fluctuate and trend upwards and the carbon footprint of data centres becomes more of a focus, some have started to look at alternative power systems. The main focus has been on greening the data centre through the use of more energy efficient equipment and through the use of renewable energy sources. For those who have the capability to locate the data centre where they want, hydroelectricity has been a prime choice. For example, Google built one of its data centres in Oregon, US in order to gain access to cheap hydro power from The Dalles dam. As a large energy consumer, Google was able to negotiate a good deal on energy prices while also gaining better green credentials. The Thor data centre in Iceland uses a mix of hydro and thermal power, along with free air cooling to control its energy usage and minimise its carbon footprint. However, the problem with both hydro and thermal is that they are dependent on location for example, neither is viable in a flat, stable country such as the Netherlands. This brings around a need to look to other possible energy sources. Solar energy is an option that has been used by some data centres as a means of providing some of the energy required to run the facility. Apples data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, US has a large solar array combined with a fuel cell system to provide 60% of that energy. Apple is working with a renewable energy company, NC GreenPower, to source the other 40% from other renewable sources, such as wind power. As with many renewables, solar power has its issues it only works during the day, and is heavily impacted by any level of cloud cover. Therefore, it is generally only really effective within a band around the equator, where the days are of predictable adequate length and the strength of the sun is relatively constant. Without energy storage systems in place, solar power has to be continuously backed up with other energy sources. However, as a secondary energy source used to provide a small proportion of a sites needs solar has its part to play.

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Wind power is debatably the least useful form of alternative power. In the UK, Ecological Hostings Smartbunker facility is stated as being the first UK facility to be 100% wind-powered site. Contracted through Ecotricity, the facility is backed up by latest generation UPSs and bio-diesel auxiliary generators. However, wind power is even less predictable than solar power. Not only is it dependent on there being wind which for many countries is something that is very unpredictable but the wind strength has to be between certain levels. Too low, and the effectiveness of the generation is minimal. Too high, and possible damage to the rotors and bearing means that brakes have to be applied to the systems to prevent damage. Again, without a suitable energy storage system, wind power is really only suitable as a secondary power supply system. Therefore, other approaches have to be looked at. A primary energy supply that is not dependent on the presence of a variable source such as sun or wind is not easy to find. However, a basic rethink of the approach to how energy is used within a data centre can have massive impact on overall energy usage. The biggest loss of energy in the complete chain of energy use is not within the data centre itself. As virtualisation and cloud computing come to the fore, the overall energy efficiency of a data centre will climb appreciably, and the distribution of energy within the facility is, on the whole, pretty efficient. Indeed, where the largest amount of energy is wasted is in the primary creation of the power during the generation stage. Whether this is coal, gas or oil, massive losses are incurred, mainly through thermal losses. Most fossil fuel systems are located away from large conurbations so as to limit the impact of possible pollution. However, going for smaller generation systems may be the way forward. This is not a case of just building a smaller coal, gas or oil fired generator in the form of those large-scale systems we see dotted around the country. A much better approach is to look at more modern systems, such as the use of fuel cells. High-temperature fuel cells can take a range of hydrocarbon fuels, breaking them down into hydrogen and then using oxygen from the air to combine and create electrical energy along with heat and water. The key here is to capture as much of the output as possible. The heat can be used in colder climes for space heating not just within the organisation that is creating the electrical energy for its own use, but also to heat other commercial and residential properties in the area. Even in warmer climes, it be used to heat up water. The water produced from the system can be collected and used particularly in drier areas, where a source of pure water has its own particular value. Such an approach, known as community combined heat and power (CCHP) may not be the cheapest way to create electrical energy at a simple dollar and cents level but it can be the most long-term effective means of stretching out the global usage of shrinking fossil fuel stocks. Indeed, when combined with non-primary sources such as solar and wind, these more ephemeral systems can be used to electrolyse water to create hydrogen, which can then be used to fuel the fuel cells. Through this means, it may be possible to come up with a true renewable continuous primary power system for data centres.

Bringing the UPS into greater focus.

A data centre is a power hog. Unfortunately, energy prices have been trending ever higher, and the cost of powering a data centre is now a major drain on an organisations budget. Over and beyond this, many countries are heading towards an energy deficit in the near future for example, it is predicted that the UK will not have enough power generation capability by 2015 to keep everything going should any part of the national grid and generation capability be out of service for any period of time. Governments are also seeing energy usage by large organisations as being a suitable target for taxation carbon taxes are already in place

