Volume 23 | May 2012

Designing a Mega
Data Center

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 DESIGN 32 How to make Private
Cloud Initiatives Matter
Corner to your CEO
by Jason Cowie
Chief information officers understand private
2 the rise of the mega data clouds and the benefits associated with the
14 Designing a Mega data technology, but they still need to sell the
center center
by Jeffrey R. Clark, Ph.D. initial investment to other executives CEOs
by Don Beaty and chief financial officers. To C-level
Mega data centers sprawl over hundreds of The optimal designs for mega data centers
thousands of square feet and can exceed leaders, the CIOs ability to explain concrete
require a holistic approach since there is so return on investment and demonstrated
10 megawatts of power, with some much to be potentially gained by considering
approaching a million square feet or 100 value makes all the difference between
a broader range of tradeoffs across all fields. embracing cloud computing or abandoning
megawatts. But what drives companies to
build these gargantuan facilities? Ultimately, cloud initiatives that could have been hugely
20 Steps to Moving Towards beneficial.
as in almost any business trend, you need Building Systems
only follow the money.
Integration
by Alan Dash
ITbusiness
24 Top 10 Green Features of
a Mega Data Center 35 Make the Most of
by Dan Prows Application Delivery
Controller Deployments
by Jesse Rothstein

IT CORNER Over the past decade, application delivery

controllers (ADCs) have become an integral

FACILITY 26 Some data centers are

part of the IT infrastructure. I played a role in
developing ADC technology at F5 Networks,

Corner getting smaller?

6 How to Justify the Cost
of New Backup and DR
Solutions
by Chris Poelker
In order to understand whether outsourcing
backup and DR to a cloud provider makes
sense, you need to understand how much it
costs you today to provide a similar service
level. This holds true for determining whether
the cost of that new solution is internal or
outsourced.
by Jeffrey R. Clark, Ph.D.
At the top of the data center world are
the mega data centersfacilities whose
massive scale dwarfs the computer closets
(by comparison) of most companies. But
the trend toward larger data centers among
some large companies contrasts with
another trend elsewhere in the industry:
37 Report Analytics:
many data centers are getting smaller.
ITOPS
where I led the design of the BIG-IP v9
product and TMOS platform. Based on my
previous experience with ADCs and my
current focus on application performance
management (APM), I have distilled nine best
practices for maximizing ADC performance.
Complementing Business
Intelligence For
Data-Driven Business
Decisions
by Michael Morrison

10 10 Power Protection
30 Natural Disasters are
not the only reason to a Yourturn
Myths Debunked Disaster Recovery plan
An Uninterruptible Separation of Fact and Fiction by Robert Gast
by John Collins
40 Strategies for Data
With a continuous stream of factors Center Consolidation
Budgeting for electricity, securing adequate necessitating both planned and unplanned
supplies of it and finding ways to use less Part 2 of 3: White Space
downtimes, having a plan in place for all
of it are all common topics of conversation by Ed Spears
IT disasters is essential to ensure quality
among data center operators. Ensuring the service, regardless of the circumstance, in
power their IT resources rely on is both todays IT-dependent world. Calendar
dependable and clean, sadly, can sometimes Vendor Index
be an afterthought.

All rights reserved. No portion of DATA CENTER Journal may be reproduced without written
permission from the Executive Editor. The management of DATA CENTER Journal is not
responsible for opinions expressed by its writers or editors. We assume that all rights in
communications sent to our editorial staff are unconditionally assigned for publication.
All submissions are subject to unrestricted right to edit and/or to comment editorially.
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 FEATURE
story

Mega data centers sprawl over hundreds of thousands of

square feet and can exceed 10 megawatts of power, with some
approaching a million square feet or 100 megawatts. But what
drives companies to build these gargantuan facilities? Ultimately,
as in almost any business trend, you need only follow the money.

The Rise of the

MEGA
Data Center by Jeffrey R Clark, Ph.D

2 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com

 The Logical Result of
Consolidation
V
irtualization has taken the
data center industry by storm,
and it is closely followed by
its cousin: consolidation.
Companies have sought to
reduce infrastructure (and thus capital and
operating costs) by focusing IT operations
onto fewer, more highly utilized machines.
Naturally, then, this process leads to a
broader view of data centers in general:
large companies operating multiple data
centers may choose to focus their facilities
into fewer and ever larger implementations
in hopes of reducing costs and complexity.
Depending on their locations, implement-
ing fewer mega data centers may enable a
company to take advantage of certain local
benefits, like (relatively) low energy prices,
tax incentives, climate, or availability of
alternative energy sources.
Ultimately, mega data centers are
the result of a push to minimize cost and
thereby maximize profit. Although the
reasons that companies like Apple, Face-
book, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and other
organizations (like the U.S. federal govern-
ment) are moving toward a small number
of giant data centers instead of a hodge-
podge of smaller facilities are not always
expressed in terms of dollars. Motivations
like a reduced environmental impact (say,
from locating a data center in a lower-
temperature climate to reduce energy spent
on cooling), improved green reputation,
availability of alternative power sources
(like hydroelectric or geothermal) and oth-
ers may be trotted out. And to some extent,
certain companies may pursue these at the
expense of some profit, but companies are
ultimately in business to make money, and
that motivation will underlie most of their
actions, regardless of any stated reasons.
Thus, data center consolidation
which is driven by the desire to eliminate
unneeded infrastructure and to reduce
energy consumption, thus lowering capital
and operational costsis generally moti-
vated by the same or similar factors relative
to consolidation at the server or rack level.
The following are some specific reasons for
this trend.
Reduced complexity
A distribution of IT resources across
multiple locations has its benefitsbut it
also has concomitant complexities. The
general trend of consolidation seeks to
www.datacenterjournal.com
reduce complexity through centralization,
maintaining a more singular management
structure. And not surprisingly, a less
complex infrastructure is generally less
expensive to build and to operate. Simpler
is (often) cheaper, but for large companies
to meet their IT needs with just a few data
centers, those facilities must be very large.
Local incentives
The operating costs of servers over
their lifetimes now outweigh their associ-
ated capital costs, meaning that the price
of energy is as great a concern as the cost
of the equipment. So when an opportunity
to tap into low energy prices or other cost
incentives, it pays companies to do so at
large scale. In particular, low energy prices
are a tremendous draw, particularly when
utilities provide long-term price guaran-
tees. Another major enticement is local tax
incentives. Many governmentsthanks to
their profligate spending, which has earned
them crushing debt loadsare looking
for any and all sources of revenue to keep
operating. Mega data centers bring the po-
tential for a flood of property tax revenue,
as well as jobs and an impetus for further
development, to such locations. Thus, these
governments are often willing to offer
breaks on property taxes or sales taxes
for equipment. And companies are often
ready to oblige by sourcing their mega data
centers in such locations, taking advantage
of these savings. And again, the larger scale
the deployment, the greater the savings
companies can in effect stock up on data
center capacity, just as any good shopper
would.
Free cooling
Although ASHRAE guidelines enable
free cooling year round for many loca-
tions, these benefits only apply to certain
allowable temperature classes. For the
recommended range (even though it was
recently expanded) some locations offer
greater potential for free cooling than oth-
ers. These conditions thus push the trend
toward centralization. By locating facilities
in fewer deploymentspreferably in
cooler climatescompanies can scale their
savings. Why not build a single large data
center in a cool climate with relatively low
energy rates and tax incentives (if you can
grab all those in the same place!) instead
of a number of data centers in a variety of
locations having a variety of economic and
other conditions.
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 3
Alternative energy
Locations with a solid sources of al-
ternative energy (like hydroelectric power)
enable companies to expand their green
image. The greater their percentage of reli-
ance on an alternative energy source, the
less their percentage reliance on coaland
that pleases many environmental groups,
in addition to being a PR bonus. As with
the other factors above, scale is critical: a
larger data center means a greater ability to
exploit the advantages of a particular area.
The Cloud
The cloud is another major driver
of mega data centersperhaps the main
driver. Indeed, although they are not always
precisely the same thing, cloud data cen-
ters and mega data centers are two cat- factors listed above provide plenty of
egories that overlap significantly. The cloud
is essentially an outsourcing of IT resources
to another (potentially undefined) location.
From the service provider perspective, the
cloud is a means of garnering value from
a pool of resources by allocating those
resources among some number of custom-
ers. In the case of a private cloud, there may
be just one customerbut the approach
still makes sense (in theory, anyway), since
a central resource pool is divided among
users, thus saving the idle time (and thus
energy waste) associated with numerous
distributed resource pools. The public
cloud is the same, conceptually: it just
expands the customer pool.
But with a larger potential base of
customers comes greater demandand
hence, the need for more resources. Public
cloud infrastructure is therefore, almost by
definition, necessarily larger in scale. Large
companies thus seek to scale profits by
scaling their data centers. One of the keys
to success in this regard is commoditization
of equipment: lower capital expenses means
less cost to amortize over the customer base.
The need for cloud data centers
leading some large companies to build their
gargantuan mega data centersis in part
driven by the ever-expanding demand for
mobility. Cell phones, tablets and other
mobile devices are building in faster (and
often multicore) processors, giving them
greater capabilities and making them more
like computers than, for example, just
phones with a few nice extra features. But
as consumersboth inside and beyond
enterprisesrely more heavily on their
4 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
mobile devices, they run into the problem
of syncing data across their numerous elec-
tronic gadgets. The cloud posits itself as the
logical solution: it can store data remotely,
and users can access it anytime and from
anywhere, as long as they have an Internet
connection.
In addition to just data storage capa-
bility, however, bandwidth demands are in-
creasingly quickly, driven heavily by video
content. Infrastructure is needed to support
this growing demand, and large companies
are in position to capitalize on this demand
through economies of scale.
Balancing Forces
Not everything favors the trend
toward mega data centers. Although the
designed to serve just a single company
motivation, some difficulties may arise.
Energy prices, for instance, are seldom low
in urban areasbut cities are more likely to
offer wide talent pools for staffing data cen-
ters, as well as broader infrastructure, in-
cluding power and networking bandwidth.
To some extent, the employee pool is not a
tremendous problemlocating a data cen-
ter in a rural area may pose some restric-
tions on hiring, but many professionals are
willing to relocate for a good employment
opportunity. Indeed, rural areas offer some
benefits to workers, such as a lower cost
of living. But the benefits of rural areas,
including greater availability and lower cost
of land, make these locations irresistible to
many companieshence the regular news
updates of a new mega data center being
built in a virtually unheard of town.
In addition, data centers may have
limited leverage when it comes to obtain-
ing tax incentives. Much of the economic
development factor may be limited to
symbolism: less developed (rural) regions
may be able to cite a new giant data center
as proof of growth, but the gains in terms
of jobs are often less than the size of the
buildings would indicate. Data centers are
heavily automated, so 100,000 square feet
of data center space doesnt necessarily
mean hundreds of new jobs in the area. As
such, tax incentives and other gimmicks
from local governments may be a passing
fadparticularly as these governments
become increasingly insolvent in a down
economy that simply doesnt provide the
tax revenues that it once did. Other drivers
may still drive the growth of mega data
centers, but tax incentives may become less
of a factor.
Conclusions
Mega data centers are ultimately the
result of consolidation in search of a more
profitable operating structure than takes
advantagewhenever possibleof local
incentives at large scale. Beyond factors
like local tax incentives, low energy prices,
climate advantages (to enable free cooling)
and alternative energy sources (for com-
pany PR purposes), the cloud is the major
driver of centralization of the IT resources
of large companies into mega data centers.
Seeking to exploit commodity hardware
at tremendous scales, these facilities target
broader customer bases than data centers
internally. The public cloud enables these
companies to essentially sell idle time on
their resources to ensure maximum utiliza-
tion, avoiding the operating costs (and
wasted capital) of unused equipment. In
some sense, then, the cloud enables a large
company to pay for its data center opera-
tionand maybe profit a little bit, too.
The cloud is in turn driven by in-
creasing demand for mobile services. As
such, locations of these data centers are
not relevant per se, thus enabling com-
panies to seek areas that provide the best
combination of incentives and conditions.
Furthermore, the constantly growing de-
mand for bandwidth leaves plenty of room
for companies to implement ever-larger
capacities in their data centers in an effort
to meet this demandand profit from it.
Perhaps the only question is how large will
these data centers become. With the largest
facilities operating in the 100 megawatt
range, talk of gigawatts seems to be on the
horizon. Already, facilities with millions of
square feet are no longer overly surprising
(although they are still impressive). And
economic instability in western nations
which could potentially stem growth in the
data center sectorseems counterbalanced
by growth in the emerging nations in the
east. Particularly, Asian nations like China
and India are seeing growth in business
and consumer demand for resources, and
they are also seeing their own crop of mega
data centers. No doubt, the trend toward
consolidation into huge data centers will
continueat least among some very large
Copyright 2012, Cablesys
companies. n
www.datacenterjournal.com
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www.datacenterjournal.com THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 5

