Data Centers Devour 5 to 15 Percent of IT Budget
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The costs involved in running a data center now represent a large chunk of IT's total budget.
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A new survey shows 51% of data centers are testing or using virtualization, up from 41% the last time the survey was done; use and awareness in SMBs are also growing.
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Gartner researchers believe that as many as 50% of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of coming improvements in data center technologies.
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The application traffic management space is getting resurfaced as vendors such as F5, Radware, and Redline green-light new products with traffic compression, DoS attack protection, server-side caching, and other features aimed at simplifying and lowering the cost of network management.
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Even though the practice was common in mainframes of old, convincing today's data center operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Four mainstream IT companies are pooling resources to launch a standardized enterprise grid infrastructure based on their products.
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(InfoWorld) - Like other adopters of server virtualization, Purdue University was concerned that its datacenter would hit the wall, exceeding physical space, power, and cooling limits. The use of EMC VMware let it combine 140 physical servers into three Hewlett-Packard DL-585 servers, a 40:1 compression ratio, says Mike Rubesch, director of IT infrastructure systems. "It helps postpone the inevitable," he adds. But the first servers chosen had very low utilization -- around 5 percent -- so the 40:1 rate is not sustainable. Over time, Rubesch expects the ratio to be 6:1, taking into account such servers as e-mail, database, and telephony that cannot be virtualized. That utilization rate will still reduce overall power usage to 16 percent of what it had been and physical space needs to a tenth, as the use of blade servers plus virtualization greatly reduces the physical footprint. Facilities costs should fall by $75,000 per year and hardware costs by $250,000 per year, he says. But organizations considering the use of virtualization need to be careful calculating costs, Rubesch cautions. If you have fewer than 10 virtual server instances running on a physical VMware server, virtualization becomes "extraordinarily expensive," he says. IT managers must also be careful not to factor in too much savings for the operating systems and applications running in virtual machines, Rubesch says. Many IT managers count on being able to run multiple instances of an OS or an app on one CPU, paying for just one license, because most enterprise apps are licensed on a per-CPU basis. But vendors are starting to charge per instance, not per CPU. For example, BEA now charges per instance rather than per CPU for its WebLogic server, and Microsoft Windows Server Enterprise Edition's license allows use on one physical server and as many as four VMs on that server. As virtualization grows more popular, you can expect the licensing savings to evaporate, so the investment should be based on savings elsewhere, such as in hardware and facilities efficiencies, Rubesch says. The use of VMs also increases your risk, because "you can put a lot of eggs in one basket," Rubesch says. But because you've reduced the number of points of failure, IT staff has more capability to focus on those critical areas, he notes. Rubesch is building sufficient capacity so that no single server is fully utilized, providing space for EMC's VMotion software to move VMs if a physical server fails. He's also keeping a spare physical server ready to go if needed. Using virtualization also incurs a high up-front cost. "The benefits aren't immediate," Rubesch says. A big reason is that to use the EMC VMotion utility to move server instances to other physical servers for better load-balancing or failover requires that all the hardware use the same CPU family, requiring a big hardware cost at each refresh cycle. "You need to sell that concept a little bit," he says dryly. Beyond the hardware costs, the use of virtualization makes the server environment more complicated, as "servers" can reside anywhere and change where they reside over time. As a result, "you need more skills," Rubesch says. For example, although a good Windows administrator will easily adapt to running virtualized Windows servers, you still need a dedicated person to handle such items as dynamic allocation and failover, he says. Of course, you can also use virtualization to simplify your environment, Rubesch notes, such as having standard server images that ensure consistency -- ending the nightmare of navigating the peculiarities specific to each hand-deployed physical server. "It's a lot simpler with VMs to have them nearly identical." Despite the caveats on understanding actual savings and the increased up-front costs, Rubesch is a big fan of server virtualization: "You get real benefit from it -- as long as you plan ahead." Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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A recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies shows that if you're not using disk-to-disk systems to cut your backup window, you're behind the times. Here's why the technology is so hot.
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A recent UBS survey of chief information officers found corporate spending on industry standard servers would grow 17 per cent over 2004, compared with estimates for overall 2005 IT spending growth of about 5 per cent.
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Company shows off labor-saving data center technology at Palo Alto research lab.
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By Brier Dudley, Seattle Times  Feb. 19--I saw some amazing data centers in Redmond last week.   They were reliable, powerful, resilient and fault-tolerant.