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in countries such as Australia and the UK, and data centres are a soft target for tax revenue gains for cash-strapped governments. As organisations have better understood this, the focus has moved to one of better power utilisation within the data centre. More modern equipment, application rationalisation, virtualisation, consolidation and cloud computing are all helping to improve the overall workload/power ratio. However, one piece of equipment that tends to be still hidden is the uninterruptable power supply (UPS). Historically, the idea was to have a single piece of UPS equipment that could kick in and power the whole data centre facility for the few minutes required between a break in grid power and auxiliary generators taking over. This was fine when the majority of data centres power requirements were measured in kW but now, many data centres are well into the MW power levels. Dependence on a single UPS means that there is no flexibility should the growth of the data centre mean that the existing UPS is no longer capable of meeting the power needs, it will either need to have another, often identical, UPS installed and managed alongside it, or a complete replacement put in with the original being scrapped. Such dependence also counts against high availability if the worst happens, and there is a power failure coupled with a UPS failure, the whole facility is out of action until the auxiliary generators start up and everything can be restarted, with the loss of data and transactional contextuality associated with such an inelegant failure. But the worst aspect of older UPSs is that they themselves are not energy efficient. Many are only between 90-95% energy efficient which sounds good until you look at the figures. Lets assume a 1MW data centre facility. Every last Watt of that energy is going through the UPS and 10% of it is being lost. So of the close to 9000MWh per annum of energy being brought in from the main grid and being paid for 900MWh is being wasted. Even if running at 95% efficiency, there is still 450MWh going to waste. Modern UPSs can run at greater than 98% energy efficiency, and are far more modular in their construction. As a data centre grows, more modules can be added to meet incremental needs with automatic workload balancing. Such a modular approach also allows for greater availability if a module does fail for any reason, then the other modules can take over and still maintain overall power to the facility. Another aspect of availability is the active role that a UPS can play in dealing with artefacts in a grid power feed. Voltage spikes and under voltage situations, radio frequency interference (RFI) and other problems with the feed can be handled through the power cleansing capabilities of the UPS, ensuring that equipment in the facility is provided with a fully managed, clean power feed. Better battery capabilities and life means that modern UPSs can also run for longer. As most grid failures are essentially transitory, then it may be that auxiliary generators are not needed to be switched on as often. Workload prioritisation can also be used, with lower priority workloads being elegantly shut down through the UPS and only a portion of the data centre kept running through power via the generators. But the main thing as far as the business is concerned will be the energy savings that a more modern UPS brings to the fore. Saving 3-8% on the overall data centre energy bill for a one-off capital outlay with a high return on investment should be a simple decision. The best part of this investment is that it keeps on giving every incremental improvement in energy efficiency within the data centre then has this extra 3-8% extra payback on top of it. The UPS has long been a hidden secret within the data centre. It is now time to bring it out from the shadows and acknowledge its importance in helping an organisation manage its data centre energy usage. Quocirca has written a report on the subject of UPSs that is available for free download here.

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Putting data centre cooling on ice.

How do you approach data centre cooling? Is it a case of a few computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units being run continuously so as to cool enough volume of air to maintain a suitable outlet temperature using underfloor spaces and perforated floor plates in order to try and direct cooling to where it is most needed? If so, it is more than likely that you are wasting large amounts of energy and therefore money. Time for a review and see how new approaches and technologies could give short capital payback backed with ongoing financial benefits. Firstly, it may be the case that you are running the data centre at too low a temperature. The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has been tracking recommended and allowable temperatures for defined types of data centres since 2004. The maximum high end temperature in 2004 was set at 25C/77F. By 2008, this had risen to 27C/81F. By 2011, ASHRAE had created a range of different data centre types, and although the recommended temperature stayed at 27C/81F, it raised maximum allowable temperatures (where increased equipment failure rates may be seen) to 45C/113F. By matching needs against risk, a higher temperature data centre requires far less cooling this leads to fewer CRAC units and lower energy. The easiest way of saving money is therefore to reduce the number of CRAC units that are being run. If half the amount of cooling is required, then turning off half the CRAC units will give a direct saving in energy costs and also in maintenance costs. Variable speed CRAC units could be used instead of fixed speed ones, where the CRAC units only run at the speed required to maintain the desired temperature. An alternative view on this is the binary running of CRAC units. These units only run at their most effective levels when running at 100%, and some variable speed systems are therefore not running at a fully optimised rate when running at partial load. Running standard fixed rate CRAC units in such a manner to build up thermal inertia can be cost effective. Here, the data centre is cooled considerably below the target temperature through running the CRAC units at which point they are turned off. The data centre is then allowed to warm up until it reaches a defined point and the CRAC units are turned back on again. Through this means, the CRAC units, when operating, are always running at full load and so are operating at their highest operational efficiency. When turned off, they are running very energy efficiently i.e. there is no draw of energy at all. However, straightforward volumetric approaches of cooling a data centre will remain wasteful, no matter how the initial cooling of the air is carried out, as the majority of the air being cooled will not come into close enough contact with any IT equipment to cause any effective cooling. Here, the use of hot and cold aisles can lead to less volume of cooling air being required (see figure 1).