 FACILITY
corner
How to Justify the Cost of
New Backup and
DR Solutions
By Chris Poelker
I
feel your pain. Your current backup application came out
when PONG was all the rage in computer games, and you are
keeping it running with spit, glue, duct tape, bailing wire, and
many long nights and weekends. You have no real disaster
recovery (DR) strategy to speak of other than shipping tapes
off site, and the last time you really tested DR with any reasonable
hope of success was when your kids were still in grammar school.
The amount of data you need to protect is doubling, your tape
drives work occasionally, and the person who wrote all the scripts
to provide at least some level of automation just found another job.
Happy New Year. Although this sounds like a comedy of errors,
these are the cards that are dealt to many a backup administrator.
An organizations data is its lifeblood. Any corporate and
government executives understand this but still are unwilling to
allocate the right budget to the IT department to protect it. Why?
Backup and DR are insurance policies. They do nothing to
enhance a business organizations bottom line or its mission. The
process is a necessary evil, just like going to the bathroom. If IT
managers could, they would enjoy the meal and pay someone else
to go potty for them. Why do you think cloud computing is mak-
ing an impact? It allows IT to outsource the hard stuff to someone
else so the core team can focus on the mission at hand which
brings up the reason I am writing this.
In order to understand whether outsourcing backup and
DR to a cloud provider makes sense, you need to understand how
much it costs you today to provide a similar service level. This
holds true for determining whether the cost of that new solution is
internal or outsourced. If the solution will replace your old one and
make your quality of life much better, how do you justify the cost
to accounting? The goal is to create a win/win message for finance.
Yes, the solution does cost $X, and it will enable me to stay home
drinking beer at night, but I can prove it will save us $Y in the long
run while providing a much more robust recovery paradigm for
our applications.
Here are a few handy tips to validate any new technology
solution to determine whether the cost of implementing it would
be justified.
6 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
Top five issues in analyzing backup and
DR costs:
1) The backup target:
Tape sucks for recovery, but its great for archives. For every
20 terabytes of production data with a 2 percent change and 3 per-
cent growth rate and using a traditional backup operation of daily
incremental and weekly full backups, you need to manage 110 tera-
bytes of tape media. Therefore, a shop with 100 terabytes would
need 550 terabytes of tape (100 x 110 = 550). Your goal should be
to include tape as an archive storage tier, so you can minimize the
need to recover from tape.
2) Infrastructure and time:
The time required to backup your datacenter is equal to the
current capacity of all the applications needing protection divided
by the performance in terabytes/hour of your current backup solu-
tion. The performance metrics must include the entire data path:
network, backup server, storage, and backup target (tape or disk) as
a whole. You could buy the fastest backup target on the planet, but
if you cant feed it fast enough it doesnt help a bit. Remember that
the time to recover using traditional approaches is usually twice
the time to back up.
3) The network:
Your wide area network (WAN) needs to be robust enough to
handle the amount of data change you have on a daily basis. WAN
bandwidth should be measured for peak loads so that critical batch
processing periods, such as end-of-month or end-of-year process-
ing data, are not at risk. This is why WAN costs can be the most
expensive part of a good DR strategy.
4) The building and the plan:
The DR target site must be able to handle peak workloads,
even if in a degraded fashion, for all the critical applications the
company requires; and it must be available in a timeframe that
supports continuity of operations at minimal impact to the busi-
www.datacenterjournal.com
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ness. This is a hard number to determine, so using readily available How to calculate the benefits:
information from the industry analysts can help you determine the
hourly cost of downtime for your industry. Phase 1: Add dedupe
Tale 1 shows an example of lost-revenue data based on pub- These calculations do not cover the cost of replacing backup
licly available data. It may be outdated, but it is useful for at least software, as it is difficult to rip and replace. Just remember that,
determining a baseline outage cost. More accurate and up-to-date using standard backup software, for every 20 terabytes of produc-
data can be obtained from the major analyst firms. tion data you may need 110 terabytes of tape based on your data
retention requirements.
Table 1: Example of Lost Revenue Assuming LTO3 drives and 20 terabytes of production data:
110TB/400GB (capacity of LTO3) = 1,126,420/400 = 282 tapes
Lost Revenue per
INDUSTRY 282 x $70 = $19,740
Hour (U.S. dollars) 80MB/s (speed ofLTO3) = 6.91TB per day
Energy 2,800,000 To backup 20TB in a 12-hour window, you need 6 drives
Telecom 2,000,000 6 drives = $4,500 x 6 = $27,000
Manufacturing 1,600,000 Total = $46,740 for each 20TB.
Price to provide 40TB of tape capacity = $46,740 (base costs) +
Finance 1,500,000
$19,740 (media) = $66,480
Information Technology 1,350,000
Insurance 1,200,000 Dedupe to the rescue:
Retail 1,100,000 Implement a single 4TB dedupe appliance that will hold 40TB
Pharmaceutical 1,100,000 at 10:1 ratio = approx. $17,700
$66,480 $17,700 = $48,780 in savings, or 375 percent!
Chemical 700,000
Purchase another dedupe solution to replicate the data off site to
Transport 670,000
eliminate off-site tape movement, recall costs, eliminate array-
Utilities 640,000 based replication licenses for that data, and reduce the WAN
Healthcare 640,000 requirements to replicate that data by 90 percent, which is a 10:1
Media 340,000 dedupe ratio. Deduped replication savings:
Cost of off-site tape storage contract $17,700 = net savings
Cost of array licenses and storage for replication = array license,
5) Intelligent recovery: storage, and maintenance savings
You need to have the right infrastructure at the DR site to WAN costs to replicate 20TB of data versus 2TB of data (10:1
handle operations. And you need to understand how to bring back dedupe ratio) = annual WAN savings
up applications that have crashed so they actually work. There are
typically many interdependencies between application servers Phase 2: Implement snapshots and CDP
and databases for most modern applications, and they need to be Lets say your current backup window is currently 12 Hours
brought up on the right platform in the correct sequence. Clients for your 20 terabytes of production data to tape. Adding more tape
need to be able to connect to the new servers as if they were con- drives may not fix the problem if the network is your bottleneck.
necting to the old servers; so infrastructure servers such as direc- Implementing snapshot-based backup will reduce the backup
tory services, network routers, and phone lines, if required, need to window from the current 12 hours to a couple of seconds. Moving
be available. from traditional bulk backup to snapshot backup eliminates the
Lets take each of these issues one at a time. Well use a phased physical data movement from Point A to Point B to copy the data,
approach to optimize the process and reduce current costs, so you which means the physics of the process changes. With snapshots,
can justify a new solution to replace your existing systems. you can backup more often and data recovery is typically much
faster. CDP takes that paradigm even further by moving from more
Phases to optimize backup and DR: frequent periodic backup to always backed up, which means there
is zero data loss.
1. Add data deduplication to your backup operations to reduce Now lets calculate the benefits of implementing Phase2. As-
backup costs and optimize replication. suming the cost of downtime is calculated using the numbers pro-
2. mplement snapshots and continuous data protection (CDP) vided in my chart for a media company and an average recovery
to eliminate bulk data movement for backup and DR. time of only four hours to rebuild a critical server, the calculations
3. Leverage WAN optimization and delta versioning with en- are as follows:
cryption to reduce risk and WAN requirements by 90 percent. $340,000 x 4 = $1,360,000 - cost of new CDP solution (assume 2
4. Use CDP to reduce recovery times to a few minutes and sites at $100,000 per location = $200,000)
eliminate data loss. $1,360,000 $200,000 = $1,160,000. Recovery time for CDP
5. Virtualize your storage and servers to reduce infrastructure solution = 30 minutes ($340,000/2 = $170,000
costs. $1,160,000 - $170,000 = $990,000 savings per outage

8 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com

Phase 3: WAN optimization
If you already have purchased the dedupe solution in Phase 1,
you may not even need to purchase anything else to reduce WAN
requirements. Many have found that disk-to-disk-based replica-
tion from a CDP or dedupe solution enables them to turn off their
current expensive array-based replication systems. CDP solutions
tend to replicate data very efficiently, and dedupe reduces WAN
requirements by 90 percent or more. Lets say you can turn off just
half of the current WAN bandwidth you need to replicate your
20 terabytes thats a 50 percent WAN savings over the current
solution.
Phase 4: Use CDP to speed recovery and
eliminate data loss
The benefits of Phase 4 are already outlined in the savings
of Phase2. The added benefit of reducing data loss to zero is also
difficult to calculate. The savings depend on the type of business.
As an example, in a hospital loss of data may mean loss of life. If
you are running a trading application for a major stock exchange, a
single second may include thousands of individual financial trans-
actions worth millions of dollars. If your company writes software,
an outage may mean hours of lost coding that may be irreplaceable.
I recommend using an industry chart to determine the benefits
of reducing the possibility of data loss and the improved recovery
times provided by CDP.
Phase 5: Virtualize servers and storage
Implementing virtualization can have a huge impact in mul-
tiple areas:
Server virtualization commoditizes servers and enables server
consolidation.
Storage virtualization commoditizes storage and enables com-
plete data mobility.
The ability to replicate data between unlike storage reduces stor-
age costs by up to 50 percent.
Consolidating multiple applications onto virtual servers reduces
infrastructure costs by 90 percent.
Dense virtual storage and servers reduces data center power,
cooling, and floor space requirements.
For example, a single blade server may be able to run 50 to
100 applications versus 50 to 100 physical servers. Virtual storage
simplifies provisioning and enables storage pooling and tiering.
With the right data, you can justify your purchase of innova-
tive technology that can optimize your IT infrastructure to help
the business and its mission. And an additional benefit of that
purchase just might be reduced stress and some free time to take in
a game over the weekend! n
About the Author: FalconStor VP of Enterprise Solutions Christopher
Poelker is a highly regarded storage expert with decades of experience,
including positions as storage architect at HDS and lead storage architect
at Compaq. Poelker also worked as an engineer and VMS consultant
at Digital Equipment Corporation. Recently, Poelker served as deputy
commissioner of the TechAmerica Foundation Commission on the
Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD).

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www.datacenterjournal.com THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 9