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Large U.S. businesses will spend $61 billion on security by the end of this year, amounting to 7.3 percent of total IT budgets.
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In an eyebrow-raising forecast, Gartner researchers said they believe that as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies.
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(InfoWorld) - British telecom giant BT Group will spend Â£14 million ($27 million) over the next seven years on a new south London datacenter to strengthen its hosting and management services, the company said Thursday. The 930-square meter facility, which will have biometric security features, should be complete by September and has additional room for expansion, BT said. The company wants to grow its data services business by 20 percent a year with an emphasis on enterprise, public sector and financial services customers. BT estimates the data services market is worth Â£5.2 billion in Europe. BT is revamping many of its 70 data centers across the U.K., said Rajiv Abeysinghe, BT's data center transformation manager, at a conference in London on Wednesday hosted by Intel. Customers are asking for the ability to architect and host applications within BT datacenters, he said. BT is also looking to maximize its return on investment in datacenters, looking at ways to cope with power requirements with an eye toward renewable energy. The company said it reduced its carbon emissions by 60 percent between 1996 and 2006, and is working to up that figure to 80 percent by 2016. BT is asking vendors to make products with wider limits on temperature, humidity and air-quality, which could allow for more utility savings, Abeysinghe said. The company is increasing the ratio of applications on each of its servers' CPUs (central processing units) while also looking at virtualization technology. BT would like to increase its CPU virtualization rate from around 7 percent to 10 percent to 80 percent. "Virtualization can provide us with greater efficiency," Abeysinghe said. Â
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(InfoWorld) - The forecast for datacenters isn't good for the short term: they're going to get hotter and a lot more cramped, according to Gartner analysts. Increasing use of cheaper x86 chip-based servers has presented problems for datacenters, most of which haven't been redesigned since the last tech boom went bust six years ago, said Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner research vice president. He spoke Monday during a presentation at Gartner's Data Center Technology Summit in London. The number of server racks is increasing. Consequently, the amount of floor space in datacenters is decreasing, but their power and cooling requirements are rising. More attention is being focused on theÂ environmental impacts of running high-energy datacentersÂ and moves by governments toward new legislation. "It will come down to a balance between the power, the cooling and the floor space," Kumar said. "What that means is legacy datacenters are obsolete." Gartner predicts that within 12 to 18 months organizations will have to make major changes to accommodate the heating and cooling challenges that come with more processing power. Four years ago, a stand-alone server in a rack used 2 kilowatts of electricity. Today, a standard rack filled with between 50 percent to 80 percent of blade servers consume between 15 kilowatts and 30 kilowatts per rack, Kumar said. The cooling statistics complicate the power picture. It takes between 1.2 to 1.3 times the amount of energy a server consumes to cool it, Kumar said. IT managers frequently can't fill an entire rack because of the heat generated by the servers. Floor cooling, where cool air is circulated under server racks, and air conditioning -- aren't going to work anymore because the heat is too great, Kumar said. What's more, the cool space beneath the servers in legacy datacenters becomes clogged with cables and wires and occasionally, other odd things that interfere. "They're thinking 'Hey, there's space under here. I'll keep my beer in there,'" said Peter Hannaford, of American Power Conversion, which makes server cooling equipment. "We found this guy who had a Christmas tree under there." All of these obstacles contribute to higher energy costs. Gartner estimates that electricity costs could go from 10 percent or less of IT budgets to 20 percent to 30 percent if left unchecked, Kumar said. Electricity costs have risen over the last year and will likely continue to rise, although the peak is unknown. Fortunately, everyone from chip vendors to servers vendors and software makers have a stake in reducing energy and heat, Kumar said. The problem could ultimately limit the growth of IT. A huge amount of investment is being made in finding solutions, either through new products or through new datacenter designs. Governments also are paying increased attention to IT. It's possible high-energy users could see higher taxes, or that ill-fitting legislation could be implemented, spurred by public demand for greener IT, said Steve Prentice, vice president and chief of research for Gartner. "They [the government] will rush something in that apparently does the job but does not address all the issues," Prentice said. "We think it's better to self-regulate."
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(Source: Symantec) IT organizations are struggling to deal with the compounded growth of storage, estimated to be 55 percent for the average company, and the scalability and manageability issues caused by this growth. This growth is forcing IT organizations to look for better alternatives to help with the challenge of managing these vast resources while controlling the associated costs. Read this whitepaper to learn more.
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Data center management software pulls in more pieces of the infrastructure--virtual machines and virtual networks.