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Figure 1 The spaces between facing racks are enclosed, with a roof being placed over the racks and doors at either end. Cold air is blown into the enclosed space, and baffles and trunking are used to ensure that the air passes through the racks from front to rear targeting those areas that need the most cooling on the way. The hot air exiting is vented directly into the data centre and from their into the external air or can also be collected and used for heating other spaces, or through the use of a heat pump can be used for heating water. These systems can be highly engineered, or can be quite effectively implemented through home grown approaches, using e.g. polycarbonate to cover the racks as a roof and polypropylene sheeting as the doors at each end. The evolution of this is to make each rack its own contained system, so that the volume of air that needs to be cooled is minimised even further, and that cooling can be engineered and targeted even more. This is where Chatsworth Towers (http://www.chatsworth.com/passivecooling/) come in totally self-contained systems that have their own 19 inch rack inside, but take cooling air from bottom to top without the air touching the main volume of the data centre at all. But, this may not be all. In certain climates, running at higher temperatures may bring in the option to use free air cooling without the need for CRAC units at all. For example, if the choice is to run a data centre at, say 30C/86F, an external air temperature of less than 25C/77F may be enough to require no additional cooling at all, with some treatment being in place to ensure that moisture levels remain within required limits. However, a basic approach of simply ducting external air can lead to inefficiencies leading to thermal hot spots and the ingress of contaminants such as particulates into the data centre. This is where new designs have been brought to bear, such as the Kyoto Wheel (http://www.kyotocooling.com/).

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Figure 2 Here, a wheel of around 3 metres diameter is made from wound corrugated metal. The wheel rotates slowly through a two-compartment space. Through one space, the hot air from the data centre flows, transferring its heat to the metal in the wheel. Through the other space, cold external air flows taking the heat out from the metal and exhausts this to the outside air. The cooled air from the data centre is then fed back to the data centre for use in cooling the equipment. The data centre loop is enclosed, and the small volumes of air that get transferred as the wheel rotates ensures that only very small amounts of particulates or moisture are mixed from one compartment to the other, with the wheel itself acting partially as a filter. The benefit here is that Kyoto Cooling uses low-speed fans and motors requiring low maintenance, and the overall system can be run from very small amounts of energy, often from solar power and a battery backup. Such a system can last for many years (it is expected that 25 years will be a low end lifetime), and maintenance can be just a quick clean of the wheel every few months along with general motor maintenance.

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Another approach is adiabatic cooling, using the cooling effect of water as it evaporates (see figure 3)

Figure 3 This is effective in warmer climates, where direct environmental heat can be used against the wet filters to evaporate the water and so cool the air being pulled through the filters. This is an effective two chamber system, with the filters providing the break between the outside air and the internal data centre. However, the filters will need to be changed on a regular basis to get rid of particulate contaminants. Also, the moisture content of the air may need to be adjusted to prevent moisture condensing on IT equipment in the data centre. For those who want to run at extreme equipment densities with high thermal profiles in warm climates, direct water cooling may be one way of solving the problem. IBM has used water cooling in the past, but has managed to advance this to extraordinary levels in its Aquasar and Liebniz SuperMUC supercomputer systems. The system gets around the problems that used to be seen with mixing water and electricity in a data centre negative pressure is used to suck the water round the system, rather than using pumps to push it. Therefore, if a leak occurs, air is pulled into the system, rather than water coming out into the data centre. Advanced sensors are used to rapidly identify where a leak has occurred, and a modular construction allows for this to be fixed while the rest of the system continues running. The system uses a hot water inlet for the cooling liquid. Using hot water to cool computers may seem strange, but using a highly targeted system means that water at temperatures in excess of 30C can be used to ensure that components such as CPUs are cooled to within operating envelopes and that the outlet water temperature can be around 45C. Such high temperature water is then ideal for use via heat exchangers for heating water that is used in other parts of a building. As well as lowering energy usage in the data centre by around 40%, this can lead to further savings in energy used to heat water for the rest of the organisation.

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For the ultimate in liquid cooling, fully immersive systems are available. Here, companies such as Iceotope (http://www.iceotope.com/) and Green Revolution Cooling (http://www.grcooling.com/) provide systems that cover the whole server (or other item of IT equipment) with a non-electrical conducting but high heat conducting liquid to take heat away from any component in the item. These systems are ideal for GPU servers with many hundreds of cores running in high density configurations or for massive compute densities with a high density of hot-running cpus, and can deal with 100kW+ per bath which is essentially an enclosed rack on its side when looking at sizing the system. As this is immersive, all fans have to be removed from the IT equipment, so providing additional savings in energy. Again, as the liquids used are far better at removing heat than a gas or even water is, it can be run at higher temperatures, allowing heat recovery from the liquid to provide water and space heating for other parts of the business. Some immersive systems are being run at a liquid temperature of 60C. These systems provide the main ways of providing cooling based around different needs and differing environmental conditions. The one area that should be in place through any of this is to be able to fully monitor the thermal aspects of the data centre on an ongoing basis. This is where data centre infrastructure management comes in. The use of thermal sensors and infra-red detectors allows a map to be built up of where existing hot spots are in a data centre. The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) enables what-if? scenarios to be carried out to see how new cooling flows and different in let temperatures will work with systems. Once a new system is in place, continued monitoring will ensure that hot spots are rapidly identified, allowing systems to be slowed down or turned off and replaced as necessary. In many cases, such an occurrence of a hot spot suddenly appearing will be down to an incipient failure in the equipment being able to pick this up before it happens means that systems uptime and availability can be maximised. Vendors in the DCIM space include Emerson, Siemens, nlyte, Romonet and Eaton. The world of the data centre has changed and will continue to change. Taking an old-world view of cooling is now pretty much guaranteed to waste money for the organisation. Newer guidelines combined with newer approaches means that data centres can be cooled more effectively for much less in capital, running and maintenance costs. In the above should be something that would allow an organisation to gain more control over its cooling and therefore data centre costs. Pay back periods may differ, but if you are in any way close to reviewing your current facility, bear these different approaches in mind.