 FACILITY
corner
10 Power Protection
Myths Debunked
An Uninterruptible Separation of Fact and Fiction
B
udgeting for electricity, securing adequate supplies
of it and finding ways to use less of it are all common
topics of conversation among data center operators.
Ensuring the power their IT resources rely on is both
dependable and clean, sadly, can sometimes be an
afterthought.
The truth is, the problems and risks associated with power
are intensifying as virtualization and movement to the cloud place
an increasing amount of stress on storage systems, servers and
network devices, which use components so miniaturized that
they fault and fail under power conditions that earlier generation
equipment easily withstood.
At one point in time, IT merely played a supporting role in
the enterprise. However, it is now absolutely central to how most
companies compete. When IT systems are down, core business pro-
cesses quickly come to a standstill. The cost of power and cooling
has spiraled out of control in recent years, and data center managers
are typically held responsible for achieving high availability while
simultaneously reducing power costs these can be two very dif-
ficult and conflicting aspects to manage, however, highly-efficient
UPS systems can help with that goal, and products are available
today that were not an option even after a few years ago.
In order to rationalize the costs associated with such up-
grades, and to properly select a system for your facilities needs,
common misconceptions associated with UPS systems must first
be debunked. The resulting realities, a combination of factors that
have been influenced by industry trends and technology advances,
are often complicated by marketing hype, which can make that the
decision very difficult.
The following will address a few particular myths weve
heard, and use the subsequent truths to outline the best practices
for selecting a power protection solution for any IT application.
Utility power is clean and
MYTH reliable
#1 Reality Utility power isnt clean, nor
is it 100% reliable.
By law, electrical power can vary widely enough to
cause significant problems for IT equipment. According to current
U.S. standards, for example, voltage can legally vary from 5.7 per-
10 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
By john collins
cent to 8.3 percent under absolute specifications. That means that
what utility services promising 208-phase voltage actually deliver
can range from 191 to 220 volts.
And, in the U.S., utility power is only 99.9 percent reliable,
which translates into a likely nine hours of utility outages every year.
A brief outage wont hurt my
MYTH bottom line
#2
Reality Losing power for as little as a
quarter second can trigger events that may
keep IT equipment unavailable for anywhere
from 15 minutes to many hours.
And downtime is costly. Some experts believe the U.S. economy
loses between $200 billion and $570 billion a year due to power
outages and other disturbances.
According to Price Waterhouse research, after a power outage
disrupts IT systems:
33+ percent of companies take more than a day to recover
10 percent of companies take more than a week
It can take up to 48 hours to reconfigure a network
It can take days or weeks to re-enter lost data
90 percent of companies that experience a computer disas-
ter and dont have a survival plan go out of business within
18 months
Financially, power outages can mean substantial losses for
the company affected. According to the US Department of Energy,
when a power failure disrupts IT systems:
33 percent of companies lose $20,000$500,000
20 percent lose $500,000 to $2 million
15 percent lose more than $2 million
My business is too small for
MYTH proactive power protection
#3 Reality Power problems are equal-
opportunity threats.
They hit small businesses as often as big ones. Your
PCs, servers and network are just as critical to your business as a
data center is to a large enterprise. Chances are, you rely on more
www.datacenterjournal.com
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sophisticated and expensive data equipment than ever, and these
systems run unattended much of the time.
Consider how much investment is at risk. Even a small server
configuration and company LAN (local area network) represents
an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. Even a basic server,
such as a Compaq Proliant DL320, costs more than $2000. Figure
on $7000 for an IBM Xseries 360, $15,000 for a Compaq Proliant
DL590, $22,000 for an IBM Xseries 380, and $37,000 for a Sun
Sunfire Blade System. Add operational applications, management
systems, critical databases and networking equipment. Clearly
the IT infrastructure is a significant company asset that deserves
adequate protection.
Downtime is also very costly. Your IT hardware may be
insured, but what about the potential loss of goodwill, reputation
and sales from downtime? Consider the number of transactions or
processes handled per hour, and multiply that by the value of each
one and the duration of an anticipated power incident. Add the
delays that inevitably occur when rebooting locked-up equipment,
restoring damaged files, and re-running processes that were inter-
rupted. Then add the cost of lost revenue from being disconnected
from your suppliers, business partners, and customers.
I have a generator and a surge
MYTH suppressor I dont need a
#4 UPS
Reality Generators and surge suppres-
sors are a good start, but remain incomplete
solutions for systemic problems.
Backup generators address power outages but provide no
protection against the eight other power disturbances. Further-
more, critical systems can lock up in the 10-30 seconds it takes to
switch to backup power. Generators themselves can create harmful
power effects when switching between utility and generator power.
Surge suppressors address the power surges, but have no
effect on the under-voltage and variance conditions that can erode
equipment health over time or zap it in an instant.
Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPSs) go beyond these
power-protection strategies while presenting a compelling busi-
ness case in any commercial environment. UPSs protect your IT
systems by conditioning incoming power to smooth out the sags
and spikes that are all too common on the grid and other primary
sources of power. UPSs also provide ride-through power to cover
for sags or short-term outages (30 60 minutes, typically), by
selectively drawing power from batteries, backup generators and
other available sources.
All UPSs have the same battery
MYTH service life
#5 Reality The design of a UPS dictates
how frequently it uses battery power,
which in turn affects battery runtime and
service life.
Standby UPSs shift frequently to battery mode, which can reduce
battery runtime and service life. Furthermore, the brief interrup-
tion of power during those frequent transfers could lock up IT
systems, and their typically wide output voltage regulation window
may cause the IT power supplies to shut down.
12 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
Line-interactive UPSs provide a higher level of protection
against power anomalies than standby systems, but must typi-
cally resort to battery power when transferring between normal
and regulated modes or coping with the instabilities of generator
startup.
Double-conversion UPSs are easy on batteries. Within broad
tolerances for input voltage, the UPS rectifier/inverter combination
can regulate output without resorting to batteries. Additionally,
transfer from normal to battery mode is instant, so theres no risk
of power interruptions freezing IT systems.
With new high-efficiency, multi-mode UPSs, battery usage
duration and frequency are similar to a double-conversion UPS
and in some instances may even be lower. Furthermore, these UPSs
operate at up to 99 percent efficiency under normal use. Higher ef-
ficiency translates into longer battery runtime and cooler operating
temperatures, which both extend battery service life.
UPS load has no effect on
MYTH efficiency
#6 Reality Manufacturers usually state
UPS efficiency ratings at full load, but
most of todays UPSs are markedly less
efficient under lighter loads, which is how they are
likely to be used.
Since so many IT systems use dual-bus architecture for redun-
dancy, the typical data center loads each power bus (and each
corresponding UPS) at less than 50 percent capacity, often as little
as 20 to 40 percent.
As a result, it is important to know UPS efficiency across the
entire load range, not just under theoretical ideal UPS operating
conditions. While many UPSs drop off markedly in their efficiency
under light loads, others can perform at 99 percent efficiency even
when lightly loaded, as much as 15 percentage points better than a
traditional UPS.
I dont need service if my UPS is
MYTH working
#7 Reality The old adage of, If it aint
broke, dont fix it may be feasible in some
circumstances, but applying it to the mainte-
nance of a UPS can have devastating consequences.
Because a company relies on a UPS to deliver continuous power
without any disruption to its business, proper service is a critical
component to ensuring optimal performance from a UPS while
minimizing the risks of downtime.
Research indicates that regular preventive maintenance
which affords the opportunity to detect and repair potential
problems before they become significant and costly issuesis
crucial in order to achieve maximum performance from your
equipment. In fact, studies show that routine preventive mainte-
nance appreciably reduces the likelihood that a UPS will succumb
to downtime. A Study of Root Causes of Load Losses compiled by
Eaton revealed that customers without preventive maintenance
visits were almost four times more likely to experience a UPS
failure than those who complete the recommended two preventive
maintenance visits per year.
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 I dont need to monitor my UPS
MYTH
#8 Reality Even with a UPS, your IT system
could still go down in case of an extended
power failure or if the UPS gets overload-
ed for too long.
Communication software can not only provide real-time notifi-
cation of UPS status, but also lets you assign automatic actions
to perform in case of a power event. This is extremely useful if
your system operates continuously without users being present to
manually shutdown affected equipment.
Additionally, virtualization is now bringing a new set of com-
plexities, as the bond between operating system and physical hard-
ware is no longer the standard. Some suppliers of UPS software
must ensure that shutdown software agents are installed on each
virtual machine as well as on the host machine. This can be quite
tedious if the number of virtual machines is large, which is becom-
ing the standard in many virtualized environments. Leading-edge
UPS manufacturers have developed new software platforms that
reduce this management complexity by integrating their software
into virtualization management platforms like VMwares vCenter,
Microsoft SCVMM or Citrix XenCenter. In these environments,
one single software installation can control and shutdown any clus-
ter of servers. Another benefit is the enablement of automatic live
migration of virtual machines in case of a power outage, as you are
no longer limited to the option of shutting down the servers and
stopping operations; business continuity is now possible through
this integration.
MYTH Once I have a UPS, my power
protection solution is
#9 complete
Reality A complete power protection solu-
tion typically includes more than just a UPS.
Here are some accessories worth considering:
UPS energy storage: Today, most UPS products use
lead acid batteries to store emergency standby power. A proven
technology with many decades of successful service in a variety
of industrial settings, the lead acid battery remains the most
cost-effective energy storage solution as measured by dollars per
minute of backup time.
Yet despite these merits, lead acid batteries are unpopular
among data center managers due to their size, weight, mainte-
nance requirements, toxic contents and relatively short lifespan,
among other issues. As a result, UPS makers have long been
searching for an alternative standby power technology thats
smaller, simpler and greener than lead acid batteries, yet no
more expensive to operate. Today, that hunt just may be nearing
its end. Several exciting new standby power solutions, all rapidly
approaching mainstream commercial viability, appear poised to
give the lead acid battery a run for its money, including flywheels,
ultracapacitors, fuel cells and lithium ion batteries.
Generator: During a utility failure, a UPS gives you the
few minutes of time you need to shut down servers gracefully.
These days, however, many companies cant afford to be without IT
systems for the hours or even days that may elapse before electrical
service is restored. Such organizations almost always include a gen-
erator in their power protection architecture. While UPSs provide
www.datacenterjournal.com
brief periods of emergency power, generators draw on a supply of
diesel fuel to keep IT systems operational for anywhere from 10
minutes to seven days or more.
PDUs: As an essential component of any power quality
infrastructure, power distribution units (PDUs) distribute power
to downstream ITE load equipment. Most companies use both
floor-mount PDUs, which provide primary distribution to server
racks, and rack-mount PDUs (also known as ePDUs), which
distribute power to individual servers and other devices. PDUs can
be equipped with optional devices like surge suppression and indi-
vidual breaker (branch) monitoring systems to monitor energy use.
A few points in energy
MYTH efficiency isnt going to save
#10
much
Reality The latest UPS technology can
aid in immense utility savings.
Today, UPSs are helping to maximize uptime
while being extremely energy-efficient and scalable. New UPSs
maximize efficiency by operating in multiple modes, changing
their operating characteristics to adapt to the electrical conditions
of the moment. By engaging internal components only as neces-
sary, these multi-mode UPSs can achieve exceptional efficiency, up
to 99% across a broad load range. Replacing legacy UPSs with the
latest energy-efficient technology is one way to reduce maintenance
and energy costs and ensure power reliability to a greater degree.
For example, in a 1-MW data center, a 10-year-old UPS could
be wasting 120 kW or more of utility power and dissipating a lot
of added heat. Replacing that vintage equipment with new, high-
efficiency UPSs can free up to 120 kW of power to support new IT
equipment and reduce the burden on cooling systems. Replacing
just one 550-kW UPS from a redundant UPS configuration with
a high-efficiency model could save more than $40,000 in power
and cooling costs each year, while eliminating 190 tons of carbon
dioxide emissions ad netting substantial utility company rebates.
n Conclusion
Businesses today invest large sums of money
in their IT infrastructure, as well as the power
required to keep it functioning. They count
on this investment to keep them productive
and competitive. Leaving that infrastructure
defenseless against electrical dips, spikes and
interruptions, therefore, is a bad idea.
A well-built power protection solution, featuring
high-quality, highly efficient UPS hardware, can
help keep your business applications available,
your power costs manageable and your data safe.
By familiarizing yourself with the basics of power
protection systems, and how to choose the right
one for your needs, you can ensure your mission-
critical systems always have the clean, reliable
electricity they need to drive long-term success. n
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 13
 DESIGN
corner

DESIGNING A
MEGA
Data center
by DON BEATY, P.E.

14 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com

 Introduction:
The first clarification required when considering the design of a mega data
center is what the definition of mega is. Large data centers can be thought of
in terms of physical footprint of a building or campus OR in terms of the amount
of critical power (i.e. power to IT equipment) that the data center provides. This
article is relevant to data centers as small as 15 MW of critical power and as
large as a data center campus consisting of multiple data center buildings
as well as other support structures such as security / administration buildings,
warehousing, training, housing, etc.

The optimal designs for mega data centers require a holistic approach since
there is so much to be potentially gained by considering a broader range of
tradeoffs across all fields. In our experience, we have always found it beneficial
to invest in a microclimate analysis due to the high concentration of heat
sources (cooling system heat rejection, generator heat rejection, electrical
equipment heat rejection, etc.). The microclimate analysis becomes even more
important and challenging as the density (e.g. KW / rack) increases.

www.datacenterjournal.com THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 15

Figure 1 Some of the Fields Associated with the Design of a Mega Data Center
The Power of a Performance
Centric Approach
The opportunities for greater perfor-
Acoustics
mance increase by the combination of a)
considering more variables for tradeoffs
and b) have those variables driven by one
Security Architectural or more performance statements that
are geared towards encouraging a more
holistic approach. The following are some
IT Civil oversimplified examples of performance
statements just to provide a sense for the
Data kind of design guidance and influence that
Geotechnical/
Telecom Center Environmental
is possible:
Design
Data center to be Tier 1 but easily
FireProtection Structural upgradable at any time to Tier 3 with
a fractional cost premium
Data center to be able to affordably
handle 100 to 200 watts / square foot
Mechanical SpacePlanning
(upgradable or down gradable).

Mega data centers are interesting be-

Electrical cause MORE often than NOT, they inten-
sify MOST decisions and MOST mistakes.
On the surface, their scale appears to war-
rant an economy of scale centric approach
(e.g. using a design that can simply be
Solving a Multi-Variable It stands to reason that tradeoffs are replicated in a module or some megawatt
Equation valuable. Therefore, why would you not increment). Also there is an opportunity
want to maximize the number of effec- to simply use the purchase power of buying
There are interdependencies and / or tive tradeoff opportunities? The industry larger quantity of any given product, equip-
inter-relationships amongst many fields defaults to a very prescriptive mode of ment, material, systems, etc. as a means of
associated with the design of a mega data thinking but this effectively creates require- saving cost.
center (Figure 1). Sometimes there seems ments that are too limiting; especially for Often, a MORE effective way to view
to be no correlation or influence but it is mega scale projects. this is to consider the increases in a quan-
very common for this to become the case at tity of scale to make each decision MORE
some point during the design evolution.
The fields shown in Figure 1 are
not intended to be all inclusive but if you Figure 2 Some Variables Associated with the Security Field
consider the fact that each of these 12 fields
has various parts or attributes to them, it is
not difficult to draw the conclusion that a
typical mega data center could easily have
hundreds, if not thousands, of variables
to consider during the design tradeoffs.
Some of the variables for one of the fields is
shown in Figure 2.
The cost centric industry trend con-
tinues to commoditize almost everything
including professional services. This in
turn encourages in design professionals to
typically reduce their overall scope to only
consider a few variables at most (e.g. PUE,
Tier Level, Density).
This certainly is an approach that
saves on professional design fees but often
it is a costly approach from a holistic
perspective (e.g. total cost of ownership
and / or return on investment).