Where and why geography is important for data centres

Recent Quocirca research, sponsored by Oracle has shown that only 6.5% of large Europe businesses feel that their existing data centre or centres will meet their needs for the next five years or more. Over 60% state that they will need to replace or upgrade their facilities within the next two years. The question should therefore be where? Even if an organisation chooses to use a co-location facility, this question is of great importance. The immediate reaction from many would be right where the old one is it is the easiest response, but could be the one with the biggest problems.

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The most obvious problem is that the old facility cannot continue running on the same plot of land where the new facility is being built, so unless there is sufficient spare ground for the new facility to be built, such an approach is doomed from the outset. However, there are more nuanced considerations to be taken i nto account as well. Lets start with energy concerns. In larger countries, it is possible to build a data centre facility close to electricity generating plant to receive a better price on the energy used. For example, in the USA, building close to hydro-electric generation on a major river or close to a wind farm on the open plains may lead to a better deal on the energy used. At a less granular level, looking to countries where energy prices are inherently lower may be worthwhile for example, Iceland has the benefit of geothermal power generation, and Norway has massive amounts of hydroelectricity. Even when looking at standard, fossil fuel powered generation, building a facility in the Middle East or another oil- or coal-rich region may lead to a good deal on energy prices. But cheap electricity can come with its own problems. Energy prices in India, for example, are relatively low, as are labour costs. This would seem to make India a good consideration for a new data centre. However, the security of supply has to be considered. It is no use having cheap electricity if it fails on a regular basis, forcing a failover to expensive back up auxiliary generators. Climatic issues need to be taken into account as well. High outside temperatures will require more forced cooling so any savings on energy prices for powering the IT equipment will be offset by the lack of capability to use free air or other low- or no-cost cooling approaches. Abnormally high or low humidity may lead to a need for additional air treatment. Security concerns are another issue. If the facility is to be staffed by locals, how much trust can you put in them? Standard HR background checks that work in the USA or the UK will not be as useful in, say, Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia. Theft of personal identifiable information (PII) has been rife in some areas as workers are offered more than they can expect to get in a year for just copying information for criminal outsiders. How much trust can you put in a given country? It is unlikely that many people would consider building a new data centre facility for global use in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, yet there are plenty of other countries where the political situation is almost as unstable. A change of government can lead to a change of laws, leading to the possibility that a data centre facility could have to open for inspection by the authorities right down to the data level. Even with trusted nations, this is happening. The US Patriot Act and FISAA are making a lot of European organisations nervous about using not only US-located facilities, but also US-owned ones. With the less-trusted regimes, there is also the possibility of state-sponsored attacks. The use of cyber spying and intellectual property theft has not been the sole property of the independent hacker, or even organised crime rings for some time, and although the internet makes location a slightly more moot point when it comes to being attacked, placing a facility in a country where there is a strong suspicion that the government funds such activities would not be a clever step. Then, there is the issue of connectivity and performance. Even some major areas of developed countries still struggle with having enough connectivity not just for required bandwidth, but also a number internet service providers so as to provide redundancy. And, the further away a facility is from its users, the more latency there will be. Combine these two, and a low bandwidth, high latency link that is often off line will force users to come up with their own workarounds so ushering in yet more shadow IT that is out of the IT departments control. All the above may make it seem that the original idea to build as close to the old facility as possible is the lowest risk. It could be far easier to divorce the facility from the IT equipment and look to co-location. Here, the energy for the facility is not so much your problem if you are profligate in the provisioning of your IT equipment, it will cost more, but once you have made the decision, the energy issue is the facility owners, not yours.

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Major co-location providers, such as Equinix, Savvis and Telecity provide centres around the globe and all have to consider the issues outlined above. An alternative approach is being taken by Calligo, which operates a facility out of Jersey in the Channel Islands between the UK and France. With lots of connectivity from multiple providers, it also benefits from operating out of a jurisdiction that is outside the major jurisdictions (Jersey is self-governing, and operates as outside of the EU under a special partner arrangement). The management of Calligo feel that this provides a means of covering quite a few of the issues that could be a problem for those looking for a new facility except for latency. Here, Calligo is investigating other self-governing Islands with a strong legal framework and a history of secure data management as a means of creating a more global footprint of low-latency capabilities. For those needing a new data centre in the coming years, it will be necessary to examine the where ? far more deeply, but also focusing on the why?s. For many, co-location will be a much better answer than an owned facility in the wrong place.