16 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com

important and MORE valuable. This once
again ties into the notion of considering
MORE significant variables rather than
LESS.
What is the Right
Contracting Strategy?
On any project, there are a number
of team members with different contract-
ing arrangements (e.g. some with direct
contracts with the owner / client and some
with subcontracts with one of the compa-
nies that has a direct contract).
On mega scale projects, those team
members with the largest scope such as
a construction manager, owners rep, IT
manufacturer/provider, or mechanical/
electrical consulting engineer are likely to
have a greater influence over the design and
therefore are more likely to have a direct
contract with the owner / client. This can
lead to an overreliance on the owner / cli-
ent to play the role of project manager and
coordinate the scopes and desires of the
various team members.
Our experience has shown that there
is NO RIGHT or wrong method regard-
ing which companies have direct contracts
with the owner / client versus which ones
are subcontracts. The key is simply the
following:
A contracting strategy that results
in a clear definition of roles and
responsibilities
A contracting strategy that avoids
selfish or independent behavior in the
decision making process
In our data center experience, we
have worked as a prime professional cover-
ing EVERYTHING (architecture, engineer-
ing, IT infrastructure, commissioning, and
construction) as all the way to simply being
the mechanical / electrical consulting engi-
neer working either directly for the owner
or for one of the other project participants.
Both roles cab be successful and again,
especially on mega data centers, it is not so
much a matter of the contracting method,
but rather to ask how to get the team to
operate in an unselfish, barrier-free way.
A Focus on Human Behavior
The added pressure for commoditized
fees acts as a strong motivator to operate
independently and selfishly. The good
news is that the mega data center intensi-
fies the situations and therefore can expose
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Figure 3 Example of the Underlying Differences Between Two Data Center Industries
ITEQUIPMENT
TOPIC
MANUFACTURINGINDUSTRY
FactoryFabricated EndProduct
InsideaFactory EnvironmentWhereThe
(desiredenvironmentalcontrol) ProductIsProduced
FactoryWorker
Labor
(performancewellmeasured)
MinimalDefects QualityControl
ProductBasedOn
Common
APrototype
Regulations
ReasonablyConsistent Interpretation&
Enforcement
how costly these selfish behaviors are. As
a result, in a number of situations, it is
ultimately discovered that the smart play is
to invest MORE time and money in assess-
ment and design because it is seen as such a
great ROI (Return on Investment).
Just like the well-known fact that
the majority of ALL data center outages /
failures can be traced to human behavior
/ performance either directly or indirectly,
the same can be said for the project team.
As a result, on our projects, we have em-
phasized directly and indirectly the great
ROI associated with an increased focus on
the human behavior of the project team
including the owners internal team, design
team, construction team, and commission-
ing team.
Holistic Tradeoffs
The overall data center industry is
actually made up of a wide variety of indus-
tries (e.g. Facilities, IT, utility, construction,
etc.) that each has independent targets and
significantly different emphases. A mega
data center project exposes and escalates
the points of interface between these indus-
tries and it follows that success therefore
can be measured by the degree of seamless
integration of these traditionally isolated
industries.
An example of two of these isolated
industries and how different their way of
thinking is shown in Figure 3.
All of these industries play a critical
role and need to be considered holistically
(silica to utility) including the assessment
of tradeoffs in aspects such as:
FACILITYCONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
FieldFabricated
(typicallycustom,seldomprototype)
OutdoorsandIndoors
(withlimitedenvironmentalcontrol,
suchasweather)
ConstructionWorkers
(littleperformancemeasurement)
ManyMoreDefects
(thanFactoryFabricated)
Seldom
LessPredictable
(BuildingInspectorsviewsoftendiffer)
Cost (capital expenditure, operating
expenditure, TCO and ROI)
Schedule (speed to market / speed to
deployment)
Reliability / Availability
Future Flexibility (avoiding premature
obsolescence)
Green Design (Energy Efficiency &
Sustainability)
Some tradeoff examples that you may
or may not be familiar with include:
Ease of IT Operations vs. Facility
Operations this can include con-
sideration of the staffing caliber and/
or quantity as well as the strategy for
monitoring and reporting.
Ease & Impact of Future Adds,
Moves, Changes this involves an
inherent understanding of the drivers
and trends behind the IT hardware
and software to be able to better
provision the right level of future-
proofing in the power, cooling, net-
work systems as well as the logistical
aspects of disruption, risk, etc.
Ease & Efficiency of Handling Drasti-
cally Varying Loads this again
involves an understanding of the IT
hardware and software but speaks to
the flexibility in the power cooling
and network infrastructure and archi-
tecture to be able to deliver capacity
in a fluid and unrestrictive manner.
The following are a couple of more
detailed examples of great mega data center
holistic tradeoffs that are relatively un-
known to traditional data center design.
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 17
Holistic Tradeoff Detailed Example 1:
Structural Impact
Structural engineers are often accused
of overdesign. Often, some of this is caused
by the structural engineers obligation and
fear to have a 100% success rate that the
structural system has NO chance of failing
will NEVER harm anyone. It is hard to ar-
gue with that logic but individuals all have
different levels of competence, experience,
and personal level of risk aversion. As a
result, the approach to structural design
is NOT absolute but rather is impacted by
human behavior and human performance
of an individual.
The other perception of overdesign is
the complexity associated with structural
design in general. Much like the data
center as a whole, the structural design is
NOT a single variable equation and some
of the variables are LESS understood by
the greater project team. Therefore, there
are both human behavior and technical
issues associated with the structural design
approach.
NO professional wants to design
something and then be forced to redesign
for free because of coming in over budget.
Years ago, some clients paid for redesign
but the overall trend is for redesign to be
uncompensated. This essentially places
additional risk on the professional. With
the trend towards commoditized fees, the
natural tendency is going to be to overde-
sign sufficiently to mitigate the risk of any
mistakes in the design assumptions and yet
have a significant concern of being charged
with overdesign.
This overall combination of condi-
tions really drives a behavior for a struc-
tural engineer to operate in a defensive,
independent way based on the challenges
they face in this commoditized world.
We have experienced firsthand that
spending 25% - 50% premium on struc-
tural construction costs resulted in a total
project savings that easily offsets the 25%
- 50% increase on structural costs through
the flexibility it provides for the other sys-
tems and infrastructure.
Looking at things holistically can
really make a big difference. In the case
of the structural changes, it can impact IT
costs, number of racks (impact on CapEx,
OpEx, and revenue), electrical system costs,
cooling system costs, etc.
Often this is low hanging fruit, espe-
cially in a mega data center. However, it is
rarely exploited since it requires thinking
18 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
in terms of multi-variable, human behavior,
interdependencies, effective tradeoffs, etc.
We are NOT structural engineers but have
observed that when a structural engineer
works as a subconsultant to us, the amount
of fee that we pay them is insignificant
compared to the benefit. Our goal has
been to create very favorable contracting
conditions and financial benefits to the
structural engineer to remove the barriers
and achieve optimum results.
Holistic Tradeoff Detailed Example 2:
Constructability
For mega data centers and mega data
center campuses, we have observed an
overall behavior during the site selection
process of thinking too small. The cost of
land is very insignificant in comparison to
its impact on overall project cost. It can
easily impact professional services fees,
construction logistics, construction, opera-
tion, and adds/moves/changes. Often the
impact is a compounded impact resulting
in a disproportionately high impact on total
project costs.
We have seen significant double and
triple handling on a site just based on NOT
having enough site space during construc-
tion. This is particularly true when a site is
developed in phases. You can have the op-
eration staff and construction staff there on
site at the same time period. Concurrent
operation and construction can quickly
become a logistical nightmare that compro-
mises security, reliability, access, cleanli-
ness, traffic flow, etc. all of which lead to
poor cost, schedule and quality metrics.
For example, just the space for park-
ing the construction workers cars can
become complicated. In some cases we
have had to implement extreme measures
such as valet parking for the construction
workers because of mismatch of site space
to site construction.
Many people have used the term
Do NOT want to build a Swiss watch.
Essentially what that is saying is that it is
just too intricate and too sensitive to build
in an extremely confined space. The ease
of design, construction, commissioning,
operation, and adds/moves/changes can
be significantly and positively impacted by
being passionate about sizing a site to avoid
building a Swiss watch.
Often, the real estate team is seeking
to provide a site that meets the minimum
expectations at the lowest possible cost.
The incremental cost of exceeding these
minimum expectations, especially when
considered holistically to the cost of a
mega data center construction cost, would
be very insignificant and yet yield incred-
ible benefit / savings to the downstream
design and construction process (i.e. fewer
constraints).
Closing Comments
The design of a mega data center is
a complex multi variable equation. A tre-
mendous edge can be attained by consid-
ering more variables in a holistic manner
through challenging the commoditized
design and construction approaches that
are self-serving and stifle the opportunity
for innovation and optimization.
Through the introduction of de-
tails and elements that are not typically
considered in data center design such as
performance centric approaches, human
behavior, holistic tradeoffs, contracting
strategies, etc. it is hoped that this article
has helped open your mind to a much
broader approach to the design of a mega
data center. n
About the Author: Don Beaty started DLB
Associates Consulting Engineers in 1980. The
firm is active globally and has provided services
for mission critical facilities in over 35 states
and throughout the world. DLBs experience
includes over 4GW (GIGAWATTS) of critical
(IT) power, data center campuses that total
over 4,500 ACRES and thousands of mission
critical projects with a combined raised floor
(white space) area of over 16 MILLION square
feet. DLB have provided design, commissioning
and operations support services for a wide
variety of large and small data center clients
including eight of the largest Google data center
campuses worldwide.
While the data center industry is global, Don
is also very active globally having presented in
70 cities in 28 unique countries over the past
decade. Don is an ASHRAE Fellow and the 2012
recipient of the ASHRAE George B. Hightower
Technical Achievement Award in recognition
for his TC 9.9 leadership and contribution. He
has served in leadership positions on ASHRAE
committees on energy, equipment performance,
and data centers. He was the co-founder and
first chair of ASHRAE Technical Committee
TC 9.9 (Mission Critical Facilities, Technology
Spaces and Electronic Equipment) and, has
been a major contributor to over 10 data center
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on TC 9.9.
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www.datacenterjournal.com THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 19
 DESIGN
corner
Steps to Moving Towards
Building Systems
Integration
By Alan Dash
B
uildings are filled with multiple
systems including IT, security,
telephony, building manage-
ment, building monitoring,
automation and much more.
These systems have always had their own
management staff, infrastructure, software
and hardware, licenses, reporting features
and capabilities, maintenance agreements,
head-end space, monitors, servers and
other peripheral devices. However, techni-
cally speaking, theres no need to have all of
these separate components to run a facility.
In fact, today more can be done with less;
and Internet Protocol, a common means
for systems to communicate, is the enabler
for this.
In the past few years, theres been a
shift of non-IT and formerly non-IP sys-
tems porting over to the Internet Protocol
and traditional IT Network. Additionally,
there has always been a slow shift of change
for systems to move on to unified plat-
forms, even though the technical capabili-
ties have existed to make this shift long ago.
However, this shift is moving much faster
now. Todays building and data center
management systems, automation and
monitoring systems, security and access
control networks, overhead paging, even
clocks and employee time-keeping can be
20 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
found running on IP-based networks. This
is great news for data center owners and
managers since taking the step to merging
separate systems onto the IP network saves
time and money. Yet, there are still some
aspects to carefully consider as the road to
integration poses challenges along the way.
For building systems integration to work,
certain steps must be taken.
Moving to IP Systems Is Only
the First Step, Heres Step
Two
Theoretically, if systems were moved
over to IP, they should now be integrated.
Right? Not quite. When looking at all the
separate networks in todays facilities, data
center or otherwise, many companies are
surprised to see that there is still a negative
impact even with the change to IP. And
what is that negative impact? While IP itself
is a graceful and relatively elegant transport
means, it can result in multiple disparate
IP networks running through facilities,
with lots of them still managed by separate
departments, using separate infrastructure,
running on separate servers with differ-
ent software packages and licenses, over
different wired and wireless pathways. In
short, a bunch of separate non-IP networks
have been made better with the creation
of separate IP networks under the guise of
integrated systems; but what has also been
created are some real IP-based monsters
in our data centers and buildings. Ideally,
it would be optimal to get these different
topologies under real measurable control
using cost-justifications such as shared
resources, shared staff, shared data, shared
reporting and increased buying power as
primary drivers. But something is prevent-
ing this, or at least slowing it down. What
force is so powerful that it can stop us from
saving money, sharing data, and mitigating
downtime in the data center environment?
What is the Speed Bump?
The problem of true integration of
data center, IT, and building systems is not
technology, nor even technical. Rather,
it is cultural. The root of the problem
is competition, as competitiveness has
been rooted into the internal workings of
corporations right down to the department
level bowling team. Whats been created
are separate departments with separate
responsibilities, with different reporting
structures, with the staff placed in separate
rooms, in separate buildings, some with
separate entrances, with separate operating
www.datacenterjournal.com
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budgets. This is exactly what has been done down a path of integration that today can The first steps initiated by healthcare
with building systems and technologies. be seen as a model for other industries. to bring integration to their facilities were
Technology topologies have mirrored staff- The drivers were the same as we have for in the physical integration of pathways and
ing topologies, and then theyre expected to data centers today too much information spaces. Program space was being used up
work together without intervention. (data) in too many places (silos) that were for IT closets; separate space was used for
It gets worse. Not only have compa- not shared (stored). While there is not PA system head-ends and equipment; nurse
nies and departments been compartmen- enough space in this article to explain the call had a space; and building facilities
talized, but the same thing happens with entire process, it will review some steps in systems and other clinical and non-clinical
extracurricular events. Many companies the right direction of building and systems systems were all hidden away in whatever
have golf, softball, and other so-called integration, using the healthcare industrys space or area the responsible department
teaming events, with these teams created evolution to integration as an example. was able to find. These spaces were not
from separate departments right down The primary thing to know is that considered a shared common space; rather,
the line. Does the facility staff invite the there are three elements of a system: 1) they were silos following along with the
administrative staff onto their team to play The head-end whereby the processing silos of departments which set them up.
against the other departments? Of course and storage of data occur (including the Considered to be very valuable real estate,
not! They will play one person short before server, collection points, software, and reducing program space in a hospital by
they play with the enemy on their side. licenses); 2) the user or end-interface merging these non-clinical spaces into a
Did IT invite the lone golfer from ship- (normally a desk-top PC, mobile device, or shared environment was the first step on
ping and receiving onto their department point of use data collection interface along this long and successful trip of physical
team for the annual golf outing? No. The with the software and licenses); 3) and convergence. By first providing a single,
shipping department is the enemy and if the infrastructure between (pathways and secure, audited space for back of house sys-
they dont have golfers then thats one less spaces, conduit, physical infrastructure, tems, hospitals were able to free this newly
team in the way of the trophy and the year- and media (copper and fiber, wireless) used unused space for clinical use and often
long bragging rights associated with being to house equipment and cable). revenue-generating functions.
number one!
Building technologies run the path
of building departments, which run the Figure 1 Separate head-end yet shared data
gauntlet of a competitive atmosphere. They
could be integrated but remain separated.
Though this is not intentional, it has been
recognized by some, with most firms at-
tempting to resolve it and make it better.
Countless articles have also been describing
the problem. Many of us read them, nod,
blink once or twice, and then move on with
our day because weve already integrated
right along departmental lines. This is
more often the case within a data center
which is part of a corporate office building,
other contiguous facility or campus envi-
ronment. Stand-alone data centers appear
to get the message; and this may be that
because they are away from the competitive
environment, there may be less interde-
partmental competition and therefore
more of a feeling of common goals between
departments.

Proven Concept in Another

Business Type
We cannot help with the cultural
problems associated with the barrier to
true building integration, but the concept
of unifying technologies has been proven
successful in some genres of business and is
a feature that can work in any campus en-
vironment, data center, and building type.
This lesson comes from the healthcare in-
dustry. Many years ago, healthcare started

22 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com

 The next step was to share head-end
data integration and actually get these
systems to communicate together, now
that healthcare had a handle on what they
all were. The concept of middleware -
thought of as a traffic cop of sorts - was
born and matured in hospitals around
the world, where software was placed as
a focal point of all alerts and events from
these dissimilar systems. This software,
which has the capability of receiving alert
and event data from completely different
systems, understands that data and routes
it based on pre-defined metrics to appro-
priate staff. This enabled a one-stop-shop
of sorts for managing events on a common,
shared platform. While this step will not
mitigate head-end devices, its main func-
tion is in reporting from separate systems
to one point.
Because the prior step does not
mitigate head-end devices, departments
still have their full responsibilities and still
maintain the same systems. While middle-
ware can be used to control other systems,
thereby reducing a number of costly areas
of control, the intent from a healthcare
perspective is to collect the data - not
eliminate collection and control points.
Figure 1 indicates an example where a BMS
network is still a separate environment, yet
tied to share data with the IT network. If
the IT network fails, the facilities network
remains intact. This is true for healthcare,
and can be equally applied to a data center
environment.
Clinical staffs (who had too few
members, large areas to cover, and several
different system types to learn) were the
first to benefit from the integration of these
systems onto a common logical platform.
The ability to collect data and display it on
one interface, eliminating the need to use
multiple systems for the same data, sped
processes and decreased the incidence of
errors. This efficient process can benefit
any company or business type, especially
data centers where quick access to informa-
tion from multiple sources is crucial.
The final step for integration, and the
step that is continually being developed, is
to use collected data to provide event cor-
relation so that the impact of an event spin-
off could be pre-determined. For example,
an overheat condition within a controlled
space may impact more than just the facili-
ties HVAC department. It could impact any
department with equipment located in that
space. Common practice is that the facili-
ties HVAC staff is alerted to the trouble,
www.datacenterjournal.com
yet the other departments are not or, if
they are, it happens too late for them to
SaveTime...
act and to mitigate an outage. Since other SaveEnergy...
systems running in that space can also be
negatively impacted, companies should SaveMONEY...
use integration to alert all stakeholders.
Event correlation provides the opportunity
to proactively warn other (integrated)
stakeholders of the event so that they can
respond early and mitigate non direct-
event related outages. This topic and the
possibilities around this are fodder for
another article. However, the only way
that this type of alert management can be
successful is when conditions of techni- Sealraisedoorcableopenings
cal capability are congruent with cultural withAirGuardgrommetsand
acceptance when we can integrate the
departments and the technologies and
realizeimmediatecostsavingsin
align them to a common goal. yourdatacenter!
Where Most Buildings are Datacentersrequirecoolairto
Today maintainopmaltemperaturetokeep
serversfunconingproperly.Air
As mentioned earlier, though theres migraonorleakagethroughcable
a growing shift moving towards a unified holesindatacenteroorsbypassing
platform for building systems, there are serverscanleadtodrascinecient
many buildings that havent evolved there
useofcoolairandwastedenergy
yet, per the reasons just explained.
dollars.
In order for buildings to move to a
true uniform platform, data center and WiththeinstallaonofAirGuard,an
facility leadership need to take action and immediateenergysavingsbenetis
create an environment whereby different realized.AirGuardsignicantly
departments can come to rely on each minimizescoolairloss,while
other in the commission of their job. Too improvingstacairpressuretocool
many employees have become comfortable
datacenterequipment.
with the concept that the tools, comput-
ers, systems and networks necessary to
complete their work belong them for their
sole benefit to meet their departmental
goals. Too many employees have also taken Extreme,
an attitude that none shall pass when it withSafetyCover
comes to the needs of other departments.
In reality, these components, systems and
AirGuardExtreme
outcomes belong to the company - not the
departments. Its time to share responsibil-
ities, data, infrastructure, pathways, spaces
AirGuardgrommetsareasimple
and success of the enterprise - not just the inexpensivesoluontopromote
success of the department meeting annual moreecientcoolingofyour
budget goals and the team bowling trophy. datacenter
About the Author: Alan Dash RCDD/
Calltodayfora
OSP, CCSE, Global Technology Lead and
Associate Partner, Syska Hennessy Group, has FREEAirGuard
over 30 years of experience on information
communications technology consulting and brochure
designing for a diverse array of structures,
including data centers, laboratories,
1.866.631.4238
healthcare facilities, sports/entertainment
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 DESIGN
corner
Green Design
Features for
Data Centers
By dan prows
M
any companies are working
toward reducing their en-
ergy consumption and en-
vironmental impact of their
facilities, and sustainability
is fast becoming an important part of
company culture. The increasing number of
data centers nationally and the emergence
of the mega data center has pushed data
center energy consumption to a new level.
This energy consumption and its effect on
the environment, has data center compa-
nies seeking greener and more sustainable
ways to address their concerns.
Every data center project has differ-
ent requirements and circumstances, and
finding the appropriate balance between
corporate responsibility, sustainability,
marketability, first costs, and return on
investment, will always be a challenge.
Because sustainable design is relatively new
and corporate leadership is usually limited
in high level sustainable design experience,
companies tend to struggle with under-
standing where to begin when designing
a green project that provides substantial
environmental benefit.
The first step in achieving a sustain-
able project is to obtain the Owners com-
mitment to reaching a certain level of sus-
tainability and then establishing associated
goals to reach that level as early as possible.
Several of the greenest options involving
data center design and construction are
applicable only to the pre-design phase. Lo-
cation, site selection, and new construction
vs. renovation decisions are all decisions
that must be addressed early in the project
timeline and play a vital role in developing
a sustainable project. So when these deci-
sions are being made, think energy.
24 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
Green data centers can come in
many shades of green as is relative to
their level of sustainable design features
and construction. Achieving a specific
level of a green building certification
makes it easier for most to relate to the
greenness of a project. However, at the
present time green building rating sys-
tems are not specifically designed to ad-
dress the true nature of data centers, i.e. a
no frills building with few occupants and
large energy consumption. The credit
weighting of the rating systems is not in
balance when it comes to rating the value
of credits relative to their environmental
benefit in data centers. To accomplish
equilibrium, the majority of the credits
need to address the issue with the largest
environmental impact, energy.
It is important to understand that
energy is more than operational consump-
tion. While energy efficiency in operations
is a vital piece to solving the sustainability
puzzle, the most important type of energy
to consider for the highest levels of sustain-
ability is embodied energy. To address
embodied energy as well as other chal-
lenges relative to green data center design,
consider the following as a starting point in
achieving your sustainability goals.
Renovation
This may come as a surprise to many,
but renovating an existing building is argu-
ably the greenest feature a company can
make when choosing to bring a new data
center online. Regardless of how energy
efficient a new building is designed, the
embodied energy required to design and
construct a new facility dwarfs the amount
of embodied energy needed to renovate
an existing building. Moreover,
renovation most often utilizes existing
infrastructure and local services within
a developed community. In short, reuse
trumps recycling, energy efficiency design,
and sustainable product selection when
deciding which green features provides the
most substantial environmental benefit.
Location
Location, location, location! Data
centers are built in different locations for
different reasons. If reducing heat load with
the least amount of power is the primary
objective, go with the simplest solution.
Free cooling! It costs nothing to use the
natural environment to cool and there
are no mechanical parts to fail. Select a
location in a cold climate (preferably in an
established area) reducing the external heat
loads on the building. If deepest darkest
Canada isnt the right fit, find a location
with prevailing winds to take advantage of
passive cooling, or a cold water lake that
can facilitate a closed loop chilled water
system.
One
IT Systems
hidden opportunity that IT
systems enjoy is the speed at which new
www.datacenterjournal.com
hardware and information management
techniques are improved. IT hardware has
a short life cycle and as such, new energy
reduction benefits can be realized every 2-5
years. Newer hardware either uses far less
energy to process its workload or it can in-
crease its workload with the same amount
of energy. Coupling improved hardware
performance with server virtualization can
generate substantial reductions in pro-
cess energy consumption. This improved
performance may also allow a reduction in
total hardware requirements.
Durability
Durability is the dark horse in the
green world and is a key feature in energy
reduction. The longer a building lasts the
less energy is used to build, repair and/
or rebuild a structure. Data centers by
the nature of their design intent which
is to safely and securely store vital data,
lend themselves to durable design as they
require a greater amount of protection than
other commercial buildings. Data centers
tend to have a simple box shape which re-
duces potential water leaks when compared
to buildings with more complex design
features such skylights, large number of
windows, decorative facades. Data centers
exterior components tend to be construct-
ed with concrete and steel. The end result
is buildings that have a far greater life span
than traditional commercial buildings.
Co-Generation
Although this feature is not very
common, it is definitely a top five feature
on the green shading scale. Cogeneration
comes in two flavors, heat reclamation and
peak shaving. Heat reclamation allows data
centers to utilize waste heat from genera-
tors to run absorptive chillers which in
turn provide cooling for the data center.
Although the primary purpose of genera-
tors is redundancy in the case of primary
power loss, they can also be used to reduce
demand loads. Peak shaving not only saves
the owners substantial amounts of money
on the utility costs, it also reduces the
large scale peak power demand on power
providers. The sustainable benefit here is
localization of power production reduces
the size of required power delivery infra-
structure and greatly reduces power losses
in transmission.
Air Flow Management
One of the largest culprits of opera-
tional energy loss in data centers is mixing
cold and warm air. This loss is caused
by mixing bypass air flow around a rack.
Warm air from the rear of the rack is drawn
into the front of the rack where it mixes
with cooler air before it enters the rack to
perform its desired cooling. To complicate
the issue, some cool air passes around the
www.datacenterjournal.com
rack and mixes with warm room air before
returning to the AHU. Both conditions
cause the total air flow to increase in order
to meet the rack cooling load. The solution
is hot isle/cold isle configuration, following
best practices in rack management, and uti-
lizing air containment systems. Proper use
of these measures will significantly reduce
warm/cool air mixing with a corresponding
decrease in overall air flow requirements.
Cooling
Reclaimed Water for
Towers
Reclaimed water and cooling towers
go together like milk and cookies. While
not available in many areas and only ap-
plicable to facilities that utilize cooling
towers, using reclaimed water for cooling
tower is truly a top ten green practice in
data centers. While saving potable water
at the vanities and toilets is always good
practice, it would take hundreds of data
centers with water efficient fixtures to even
begin to make a dent in the sheer volume of
potable water savings that is accomplished
by using reclaimed water in cooling towers
on a large data center.
Cooling Systems
Deciding on which cooling system to
use in a data center is not an easy deci-
sion to make. System choice is relative to
facility size, environmental conditions, and
first costs. Smaller facilities tend to utilize
direct expansion (DX) systems, while mid-
size and large facilities use water cooled
computer room air conditioner (CRAC)
units with cooling tower(s). The use of
water cooled equipment provide the most
tonnage of cooling for the least amount of
energy and, life cycle costs tend to run far
less than DX systems.
Another alternative is chilled water
air conditioning (CRAH) units. Since the
chilled water units do not include refrigera-
tion cycle components, they have fewer
moving parts, less maintenance, and longer
service life. Since the refrigeration function
is provided by a central water chiller rather
than localized compressors, the energy
consumption per ton of refrigeration is
reduced.
Projects can further reduce energy
consumption in their mechanical sys-
tems by adding high-efficiency variable
frequency drive (VFD) into both pumps
and chillers and utilizing condenser water
reset. As noted above, use of free cooling
with air side economizers or water side
economizers can also be used in areas
with accommodating climate conditions.
Humidification and mechanical controls
for the cooling system should always be
considered in design and will be a factor
with overall system efficiencies.
Electrical Systems
Rotary uninterruptable power sup-
ply (UPS) streamlines the conversions in
voltage and the amount of AC to DC to AC
power conversions that normally occurs in
traditional UPS systems. Power conversion
improvement can lead to reductions in
total data center IT load up to 6-8%. Ad-
ditional opportunities can be found in high
voltage DC power distribution. Compared
to standard 48 V systems, higher voltages
allow installation with much less copper
(smaller conductors) and higher transmis-
sion efficiencies.
Although it may be inconsequently
compared to the overall power usage of a
data center, using energy efficient lighting
fixtures (T-8, T-5, or LED) and general
lighting controls including motion detec-
tors provide excellent energy reduction at a
reasonable cost.
Verification
Measurement and
(M&V)
Actively monitoring energy and water
usage is a vital component of any sustain-
ability plan. Measurement and verifica-
tion (M&V) reduces maintenance cost,
increases equipment life, and maintains
maximum efficiency of equipment by iden-
tifying trends in efficiencies, and providing
an early warning to potential failures. Op-
erating data centers at maximum efficiency
and maintaining sustainability goals can
only be accomplished with active monitor-
ing (M&V).
Sustainable design in data centers
provides companies the ability to address
the energy consumption and environmen-
tal impact of their facilities. Forward think-
ing design teams are able to incorporate
the use of existing infrastructure with high
efficiency operating equipment to meet
company goals and limit the impact of
data centers on the environment. Although
technology provides many solutions in
reducing energy consumption, most of the
answers will be found in energy reduction
through increase life cycle performance of
the building and equipment in data center
facilities. n
(About the Author) As the Department
Manager of Morrison Hershfields Southeast
Building Consultation Group, Dan Prows
is responsible for the overall development,
operation, and growth of sustainable services
and building consultation in the Southeast
United States. He teaches sustainable
design and green construction methodology
to architects, engineers, and construction
personnel throughout the country. Dan
specializes in sustainability consultation on very
large, high process energy consuming buildings
and operations.
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 25
 it corner

Some data centers

are getting smaller?
by jeffrey R. clark, phd

At the top of the data center world are the mega data centersfacilities whose
massive scale dwarfs the computer closets (by comparison) of most companies. But
the trend toward larger data centers among some large companies contrasts with
another trend elsewhere in the industry: many data centers are getting smaller. The
means and motivations of these companies that are downsizing their IT operations
vary, but a number of driving factors play a major part in most cases.

Does Consolidation Make many data centers into a smaller number of Economic/Financial
Data Centers Bigger or facilities will most likely end up with larger Factors
Smaller? data centers; a smaller company consolidat-

M
any larger companies
(and organizations like
governments) are seek-
ing to reduce costs and
operating complexities by
consolidating their data centers into fewer,
larger facilities. In some sense, then, con-
solidation is driving increased data center
size. But it is also a driver toward smaller
data centers, since within a data center it
involves reduction in the amount of infra-
structurean attempt to do more with less.
The difference in the result of consolidation
depends on the situation: in some sense,
consolidation can mean two different
things. A large company consolidating
ing within a data center (i.e., eliminating
excess server capacity; replacing older
servers with fewer, higher-power servers;
and so on) is likely to end up with a smaller
data center footprint (for example, it might
convert freed space into an office area).
Thus, consolidation seems to be driv-
ing two disparate trends, but a number of
factors demonstrate clearly the reasons why
many companies are aiming smaller instead
of larger. Individually, smaller may simply
mean designing a smaller data center than
might otherwise be expected, moving to a
smaller facility or consuming less coloca-
tion space, or actually reducing data center
footprint within an existing facility.
Money (or, more specifically, a lack
of it) is a major motivation in companies
moving generally toward smaller data
center designs. Here are a few of the driving
factors.
The economy isnt recovering as
much as you might think.
Although employment numbers may
be down slightly, they are still high (and
they dont really represent the employment
situation accurately), the overall economy
is seeing little by way of recovery. Many
companies are still struggling with tight
budgets, and for those that view IT as a
means and not an end, data center expenses
are often viewed as necessary evils. IT bud-