Sharing data centre service capabilities

Building a data centre is not only expensive, it s complicated. Its always been complicated, but the emerging and growing use of cloud has just added to that complexity. Would you be willing to bet a few million or tens of millions of dollars on whether, in five years time, your data centre should be larger or smaller than it is now? Yet that is pretty much what those designing data centres are having to do at the moment. Maybe a different approach needs to be looked at based around co-location. Co-location, just to ensure that we are all starting from the same position, is the capability to have IT equipment housed in a third-party data centre facility. The facility is owned and managed by someone else; the IT equipment and the responsibility for the stack above it (operating systems, applications, databases, whatever) remains with you. This leads to some obvious benefits and a few not-so-obvious ones. The obvious benefits are around what constitutes the facility: shared uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs), auxiliary generators, cooling systems, environmental monitoring, physical security and connectivity are but a few to mention. Energy supplies to the data centre and its distribution to your equipment should also be covered by the facility owner. The facility owner should be responsible for these, and you should be paying for them through your standard billing system, whether this is based on per energy unit or floor space being used or whatever other measure the facility owner uses to charge you. As all of these systems are shared, it also should provide you with the flexibility to grow or shrink your footprint within the facility. The facility owner will have designed the building based on a plan for starting at, say, 10% occupancy and will start to look at building additional facility space when reaching 60-70% occupancy, when there are needs for other geographies to be covered, or when newer data centre technologies come through that make it viable within their own business model to build a new facility. But the real value that an organisation should look into is sharing the other services that could be available. A co-location provider is dependent on there being multiple customers in the same facility: if not, then all of their eggs are in one basket, and they are really only a facilities management company looking after a data centre for the one customer a business model that is not particularly promising. Each of the facility owner s customers will be doing something with the platform that they have within their part of the facility and in most cases, only some of these will be private organisations.

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Many cloud-based commercial organisations sit within co-locational facilities, and identifying which ones of these have functions that may be useful to you and your business could be very advantageous. For a start off, you know exactly where the cloud provider s equipment is its in the same facility as yours. Secondly, you also know how good their physical security is its exactly the same as yours. But where the value really starts to stack up is when you look at the technical aspects of integrating the provider's function into your systems. The biggest benefit here is that everything is happening at data centre speeds no having to go out across the WAN to access an external service and waiting for it to respond. No being at the whim of whether the internet is having a bad day and is running slow as some large organisation gets hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. At worst, the connectivity between you and the service provider will be at standard speed Ethernet 1 or 10GB. If you are lucky, then youll be able to plug into a 40GN or even 100GB backbone or into a virtualised fabric network where port aggregation can give even better bandwidth. As the data is not going outside of the data centre, theres better security: the data is in a known place at all times, and through the use of virtual networks, can be secured from others in the shared facility in a relatively easy manner. Then theres root cause analysis (RCA) its between you and the provider (and a bit of the facility owner). No capability to point to the public internet and say it must be a fault there its easier, and therefore faster, to identify and rectify any problems in the system. Some facility owners are looking at how to make this a standard offer for their customers. You would think that it would make sense for all involved more utilisation of a cloud service providers equipment means faster growth, meaning they need more space. Faster performance for an end-user organisation makes them happier and a more sticky customer to the service provider and the facility owner. However, there does seem to be a degree of inertia from the service provider and end user sides. Whether it is a worry of tie-in or what, Quocirca cannot get to the bottom of it. For us, it seems to be a no-brainer, and for those who are using or looking towards co-location and using cloud services at the same time, we strongly advise talking with the facility owner to see if they can divulge what cloud services may be directly available from within the facility itself.

Modules and appliances the future is better engineered.

There have been many changes in how a data centre has been populated over the years. From the old-style mainframe requiring extremely narrow environmental envelopes of temperature, humidity and particulates through to tower x86 servers with broader capabilities, but still with pretty narrow requirements around temperatures. Then on to smaller formfactor, higher density rack-mounted systems, creating greater issues around heat being concentrated in specific areas, but also enabling greater focus to be placed on engineering cooling to target it at specific areas.