26 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com

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 gets are thus unlikely to see much in the
way of increases, requiring the data center
manager to do more with less. Further-
more, the lack of funds makes construction
costs even more burdensome, and with
outsourcing offering a pay-as-you-go op-
tion, many companies see a way out of the
capital costs of building a data center.
Energy costs continue to rise.
Name your reasonpolitical tensions
in the Middle East, inflation, regulations,
lack of new energy production infra-
structure, growing demand in emerging
1X The Data Journal
5.375 x 7.85economies
with photoor all300
of thedpi
aboveenergy
costs continue to rise, making the proposi-
Sherman, TexaS
tion of running a data center a headache
to companies concerned about expenses.
For those that do operate or plan to build
a data center, smaller sounds better from
the perspective of cost: less infrastruc-
ture generally means lower costs. Higher
operating costs also naturally puts a pinch
on available capital, meaning a companys
maximum capacity is decreased.
Data centers eat water, too.
Energy is the most widely reported
resource consumed in large quantities by
data centers, but water is used by many
as well. Some consume large amounts of
water, putting pressure on utility compa-
nies in extreme cases. Like electricity, the
cost of water is unlikely to see a decrease
anytime soon, further driving downsizing
as a means to stay within budget.
Virtualization
If consolidation is peanut butter,
then virtualization is chocolatein many
ways, they go together. Virtualization pools
compute, storage and networking resources
and reallocates them according to demand
in a manner independent of the capacity of
a given server or storage drive, for example.
This approach thus enables greater utiliza-
tion rates for equipment, meaning a facility
can generally get by with less equipment
(and thats where consolidation comes
in). As long as the combined resources
can handle peak workloads, a company
can minimize its IT infrastructureand,
concomitantly, supporting infrastructure
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(since, for example, unutilized servers still
consume power as long as they are turned
on). Modular expansion may require a
little more planning from the start of a data
center project, but it can pay significant
dividends in savings. Thus, even in the
face of increasing demand for data center
services, companies can still aim small with
the confidence that they can expand when
needed, should growth require it.
Higher Densities
IT architectures like blade servers can
vastly increase power densities in a data
center, reducing the required amount of
floor space for a given compute capacity.
Although this may require greater cooling
infrastructure (beyond certain power densi-
ties, even air conditioning can be insuffi-
cient), it can be worth the tradeoff in some
instances.
New Process Technologies
In accordance with Moores Law, pro-
cess technologies for processors continue to
shrink, providing a given level of comput-
ing capability in a smaller area and smaller
power envelope. A server can thus pack
more of a compute punch in a given volume
and for a given power budget. Unfortunate-
ly, however, demand is scaling right along
with compute capabilitiesthus, smaller,
faster processors dont enable as much of
a data center shrink as one might hope.
Nevertheless, Moores Law has enabled
companies to avoid sprawling data centers.
Outsourcing
The ultimate data center downsizing
involves outsourcing. Outsourcing options
run the gamut from one or two services
such as backup in the cloud or colocation of
serversto complete elimination of a data
center in favor of cloud computing. For
some companies, the demands of con-
structing and operating a data center are
just too much, particularly if IT is highly
peripheral to the companys business. To
some extent, a company that outsources to
shrink its data center is really just passing
the buck: someone must provide the data
center capacity. (Ah! Maybe thats why
mega data centers are becoming more com-
mon!) The following are some noteworthy
options for IT outsourcing:
www.datacenterjournal.com
Colocation:
Colocation is the older brother of ba-
sic hosting services. Instead of counting on
an Internet company to provide everything
but the HTML, however, colocation cus-
tomers count on the provider to essentially
be responsible for all of the infrastructure
they would need to run their servers in a
data center. The company just installs the
servers, purchasing floor space, bandwidth,
cooling capacity, security and power distri-
bution from the provider. The colocation
provider is able to amortize the infrastruc-
ture costs across a wide base of customers.
The result for the customer is a smalleror
nonexistentdata center, at least in a sense.
Visitors to the companys campus wouldnt
find a building or room dedicated to server
hardware; they would just find individual
computers with network connections. Co-
location is thus outsourcing of data center
infrastructure, short of the IT equipment.
Public cloud:
The public cloud is probably what
most industry observers would think of
first when they see the words IT outsourc-
ing. The public cloud goes a step beyond
colocation: it involves outsourcing of
the data center infrastructure and the IT
equipment as well, leaving customers with
nothing but a bill for services rendered.
Capital expenses are removed entirely from
the equation. (Again, this doesnt mean data
center capacity evaporates like, well, wa-
tersomeone must carry the resource load,
it just isnt the customer.) Furthermore,
the customer isnt required to deal with
software or hardware problems that might
arise on the servers; its all the responsibil-
ity of the cloud service provider. This is the
ultimate data center downsizing: shove off
the entire mess on someone else, and just
pay for the end result: networking, compute
and storage services. As with anything that
sounds too good to be true, the cloud car-
ries with it a number of concerns, includ-
ing matters of security and cost. (Whether
cloud computing is truly less expensive
in the long term is a matter still under
debate. In all likelihood, it depends on the
customer.) The public cloud is not necessar-
ily an all-or-nothing proposition, however:
companies can always go for something in
between. If a company has an existing data
center but needs greater capacity, it can
outsource that extra capacity to the cloud,
maintaining some resources in house but
completely sidestepping the need for a
capital-intensive data center expansion.
Outsourcing enables companies to re-
duce their data center sizes (either by elimi-
nating expansions, by building facilities
that only partially meet company demand
and outsourcing the rest, or by not building
a data center at all). But in a sense, this is
a ghost effect: the net data center capacity
of the industry at large is not decreasing (al-
though larger data centers may offer greater
efficiency compared with smaller facilities).
n Conclusions
Mega data centers make
big headlines, but for many
companies, smaller is better
when it comes to IT. A
number of factors are driving
companies to build smaller
data centers compared with
what they might have done
several years ago. These
factors include a stagnant
(at best) economy, rising
energy prices, improvements
in cooling technology and
a greater reliance on free
cooling, virtualization and
consolidation, modular data
center design strategies,
higher-density deployments,
and improved semiconductor
process technology.
Colocation and the cloud
collectively, outsourcingalso
play a major role in decreasing
data center size for many
companies, as they eliminate
the need for these companies
to maintain infrastructure on
premises. But outsourcing is
something of a ghost effect:
the data center capacity
and infrastructure doesnt
evaporate, it is simply moved
to another company. And this
shift is part of whats driving
the growth of mega data
centers that provide cloud
services. Nevertheless, for
many companies, smaller
facilities are indeed better. n
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 29

Natural Disasters
Are Not the Only Reason to Have a
Data Recovery Plan
I
ts no surprise news stories are
prioritized. The more violent they
are, the more public interest and
the higher they rank. So it stands
to reason disasters of magnitude,
especially natural disasters make front
page news. But another reason newspapers
lead with disasters is because stories of this
nature trigger empathy. As human beings
we readily identify with others affected by
tragedy, even envision our own survival in
comparable situations.
For IT professionals, theres a similar
correlation when it comes to IT disasters.
As a group, we understand the magnitude
of responsibility involved in restoring pri-
mary production servers or recovering lost
data in the aftermath of an IT disaster. This
is because we know all too well that unin-
terrupted flow of accurate, real-time infor-
mation can critically cripple a business.
Yet, while events like fires, floods, hur-
ricanes and tornadoes are perhaps the most
news-worthy for the general public, in the
IT world, theyre just a few of the circum-
stances responsible for bringing a company
to a standstill. Downtime from power fail-
ures, malicious software attacks, disgruntled
employees and a host of other problems can
be just as devastating to a corporate data
environment. For the most part, when busi-
ness stops, costs mount quickly.
30 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
By robert gast
Although unplanned downtime (such
as those associated with natural disasters
or hardware and software failures) can be
devastating, the majority of system and
data unavailability is actually the result
of planned downtime due to required
maintenance. In fact, statistics show that
unplanned downtime accounts for only
about 20 percent of all downtime, whereas
planned downtime is close to 80 percent.
Take the case of a 24/7 enterprise. Per-
forming critically important hardware,
software, security and data maintenance
can be tricky when production servers
cant be taken down during business hours.
Yet, even with a round-the-clock busi-
ness, downtime is essential for backups
and implementing various software
upgrades to protect the business and keep it
competitive.
When it comes to planned downtime,
there are three primary subsets:
1. Normal IT-infrastructure
Operations:
These are activities that are performed
on a regular basis to maintain system pro-
tection and health. For instance, e-mail is a
mission-critical system for most companies
and for good reason. Recently, a delay in
e-mail delivery for BlackBerry users on all
U.S cell phone networks caused enormous
IT OPS
frustration for Blackberry users. But in
addition to users being inconvenienced in
situation like this one, the financial losses
that result from a maintenance related out-
age can be substantial.
2. Maintenance:
These are tasks involved with
program and software activities, such as
program fixes. Software, with its many op-
erational layers, is a very complicated piece
of the computing puzzle. Rarely are any
two implementations of business-critical
software systems exactly the same. Apply-
ing bug fixes, point releases or full releases
can be sketchy, and sometimes serious
problems go unnoticed for days or weeks.
If the base software systems have been
customized, the implementation window
and success uncertainty factor increase
exponentially.
3. Unique periodic events:
This refers to deployments of hard-
ware and software, which can usually be
scheduled with substantial lead-time. The
reality is several undertakings have to go
right for a server migration or new software
implementation project to go well. Its a
mistake to think any piece of hardware or
software will come alive after following a
few simple steps. Often despite good plans
www.datacenterjournal.com
and good intentions, problems arise, and the
result is that these types of procedures take
much longer to complete than planned. In
general, technicians acknowledge this reality,
yet one unintended consequence can be a
kneejerk reluctance to embark on such initia-
tives in the future.
Regardless of the type of downtime,
mitigating the risks is essential for a company
to stay afloat in todays competitive market.
By following a few basic steps, protecting
your data can be a fairly straight-forward and
doable task.
Establish a Co-location
Facility
Most IT professionals agree its just
good business practice to have a plan B when
it comes to IT protection. For companies
with an approved business continuity plan
in place and a project budget to support it,
establishing an off-site co-location facility is
often the first step.
Because a co-location facility is es-
sentially a completely duplicated hot site
ready to go at a moments notice, locality
and accessibility are primary considerations.
Equally important is having a clear vision on
how the entire data center configuration will
be duplicated. Ultimately the goal in creating
a co-location is to provide a place to move a
complex web of data and applications with-
out users experiencing any downtime regard-
less of the reason for the switch. For instance,
the same co-location facility used in disaster
recovery efforts can also be used for maxi-
mizing uptime for business-critical systems
and utilized to provide better management of
the data center day-to-day operations.
Once the location is chosen, hard-
ware and infrastructure need to be set up
to facilitate the next step, the transfer of
systems. This can be accomplished using
tape, a removable disk, or with a continuous
data protection product which enables you
to replicate data from one or many locations
and additionally allows the systems to be
switched on demand. When this is com-
pleted, the next task is determining when to
bring the servers online, to test, or configure
them.
Protect Critical Servers
First
Although it stands to reason IT systems
vary from company to company depend-
www.datacenterjournal.com
ing upon the type of business, in every case,
some systems are more critical than others.
For instance, most businesses would find
it difficult to survive without the following
systems:
Accounting
Basic office applications
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
CRM (Customer Relationship
Management)
HRM (Human Resource Management)
Email
Web apps and content management
systems
Keeping this in mind, begin by deter-
mining and ranking the companys systems
from most critical to least. Then, start with a
phased approach and steadily set up the co-
location facility with the most critical first,
rolling out the less critical ones over time.
Centralize Operations
Finally, following the prioritizing of
critical systems, consolidate and centralize
remote servers to reduce the need for a sepa-
rate set of technical experts at each location
for regular maintenance. This also allows
for a more efficient centralized management
team to maintain your primary communica-
tion and maximize uptime.
Whether in the aftermath of a di-
saster or recouping following a scheduled
maintenance, the most important business
continuity task is resuming business critical
operations. Start by determining where vul-
nerabilities lie. Then, establish a co-location
site ready for any interruption where critical
systems are given top priority.
With a continuous stream of factors
necessitating both planned and unplanned
downtimes, having a plan in place for all IT
disasters is essential to ensure quality service,
regardless of the circumstance, in todays IT-
dependent world. n
About the Author: Robert Gast is an IT industry
analyst with Vision Solutions. As a technologist,
author and speaker, he has been firmly anchored
in the IT industry for nearly three decades. Vision
Solutions is the worlds leading provider of
information availability software and services for
Windows, Linux, IBM Power Systems and Cloud
Computing markets. For more information, visit
www.visionsolutions.com.
Disaster Can Strike
Any Business...
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ight now, your data center is under
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How to Make Private
Cloud Initiatives
Matter to Your CEO
By Jason Cowie
C
hief information officers
understand private clouds and
the benefits associated with
the technology, but they still
need to sell the initial invest-
ment to other executives CEOs and chief
financial officers. To C-level leaders, the
CIOs ability to explain concrete return on
investment and demonstrated value makes
all the difference between embracing cloud
computing or abandoning cloud initiatives
that could have been hugely beneficial. So
how can CIOs present the business-friendly
benefits of the private cloud to their bosses?
The value of private cloud
education
For starters, CIOs need to look at
themselves as educators. Some might feel
32 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
this is less necessary than it once was. Last
fall, for example, the Computing Technol-
ogy Industry Association (CompTIA)
surveyed a group of 500 IT and business
professionals and 400 IT firms. Among
its findings were positive indicators about
executive understanding of the cloud. The
58 percent of executives and IT staff who
said they had significantly increased their
knowledge of the cloud suggests that the
CIOs role as educator should actually be
shrinking.
However, there is still a serious dis-
connect threatening the adoption of private
clouds. CIOs and business-focused execu-
tives are not necessarily always on the same
page about this technology or its benefits.
CIOs not only understand private clouds
and the benefits associated with automa-
tion and management solutions, but they
are also actively trying to sell it internally.
To do so, CIOs need to think like busi-
ness leaders, and prepare for the questions
CEOs are likely to ask:
Didnt we just invest in
virtualization? Virtualization was on
the IT must-have list years ago, and it
required CEO and CFO convincing back
then, too. CIOs need to explain that
virtualization was only the beginning of
their companies journeys to private clouds.
Yes, virtualization delivered increased
flexibility, agility and cost-savings. CIOs
should tout those benefits when they bring
up private cloud investments, and focus
on leveraging the current investment in
the virtual data center as a key component
to transforming the way they deliver and
manage infrastructure.
But are we about to lose technology
for which weve already paid? For
CIOs who pledge to embrace a pragmatic
path toward a true private cloud, the
answer to this question should be no.
No CEO wants to rip and replace recent
IT investments, and the right steps toward
the cloud should not require that kind
of sacrifice. The smart CIO answers this
question quickly and emphatically.
Is infrastructure a critical need
right now? The way we think about
private clouds is evolving from an
infrastructure investment that supports
the business to a strategic enabler that
not only drives down costs but also
improves customer service and the
speed of delivery. Private clouds are
about far more than infrastructure and
fundamentally about leveraging the speed
and agility of virtualization with repeatable,
standardized, and highly optimized
processes. Therefore, CIOs should move
infrastructure conversations to more
compelling arguments about competitive
advantage in the market.
What challenges would private
cloud introduce? Communication is
the key to avoiding the pitfalls that can
derail valuable initiatives before they ever
begin. CIOs should work hard to avoid
confusion about expectations, results
and deliverables. The creation of a cloud
requires people, processes and technology,
and CEOs should be made aware of that
fact from the start. Process re-engineering,
aligning business goals with IT objectives,
and ensuring the right measurements and
people are in place are essential to eventual
success. Is the CEO on board? The CIO
needs to know early on in the initiative.
www.datacenterjournal.com
DCW
 Choosing the
Data Center World
conference was the
right choice to find
solutions for our
data center needs
and issues.
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Baptist Health South Florida