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Then came blade computers a new way of putting together computer resources as required, with CPU, storage and networking being able to be built as separate blocks that could be built to meet any specific needs. However, blade computing struggled and never really took off to the extent that many expected. As virtualisation became more mainstream and cloud computing entered into the plans of organisations, the focus was back on scale out the use of commodity hardware in the form of pizza box servers remains a large focus for those putting in place large estates of compute capability in a data centre. However, there are signs that this may change. Appliances aimed at specific functions have been available for some time. Firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS) systems and wide area network (WAN) acceleration boxes have moved from being interesting boxes for midrange organisations to be able to deal with the data traffic requirements of large organisations and service providers. These boxes bring together all the components required to manage a specific workload, enabling the system to be highly tuned to do one thing very well. Can this be done in the mainstream computing world? Even as scale-out was the focus, there was still a requirement for workload-specific scale-up systems. IBMs System p and i boxes, Suns (now Oracles) UltraSPARC/Solaris systems and HPs Superdome provided systems aimed at supporting specific types of workload. IBMs mainframe continued to provide a different approach to specific workloads and continued to sell more overall compute power per annum than it had in years before. So, scale-out was not the ultimate answer; nor was scale-up. The majority of organisations ended up with a hybrid estate of scale-out based on commodity boxes with islands of scale-up that were not quite peer members of the rest of the environment. The first vendor to come up with a different approach was Cisco. Its Unified Computing System, UCS, brought together CPUs, storage and networking engineered as a single, tuned system. Aimed at certain Windows Server workloads, it was initially seen by commentators as not being a good move by Cisco until it started to sell. Along with its partners, VMware and EMC, Cisco formed the joint-venture VCE company which then created the Vblock reference architectures. Dell has also introduced its vStart systems. Again, each of these engineered systems pulls together the CPU, storage and networking components to create an overall system that can be tuned to a specific workload. However, with each of these systems being x86, this does tend to mean only Windows or Linux workloads. This is where IBM come in. A while back, it introduced the zEnterprise a mainframe that just happened to have some Power CPUs alongside it and software that could intelligently assign a workload to the right platform. x86 systems could be added, in which case, the result was a multi-workload engine which unfortunately, sat in the mainframe camp and was ignored by the majority of organisations that did not have a mainframe. IBM has now introduced the PureFlex range of computers a mix of x86 and Power CPUs, again engineered with storage and networking in the same box but with the intelligent workload management software required to ensure that the right workload is placed on the right platform at the right time. Such systems can also be engineered to be far more self-contained than previously internal wiring can be kept tidy; cooling can be highly targeted. Proprietary connections can be used inside the systems to give lower latencies and better performance, as long as all external connections remain standardised. Systems can be pre-prepared before being brought to site a system can be up and running in hours rather than days. The logical conclusion to an engineered solution is a data centre in a box, or a containerised system. Here, all the technical bits are installed in a standard road container, leaving it just that in most cases, power and water are all that

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need plumbing in when the container is delivered to site. Previously seen as ideal for out-of-the-way sites needing a computer capability or for temporary use as an extension to an existing data centre facility, containerised systems are now being used as engineered systems in their own right. Indeed, Microsoft uses a mix of containerised and modular systems in many of its data centres around the world. Further, Intel is looking at getting rid of the need for cooling completely the idea is to have a completely sealed container with around 50% more equipment in it than is seen to be necessary. Running the container at high temperatures will result in higher failure rates in the equipment but by designing and engineering the system correctly, the over-supply of equipment should ensure a suitably long life before the container needs replacing. These new systems from vendors are moving some commercial users over to such engineered solutions. As complete systems with single contracts and known performance envelopes, buyers can be more sure of what they are getting and how it will run against their defined workloads. Sure, there will still be workloads than are better suited on a cost/benefit basis to a commodity scale-out platform, but more users will realise that in a world of dynamic cloud, where workloads are moving across boundaries on a regular basis, a more defined yet flexible platform makes a greater deal of sense. The main thing to remember is that all workloads are not the same. In a world where chasing the best user experience is becoming more important, then ensuring that each workload is being run on the platform best suited for it at the right time is of paramount importance. To this end, engineered systems seem to be the way forward.

ITLM playing economics to gain the optimum IT platform

Take a look around your data centre. All that equipment sitting there. Just how much did you pay for it all? How much is it now worth? Now the big question how well is all that equipment managing the workloads for the business? IT equipment ages rapidly not in the sense of that it starts to fail or misbehave, but in that new, faster, more energyefficient equipment comes to market on a seemingly constant basis. Some of the equipment in your data centre will be three or more years old is it up to the job any longer? If you have been sweating assets by extending their lifecycles over, say, a five year period, is that equipment actually costing you more in business terms than the costs of replacing it with new equipment? Quocirca continually finds that many organisations have little real understanding of what is in their data centre, never mind carrying out real IT lifecycle management (ITLM) processes around the equipment. ITLM can not only save money for an organisation, but it can also ensure that the most optimal IT platform is in place on an on-going basis. The first need for ITLM is in finding out and logging exactly what equipment assets there are in the data centre. Here, IT asset management (ITAM) is the tool to use. Many organisations carry out rudimentary ITAM through the use of spreadsheets with serial numbers and dates of purchase and delivery to keep track of things but these systems rapidly become out of date as equipment is updated with new components; as items fail and are removed but are not updated in the spreadsheet; and as hard-pressed systems engineers bring in new equipment and fail to enter it into the spreadsheet. Automated tools are what are needed ones that can carry out a sweep of the entire network and identify not only what end points are present, but also deep details about their vendor, a granular breakdown of components such as