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How long is this going to take?
CIOs should go into meetings with their
CEOs and CFOs with recommendations
on solutions that quickly and effectively
deliver quantifiable private cloud
computing competencies. If you cannot
measure or commit to actual results
in a reasonable timeframe, expect to
be met with reluctance and resistance.
Clearly document objectives that align
to organization requirements with a
common understanding of the deliverables
associated with a private cloud (self-service
provisioning, IT costing & showback,
service catalogs, etc.). In doing so,
expectations and timeframes should be
aligned with a unified vision of what is
actually getting delivered.
Benefits for IT, benefits
for business
Once the questions and concerns are
addressed, the CIO can turn the focus to
the benefits of delivering IT in a private
cloud. The conversation between IT and
business should focus on quantifiable and
tangible benefits of moving towards a pri-
vate cloud. For example, improvements in
provisioning and approval times, reduction
34 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
in costs (if chargeback is being used), and
improved customer service through self-
service management portals.
IT teams can meet CEOs financial
expectations once they hit more strategic
phases of virtualization deployments by
integrating features such as IT cost visibility
and chargeback. In terms of transparency,
administrators and executives want to
know what resources are going into the
private cloud and how to curb consump-
tion wherever possible.
This is an opportunity to promote the
value of speed, agility, and the simplifica-
tion of data center management since cloud
management solutions automatically calcu-
late costs, automate routine administrative
tasks and help optimize the performance
of configuration of the virtual data center..
With constant access to the benefits of the
cloud and IT costing at their fingertips,
CEOs and organizations are better equipped
to quantify, justify, and when appropriate,
charge back infrastructure investments.
The efficiency story should also ap-
peal to CEOs. When IT is more productive
because business users can appropriately
self-provision resources, the business
overall is better off. C-level leaders should
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also be moved by the ability for monitor-
ing, measuring and managing IT consump-
tion and show back that comes with cloud
deployments.
Bridging the
understanding gap
Private cloud adoption can transform
the way IT delivers services to end-users
but typically starts with buy-in from
executives beyond the data center. If CIOs
and CEOs are committed to private cloud
adoption, expectations, perceived value,
and deliverables of the cloud must be clear
from the beginning. By anticipating the
questions of business leaders, by commu-
nicating honestly and completely, and by
embracing the role of educator, CIOs can
bridge gaps that might otherwise derail
business-critical cloud pursuits. n
About the author: Jason Cowie is the vice
president of product management at Embotics
and oversees product direction and strategy.
Previously, Jason was the general manager at
EMC responsible for the server management
business, and he played a key role in the
acquisition of Configuresoft.
www.datacenterjournal.com
 IT BUSINESS
Make the Most of
Application Delivery
Controller Deployments
O
ver the past decade, ap-
plication delivery control-
lers (ADCs) have become
an integral part of the IT
infrastructure. I played a role
in developing ADC technology at F5 Net-
works, where I led the design of the BIG-IP
v9 product and TMOS platform. Based on
my previous experience with ADCs and my
current focus on application performance
management (APM), I have distilled nine
best practices for maximizing ADC perfor-
mance. These best practices provide insight
into tuning parameters, offer troubleshoot-
ing tips for ADCs, and are supported by an
APM solution that delivers comprehensive
real-time transaction analysis from L2 to
L7 across the network, web, database, and
storage tiers of applications.
ADCs evolved from load balancers
that typically employed a simple catch-and-
release system to buffer packets, make a
load-balancing decision, and then release
the packets with some form of network
address translation. ADCs brought applica-
tion awareness as well as a new architec-
ture based on a high-speed, transparent
full-proxy, enabling IT teams to precisely
manage the delivery of application traffic
within the data center. ADCs can inspect,
direct, and transform network traffic; cache
content; scan for security threats; perform
SSL encryption or decryption; and execute
an abundance of other tasks to dramati-
cally improve the availability, speed, and
www.datacenterjournal.com
By jesse rothstein
efficiency of the IT infrastructure. In short,
ADCs demonstrate what is possible when
IT harnesses exponential increases in pro-
cessing capacity.
However, as Uncle Ben once told
Peter Parker in Spider-Man, With great
power comes great responsibility. ADCs
are powerful but complex products that
have the potential to impact network and
application performance for better or
worse. They perform significant content
transformations, rewrite IP addresses,
change HTTP headers, split and aggregate
transactions across TCP connections,
and directly serve cached content. If not
carefully configured to match the unique
network topology and mix of applications
running in a data center, ADCs can intro-
duce performance issues that are incredibly
difficult to isolate and fix.
Like many other in-line network-
infrastructure devices, ADCs excel at
intelligently moving and manipulating
large volumes of traffic at high speeds but
offer limited metrics to help in tuning
performance or troubleshooting problems.
Management and quantification of the
performance of a deployment is often a dis-
tant afterthought. These shortcomings can
be addressed with an APM solution that
measures in real time how well applications
are delivered over complex network infra-
structure. Equipped with these real-time
performance metrics, IT teams can easily
apply the following nine best practices for
ADC deployments.
1. Establish performance
baselines.
Because ADCs affect both the
network and applications, they are often
blamed for performance problems. Per-
formance baselines for the virtual server,
or VIP, and for servers in the back-end
pool can help to verify whether the ADC
is in fact responsible for performance
degradations. If the VIP and back-end
pool members are processing transactions
over a similar time distribution, then these
performance baselines absolve the ADC
and point to the network or application as
the source of the issue.
2. Analyze transactions in
real time.
Although ADCs use periodic service
checks to monitor server health, this
method seldom detects intermittent failures
or degraded performance. As a result, the
ADC will continue to direct requests to
these poorly performing servers. IT teams
can avoid this inherent undersampling
problem by continuously monitoring trans-
action performance in real time with an
APM solution. With trend-based alerts that
detect anomalous behavior, IT administra-
tors can proactively fix problems before
they affect end users.
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 35
3. Monitor IP
fragmentation.
While the issue is simplified in IPv6,
IPv4 devices and routers use IP fragmenta-
tion to deal with lowered maximum trans-
mission units (MTUs) between endpoints.
Significant IP fragmentation can degrade
performance by requiring reassembly pro-
cessing and more packets sent over the net-
work and also increases the performance-
degrading impact of even relatively minor
packet loss. The problem is exacerbated
when firewalls and ADCs do not forward
crucial Internet Control Message Protocol
(ICMP) messages and hamper the path
MTU discovery process used to avoid IP
fragmentation. To detect excessive IP frag-
mentation that can degrade performance,
IT teams must monitor L3 metrics in real
time, including IP fragments and ICMP
destination unreachable fragmentation
required messages.
4. Provide sufficient SNAT
pools.
ADCs may provide some metrics to
help allocate the appropriate number of
unique IP addresses for Secure Network
Address Translation (SNAT), but these
metrics do not take internal connections
and service checks into account. Addition-
ally, ADCs do not offer automatic alerts
when IP addresses are exhausted. This
limitation can be problematic because if
the SNAT pool of IP addresses is too small
to handle spikes in connections, then new
connections may fail intermittently. For
short-lived connections, IT teams should
size their SNAT pool by measuring the total
new connections per second to each back-
end server and then divide by the number
of unique IP addresses. A value less than
approximately 1,000 indicates a properly
sized SNAT pool. Real-time TCP analysis
can detect performance problems caused
by rapid connection recycling, which can
occur when the SNAT pool is too small.
5. Plan capacity for load-
balancing pools.
While ADCs help to ensure applica-
tion availability by balancing workloads
across a pool of servers, even pools of
36 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
servers can be overwhelmed. APM solu-
tions that perform real-time analysis of
server processing performance can provide
both the historical trends needed to plan
capacity as well as early warning alerts for
excessive loads.
6. Adjust load-balancing
methods and ratios.
Just like other high-performance
systems, ADCs come with many virtual
knobs and dials that allow IT teams to
tune performance. One of the best ways
to tune performance is to modify the
load-balancing method used on the ADC,
typically set by default to round-robin or
ratio-LB methods. When dealing with a
pool of heterogeneous servers, IT teams
should adjust pool-member ratios accord-
ingly. For example, using the Fastest setting
in the F5 BIG-IP will direct traffic to the
server with the fewest outstanding requests.
This configuration will result in a smoother
allocation of workloads across servers of
different capacities. To make the correct
adjustments, IT teams need to compare
processing time for servers in the load-
balancing pool.
7. Verify the profile and
mode.
ADCs offer different modes of perfor-
mance depending on the profile assigned
to the virtual server, such as the FastL4,
performance-HTTP, and full-proxy modes
in BIG-IP. The FastL4 and performance-
HTTP modes offload the operational
complexity of TCP to the endpoints and
require fewer resources, such as processor
and memory, on the BIG-IP itself. Depend-
ing on the network topology and applica-
tion mix, an incorrectly selected mode
can negatively impact user experience. To
determine whether the correct mode is
employed, IT teams require detailed TCP
analysis to detect problems with congestion
control, slow starts, and PAWS drops.
8. Optimize TCP settings.
When operating in full-proxy
mode, ADCs offer a range of TCP-related
configuration settings. While the default
options represent best guesses for different
environments, suboptimal configurations
can degrade performance. To determine
the correct settings in the TCP profile
especially Nagles algorithm, proxy buffer
thresholds, and ACK-on-pushIT teams
need advanced TCP analysis to detect con-
ditions such as receive-window throttles
and zero-window advertisements.
9. Evaluate HTTP-caching
and HTTP-content-
compression policies.
Caching, web-acceleration, and
content-compression features in ADCs
can dramatically improve user experience
but also can cause unintended problems
with applications. IT teams should monitor
HTTP requests to determine appropri-
ate content to cache or compress, as the
compression of less-compressible content
can degrade page render time. The HTTP
analysis should show the distribution of
content type delivered, along with indi-
vidual URIs and the number of times they
are requested.
ADCs, which have proven to be valu-
able building blocks for use in modern data
centers, introduce unique IT management
complexities. Knowing the best practices
for ADC deployments is the first step in
maximizing the performance and efficiency
of this important infrastructure compo-
nent, which in turn helps to maximize the
value of your investment. An application
performance management solution that
provides real-time analysis of transactions
from L2 to L7 makes it much simpler to
implement these best practices and make
the most of ADC deployments.
To read more about these best
practices, download the white paper Ten
Best Practices for Optimizing Applica-
tion Delivery Controller (ADC) Deploy-
ments. n
About the author: Jesse Rothstein is the
CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks,
which provides the most powerful network-
based application performance management
solution on the market. The ExtraHop system
analyzes hundreds of thousands of simultaneous
transactions from L2 to L7, at speeds up to a
sustained 10Gbps. Previously, Jesse architected
and led the development of the BIG-IP v9 product
at F5 Networks.
www.datacenterjournal.com
 IT BUSINESS
Report Analytics:
Complementing Business Intelligence
For Data-Driven Business Decisions
By Michael morrison
With the explosion of available data at an organizations disposal, and despite the
overwhelming offerings available to harness these assets, companies of all sizes
continue to grapple with capturing and presenting the information they need in an
engaging and understandable format.
I
n an effort to make more informed business decisions, many
departments and individual line-of-business users have turned
to Business Intelligence (BI) solutions as a way to mine data
for both reporting and forecasting purposes and to address
increasing, business issues. Unfortunately, with failure rates
hovering between 50% and 70% according to some studies, and
business users continually looking for new tools to help them easily
get at the data they need, BI alone is not always the answer.
Its well known that BI software can provide advanced report-
ing and predictive analysis, but for many day-to-day reporting tasks,
its sophisticated functionality is overly complex. For tasks like
these, business users and self-service data consumers may find the
technical challenges of BI a deterrent and as a result, often rely on
the IT department to generate custom reports. This not only creates
more work for an already over-taxed IT group, but also introduces
delays and frustration for the users who require accurate and timely
information in order to perform their job effectively.
The underlying issue is that business users often have all the
information they need but that information resides in existing
reports and business documents scattered throughout the organiza-
tion. Since they have no easy way to dynamically organize, integrate
and analyze the intelligence trapped in these static documents, they
are often left with less than ideal options. For instance, business us-
ers can rely on predefined BI reports from a data warehouse or en-
list the expertise of the IT department to program custom reports.
According to a recent Computing poll of more than 250
www.datacenterjournal.com
people who use or rely on data derived from BI reporting software,
BI complexity is an ongoing problem. Cost was cited as the most
important factor in the BI software selection process (29%) followed
closely by ease of use (25%). The fact that cost and ease of use are
the most important drivers of software selection underscores the
challenges that complex BI solutions present to the people who
consume the intelligence for making data-based decisions. These
challenges are driving the emergence of a new category of solu-
tions within the BI market that industry analysts refer to as Report
Analytics.
From ERP-generated reports to even mainframe reports,
organizations of nearly all sizes generate thousands of reports
monthly. But those reports are largely unusable without invest-
ing time and money into burdensome processes. Report Analytics
software leverages an organizations existing reports and reporting
processes and provides consumers with a self-service environ-
ment. This allows them to extract the relevant intelligence from
any combination of these existing documents themselves and
transform that information into dynamic, interactive reports for
easy analysis and visualization. Whether the reports or business
documents originate inside an enterprise or from external sources
like customers or suppliers, Report Analytics allows business users
to create, distribute and publish these reports without time delays
or involving IT. And lets face it, with increasing cost pressures and
decreasing revenues, anything that bolsters productivity is critical in
todays real-time business environment.
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 37
Harnessing Business Assets
In most organizations, the volume of data is enormous, creating
a challenge that lies not in amassing more data, but rather in integrat-
ing and using the meaningful data that already exists. Lets face it,
data exists in various static reports, transaction systems, data stores,
and formats which forces professionals to spend valuable time ag-
gregating information from various sources. And thats not all. Once
they have access, they still need to manipulate the data in familiar
programs like Excel in order to present the information in the right
format, to the right people, instead of focusing on the more value-
added activity of analyzing and acting on the data itself. This creates
an issue for many businesses according to a recent Ventana Research
study, which found that leveraging reports from BI systems is im-
portant to 57 percent of organizations, and getting to the data from
source ERP, CRM and other applications is important to 71 percent
of respondents.
To complicate matters, existing reports and business docu-
ments come from a variety of sources: internal transaction systems
that generate canned ERP, HR or CRM reports, external customer
or supplier systems, and personal productivity tools such as Excel or
BI systems. And these reports come in multiple formats: main-
frame green bar, text, ASCII, PDF, HTML, spreadsheet, log files and
semi-structured documents that are stored in content management
systems. All of these sources and formats of existing reports cre-
ates a major challenge for business users that need to make timely,
informed business decisions based on available data.
Making Data Meaningful
Today, the enormous amount of data has made it difficult to
parse and analyze it, which means that the resulting reports are sub-
optimal at best. The format of the report also comes with its own
set of unique problems. ERP, HR and CRM systems deliver static
reports, oftentimes in text or PDF format, which are inflexible and
cannot be integrated with data from other reports. This does little
to foster understanding, analysis, or decision making and often does
not include the unstructured, semi-structured, or externally sourced
data that is required to make information meaningful. As a result,
most organizations spend a great deal of money and time consolidat-
ing and mapping this data into a data warehouse, data mart or other
operational data store. Or worse, an organization simply abandons
the idea of leveraging that data and operates by intuition rather than
hard data.
Report Analytics began to take root as a way to address this
longstanding business challenge. Report Analytics tools model, ag-
gregate and transform information from any number of existing re-
ports and business documents throughout the organization, making
it easy for users to access, extract and analyze data without having to
invest in new reporting solutions. Functioning as the missing link
in the broader BI reporting arena, Report Analytics captures struc-
tured and semistructured data from virtually any existing document.
It also enables faster and deeper visibility into the business and better,
more informed business decisions.
Report Analytics & BINot an Either/Or
Proposition
For many, Report Analytics sounds like it overlaps with Busi-
ness Analytics or Business Intelligence. In all actuality they are com-
38 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
plementary, yet key differences between the two exist. For instance,
in BI deployments a few staff members, largely from IT, are charged
with managing the data and creating both content and reports for
business users. So while BI systems are an invaluable asset for many-
-allowing them to discern patterns in customer behavior and align
the business behind a common goal--it may not always be the best,
or only, tool for generating reports. Of the IT staff questioned in the
Computing study, 31 percent said their department was required to
produce up to 100 reports a month while 16 percent generated up to
500. Even worse, four percent estimated that they were required to
produce more than 1,000 reports every month. The time that IT staff
spent on producing these reports varied, with half taking a day or
more and 10 percent estimating an average time of weeks or months.
With such a limited group responsible for developing reports
for the entire organization, back-logs undoubtedly will occur. In oth-
er words, it requires lots of IT support to make information usable.
And, often, while IT is off programming the custom reports, the
business requirements changemeaning the data consumers receive
in their custom report is once again incapable of helping them solve
their particular business problem. This leads data consumers to the
ever-popular BI workaround Excel. All too often, business users
dump the data they need into Excel; import additional information
from transactional systems or other sources that are not in the data
warehouse; and then perform analytics from there. This cumber-
some manual process, while painful, is necessary as there is often
little analytic value otherwise because of the missing and incomplete
data. And while it solves the business users immediate need get-
ting the data they need to answer specific questions it is fraught
with peril. On a tactical level, moving data from a trusted system to
the unsecure environment of Excel also introduces the possibility of
compromising data accuracy due to simple human error. On a much
more strategic level, this process completely undermines the integrity
of the data. Once data is put into Excel, the business user is violating
most data governance policies. The data is no longer trusted.
The Computing study demonstrated just how pervasive this
problem can be. According to the financial decision makers ques-
tioned, 52 percent felt that less than half of the information needed to
run the business effectively could be pulled from existing documents
and in the correct format without having to rely on IT. The fact that
users struggle to get a grip with BI software is perhaps reinforced by
the fact that for two out of three of those polled, it is not the more
tech savvy members of the IT department who are using it. More
than half (54%) said responsibility for producing BI reports was with
individual business departments such as finance and sales. Worse,
only 11 percent of these individual executives or business managers
said they run reports themselves -- meaning they had to submit a
request to the IT department to perform these tasks on their behalf.
Report Analytics is a smart approach in todays economy. It is
an easy self-service solution which enables business users and data
consumers to get the data they need out of existing reports. Not only
does this approach leverage an organizations significant invest-
ments in enterprise applications, but it also avoids the costly route of
creating a data warehouse, or worse - programming ones way to an
acceptable solution. n
About the Author: Michael Morrison is President and Chief Executive
Officer at Datawatch Corporation, a provider of report analytics products
and services. For more information contact Michael at Michael_Morrison@
Datawatch.com or visit www.datawatch.com.
www.datacenterjournal.com
 Yourturn
Strategies for
Data Center
Consolidation
Part 2 of 3: White Space
W
ith companies relying
on IT more heavily than
ever, data center capacity
requirements are steadily
rising. Unfortunately,
so are the costs associated with data center
construction and operation. As a result,
organizations are increasingly searching for
ways to reduce the size of their data centers
without compromising their ability to meet
business requirements.
The good news is that companies inter-
ested in following the trend toward smaller
data centers can employ a wide range of
techniques to shrink their computing foot-
print. IT consolidation is best approached
by a combination of three primary strategies,
design-level, white space and grey space. By
employing a combination of strategies in
each area, data center managers can not only
make the most out of available footprint, but
also assure mission-critical systems always
have the clean, reliable electricity they need
to drive long-term success.
Part one of this series discussed design-
level strategies for IT consolidation; the
following will recommend six white space
tactics for shrinking the size of your data
center without shrinking its operating capac-
ity, availability or efficiency.
1. Utilize virtualization:
Virtualizing and consolidating servers
enables data centers to conserve floor space
by replacing large numbers of lightly utilized
devices with a smaller number of heavily
utilized devices.
Consolidating storage resources
through virtualization can similarly reduce
a data centers footprint by enabling it to
www.datacenterjournal.com
By ed spears
house more data in less hardware. Leading-
edge power companies can now integrate
seamlessly with virtualization management
systems like vCenter of VMware or SCVMM
of Microsoft to enable live migration of vir-
tual machines in case of power events. This
is a significant improvement over the legacy
server shutdown capability that is no longer
addressing the need for business continuity
which is inherent of any fully-virtualized
environment. UPSs and advanced power
management systems integrate seamlessly
with software from VMware, Microsoft and
other manufacturers to coordinate automatic
migration or shutdown and infrastructure
management in a virtual environment.
2. Deploy blade servers:
Often used in conjunction with vir-
tualization, blade servers are plug-and-play
processing units with shared power feeds,
power supplies, fans, cabling and storage. By
compressing large amounts of computing
capacity into small amounts of space, blade
servers can dramatically reduce data center
floor space requirements. They also enhance
IT agility, since companies can simply plug
in additional blades any time their process-
ing needs grow.
3. Leverage cloud
computing:
In an effort to lower overhead and
increase IT efficiency, businesses around the
world are rapidly adopting cloud computing
solutions. Indeed, some 15 percent of all IT
spending in 2011 will be tied to cloud ser-
vices or infrastructure, according to analyst
firm IDC.
Cloud computing can help organiza-
tions shrink their data centers in several
ways. By offloading applications and infra-
structure to externally hosted public cloud
data centers that use the public Internet
to exchange data, companies can reduce
the number of servers they must own and
maintain in their own facilities. Alternatively,
businesses can deploy private cloud solu-
tions that utilize the same basic technologies
as the public cloud but reside on privately
owned or leased servers. Through the so-
phisticated use of virtualization and automa-
tion, private clouds dramatically raise server
utilization rates, thereby lowering floor space
requirements.
4. Leverage capacity
planning and asset
management tools:
Deploying more server and power re-
sources than is necessary wastes floor space,
but determining exactly how much capacity
is required can be difficult, especially if
virtual servers or a private cloud infrastruc-
ture are used. Capacity planning and asset
management tools can help size a data center
optimally for current and near-term needs,
saving money while trimming the physical
footprint.
5. Implement a passive
cooling scheme:
Today, most organizations dissipate
data center heat by placing computer room
air conditioning (CRAC) units around the
periphery of their server floor. Unfortunate-
ly, CRAC-based cooling systems are often
incapable of handling the greater power
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 39
densities and temperatures associated with
technologies such as virtualization and blade
servers.
As a result, some companies are now
investigating or implementing in-row liquid
cooling systems, which take up floor space
that could otherwise be dedicated to IT
equipment. By utilizing a hot or cold aisle
containment strategy instead of in-row
cooling, data center managers can fit more
server racks in their existing data halls while
keeping operating temperatures at safe
levels. One such strategy would be a passive
cooling system, which can come in many
different types; the most efficient enclosures
are equipped with a sealed rear door and
chimney that captures hot exhaust air from
servers and vents it directly back into the
return air ducts on CRAC units. The CRAC
units then chill the exhaust air and re-circu-
late it. A properly designed passive cooling
system can cost-effectively prevent even the
densest, hottest server racks from overheat-
ing. Furthermore, some passive cooling
schemes dont require raised floors, enabling
companies to conserve the space formerly
dedicated to maintaining air flow beneath
their server enclosures.
June 10 - 13, 2012
Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek
Orlando, FL
www.7x24exchange.org
2012 SPRING
CONFERENCE
End-To-End Reliability
Mission Critical Facilities
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE
Apollo 13: A Successful Failure
Captain Jim Lovell
NASA Legend and Apollo 13 Commander
40 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
6. Switch from disk-based
storage to static storage
technologies:
Though they currently account for
a small fraction of storage hardware sales,
static storage systems are slowly gaining
popularity among enterprise IT manag-
ers. Such devices save data on solid-state
memory chips, much like a USB memory
stick. Though generally more expensive
than conventional memory technologies,
static storage systems are also dramatically
faster, more energy-efficient and more reli-
able, since they contain no moving parts.
In addition, static storage devices tend to
be more compact than disk-based stor-
age systems, so deploying them can help
businesses save storage-related floor space
in their data center. Tape-based archiving
systems are also being impacted by cloud
providers offering low-cost archiving stor-
age at their facilities, something that can
lead to reduction of equipment on the data
center floor and still provide some type
of disaster-proofing with data stored in
another location.
PLATINUM
PARTNERS
GOLD
PARTNERS
SILVER
PARTNERS
BRONZE
PARTNERS
MEDIA
PARTNERS
Closing Thoughts
Todays IT and facilities managers face
a difficult bind: Though computing needs
are constantly escalating, so is the cost per
square foot of data center space and the
price of critical supporting resources such as
electricity and water.
Fortunately, there are many ways
to compact a data center while still meet-
ing business requirements. Most of them,
moreover, are proven and cost-effective
options for companies of almost any size. By
following the white space recommendations
outlined above, and the design-level strate-
gies discussed in part one of this series, you
can get more done in less space and position
your company to meet its IT requirements
with maximum cost effectiveness. Stay
tuned for part three of the series, grey space
consolidation strategies, for a complete guide
to getting the most out of your physical
footprint. n
To read Part I of this series go to
www.datacenterjournal.com/category/
dcj-expert-blogs/
CARASTRO & ASSOCIATES, INC.
mission critical engineers
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Calendar
VENDOR INDEX
MAY Universal Electric ....................................... Inside Front
www.uecorp.com