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storage devices attached, graphics cards, network interface cards (NICs) as well as what is present at a software level, such as operating system, application server and any applications installed and what version level they are at along with what patches have been applied. Once a full knowledge of the systems is in place, further intelligence can be added. For example, maintenance schedules can be added with triggers to fire off tickets into ITIL systems, providing full work dockets and details of exactly where the equipment is in the data centre, so that engineers work on the right equipment with minimum time being wasted. Full knowledge of the systems can also lead to ensuring that workloads on systems that need to be taken down can be moved in advance of maintenance so as to prevent any downtime to users. But the real value comes in being able to apply value economics to the equipment. Value economics is a way of ensuring that an IT platform is at the optimum level of performance at all times based on the business and economic value of the underlying equipment. Any item of equipment has three basic values. Once it has been purchased, it will be placed on book and will be depreciated at whatever rate the organisation deems to be suitable generally three to five years with a straight line depreciation. It then has an intrinsic value the amount that someone would be willing to pay for the equipment on the secondhand market. This is not straight line there is a rapid depreciation in intrinsic value from initial purchase, flattening out somewhat over time. Then there is the data value of the equipment. Most servers will have direct attached storage; storage systems are full of data; and routers, switches, other network devices and even printers will tend to have small storage capabilities that can hold data that could have corporate value, such as username/password pairs. The final value component that needs to be taken into account is the business value. This is the one that is most dependent on the aging equipment. To start off with, a brand new piece of equipment has little direct business value it only starts to provide this once it is implemented and starts to support business workloads. As the data value increases, then business value will also increase but the relative decrease in the speed and capabilities of the equipment against newer equipment begins to dilute the overall value. The trick is to be able to identify exactly where the peak of business value is and replace the equipment at the point where this begins to fall off.

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At the point of replacement, the intrinsic value can be realised and offset against the purchase of the new equipment, providing some level of financing towards constant equipment refresh. There are lots of areas that need to be borne in mind though around selling old equipment particularly when it comes to data security. The data value of the equipment will be high to others as well as to the business. The data will have to be destroyed before selling the equipment on. Depending on the organisations own risk profile, this may be through the use of secure information deletion or may be through the physical destruction of hard disk drives lowering the value of the remaining equipment, but maintaining corporate security. However, even the detritus of a destroyed disk drive has value it contains copper, gold and other metals worth recovering by commercial organisations specialising in this field. ITLM should be in place for any organisation as it enables an IT estate to be better optimised, even if it is not taken to the degree of selling off old equipment to help fund new replacements. However, full lifecycle management has financial and business benefits which are very powerful and Quocirca recommends that organisations look into how such an approach can be implemented. Quocirca has two reports available on ITLM which can be downloaded here: http://www.quocirca.com/reports/682/dont-sweat-assets--liberate-them http://www.quocirca.com/reports/740/de-risking-it-lifecycle-management

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High availability Mirage, chimera or reality?

In a completely physical world, a single application would be run a single server. If anything went wrong with that server, the application would also be impacted. One way around such issues was to use clustering, bringing together a collection of servers in a way that the failure of a single server would at least leave the application available, albeit with the possibility of lower performance. Then came virtualisation the capability to aggregate hundreds or thousands of servers in a fashion that made single server failure far less of an issue. Now we have cloud computing the use of virtualisation to create dynamic, elastic pools of resource that can be applied to application workloads so that the failure of a single component should have minimal impact on the availability of the application or its performance. Great we now have high availability, and so this article should end here, surely? Well, no, unfortunately. The problem with high availability is that it can be far more complex than outlined above. Firstly, it is not just about servers, even though the focus has historically been here due to the fragile nature of them. The network also has to be included, as network issues can bring the performance of a running application to its knees. Here again, virtualisation is helping. The use of virtualised, fabric networks enables the aggregation of multiple physical network interface cards (NICs) and the resulting pool of bandwidth to be dynamically allocated as needed. Should one physical network link go down, then traffic can be elegantly and immediately re-routed via other physical links. Systems have to be architected to remove single points of failure multiple NICs have to be implemented per physical server system, but this is no major issue at either a technical or cost base these days. The big issue has been on storage. Storage can be virtualised, but the problem remains that the data is being stored at a physical level at some stage, and that the failure of that physical level will always create some issues. Technological approaches such as RAID and other multi-store techniques have been used to avoid issues where a single disk drive fails, but this still leaves issues where it is a disk controller or RAID controller that fails. The easiest way to fight such storage failure is to mirror data in real time to another physical store. However, this does have a high financial cost, as the mirror store needs to be as big as the primary store. There will also be technical issues in ensuring that the data is mirrored in real time and in identifying what transactions were in progress when the storage failure occurred, and what the recovery point will be. Once the recovery point has been identified, then the application has to failover to the mirror, re-allocating its storage points to new virtual LUNs. The technology behind such business continuity at a storage level is improving rapidly, and with the right investments, high availability within a data centre is now possible. So, what happens when the issue is not within the data centre? In many cases, the data centre is still running effectively, but it is connectivity to and from the data centre that is impacted. For example, a back hoe through a leased line could cut off all access to the data centre. Here, multiple connection coming in through different directions from different vendors can provide the levels of availability required again, at a cost, but a worthwhile cost in most circumstances. How about when the problem is more than just the failure of a single item for example a data centre fire, or a natural disaster covering a larger area? No amount of high availability within a single facility can provide protection here. The only way to provide high availability in these circumstances is to mirror across data centres. Obviously, this is not