Mon May 14, 2012

Santa Clara, CA Cable System ............................................................ pg 5
Uptime Institute Symposium 2012 www.cablesys.com

Wed May 23, 2012 Corning ..................................................................... pg 7

New York, NY www.offers.corning.com/1-EDGESolutions
2nd Annual Spring Forum on Financing,
Investing, & Real Estate Development for Burndy ....................................................................... pg 9
Data Centers www.burndy.com

Wed May 23, 2012

Nice, France DataAire ................................................................... pg 11
www.dataaire.com
Datacentres 2012

Server Tech ............................................................. pg 19

JUNE
www.servertech.com

Eaton ....................................................................... pg 21
www.switchon.eaton.com/datacenterjournal5
Wed June 6, 2012
San Francisco, CA
PDU Cables ............................................................ pg 23
2nd Legal Forum on Cloud Computing
www.pducables.com
Agreements

Thur June 7, 2012 Belden ...................................................................... pg 23

Chicago, IL www.belden.com
Greater Chicago Data Center Summit
Binswanger ............................................................. pg 28
Mon June 11, 2012 www.binswanger.com/sherman
Brussels, Belgium
BICSI European Conference and Exhibition
AVTECH ..................................................................... pg 31
www.avtech.com
Tue June 12, 2012
Boston, MA
USENIX Federated Conferences Week AFCOM ...................................................................... pg 33
www.datacenterworld.com
Tue June 12, 2012
New York NY Americool ................................................................ pg 34
info360 Optimizing Your Information www.americoolin.com
Lifecycle
7x24 Exchange ...................................................... pg 40
Tue June 12, 2012 www.7x24exchange.org
London, England
4th Cloud Computing World Forum
DCJ Expert Blogs .................................................... Back
www.dcjexpertblogs.com