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for the faint hearted the costs can be highly prohibitive, but for those where downtime results in immediate and high financial impact, mirrored data centres are necessary. Across small distances, data centre mirroring presents little in the way of technical problems beyond the issues outline above for a single facility. However, as distances increase between the facilities, data latency can become a major issue, particularly in high speed data transactional environments. Here, the use of a means of identifying what state transactions were at when failure happened will be required so that the failover to the mirrored system can be done with minimal business and customer impact. For the majority of organisations, the problem of high availability will result in a hybrid mix of solutions. In many circumstances, the importance of a certain application will be such that an absence of its capabilities for a period of a few hours will have minimal impact on the business. Therefore, a standard approach of using virtualisation of servers and networks to avoid issues with failure at these levels may well be enough. Only storage failure will then be an issue, and a standard RAID approach should minimise this. For higher priority applications were downtime will impact the business, higher levels of protection using cloud platforms and mirrored data may be required. For those applications where lack of availability could lead to heavy financial and/or brand impact on the organisation, then facility mirroring may be required. It is down to IT and the business agreeing the priorities and what the business is willing to spend on providing protection against lack of application availability. This then leaves downtime due to planned maintenance. These days, this should not be an issue. An instance of an application can be run while another instance is being patched or upgraded. This updated instance can then be spun up and the old instance failed over to the new in what is effectively real time. There may be a few seconds of the application appearing to freeze, but this should not impact the business in any material way in most cases. The final issue is with unplanned issues, due to poorly written applications with, for example, memory leaks or other flaws in the code. These issues can be lessened through proper code testing and run-time garbage collection, but will remain the one area where true high availability can still remain an illusive mirage.

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REPORT NOTE: This report has been written independently by Quocirca Ltd to provide an overview of the issues facing organisations seeking to maximise the effectiveness of todays dynamic workforce. The report draws on Quocircas extensive knowledge of the technology and business arenas, and provides advice on the approach that organisations should take to create a more effective and efficient environment for future growth.

About Quocirca
Quocirca is a primary research and analysis company specialising in the business impact of information technology and communications (ITC). With world-wide, native language reach, Quocirca provides in-depth insights into the views of buyers and influencers in large, mid-sized and small organisations. Its analyst team is made up of real-world practitioners with first-hand experience of ITC delivery who continuously research and track the industry and its real usage in the markets. Through researching perceptions, Quocirca uncovers the real hurdles to technology adoption the personal and political aspects of an organisations environment and the pressures of the need for demonstrable business value in any implementation. This capability to uncover and report back on the end-user perceptions in the market enables Quocirca to provide advice on the realities of technology adoption, not the promises.

Quocirca research is always pragmatic, business orientated and conducted in the context of the bigger picture. ITC has the ability to transform businesses and the processes that drive them, but often fails to do so. Quocircas mission is to help organisations improve their success rate in process enablement through better levels of understanding and the adoption of the correct technologies at the correct time. Quocirca has a pro-active primary research programme, regularly surveying users, purchasers and resellers of ITC products and services on emerging, evolving and maturing technologies. Over time, Quocirca has built a picture of long term investment trends, providing invaluable information for the whole of the ITC community. Quocirca works with global and local providers of ITC products and services to help them deliver on the promise that ITC holds for business. Quocircas clients include Oracle, IBM, CA, O2, T -Mobile, HP, Xerox, Ricoh and Symantec, along with other large and medium sized vendors, service providers and more specialist firms. Details of Quocircas work and the services it offers can be found at http://www.quocirca.com Disclaimer: This report has been written independently by Quocirca Ltd. During the preparation of this report, Quocirca may have used a number of sources for the information and views provided. Although Quocirca has attempted wherever possible to validate the information received from each vendor, Quocirca cannot be held responsible for any errors in information received in this manner. Although Quocirca has taken what steps it can to ensure that the information provided in this report is true and reflects real market conditions, Quocirca cannot take any responsibility for the ultimate reliability of the details presented. Therefore, Quocirca expressly disclaims all warranties and claims as to the validity of the data presented here, including any and all consequential losses incurred by any organisation or individual taking any action based on such data and advice. All brand and product names are recognised and acknowledged as trademarks or service marks of their respective holders.