Q & A

 
Pankaj Sharma, CGM & President India & SAARC, APC-MGE speaks Faiz Askari, Bureau Head, Network Computing on the invisible crisis in today’s data centers

What are the major concerns for data centers in the power management realm?

IT heads are demanding scalable, high availability data centers with highly efficient UPS systems. They are looking closely at the power management aspect of their high-end IT hardware. IT heads are looking at integration of BMS (Building Management Systems), NMS (Network Management System) and NCPI (Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure) Systems. NCPI -- which includes power, cooling, physical housing, security, fire protection, and cabling -- a very critical segment of the IT set up.  But their complexity and custom-evolved nature is becoming an issue in terms of day to day management of the data center. Moreover, IT is getting increasingly dynamic, whereas NCPI remains static. The proliferation of “custom-built” data-centers also leads to situations where they see a huge challenge to manage the data center set up. All this directly impacts business continuity.

What about ‘bloated’ or ‘oversized’ data centers?

Over sized data center infrastructure is a big problem area today.  On average, over 50 per cent of the installed capacity is wasted and this waste is caused by uncertainty. Users have an expected load which they determine through various estimation methods which is then padded up for uncertainty. This requirement typically starts at some value and then grows by a factor of three, reaching final value about halfway through the lifetime. They provide a room capacity and an installed power and cooling capacity to meet the expanded requirement. However, on average the actual load is much less than the planned load because the systems don’t start out to be as large as was expected, and they don’t grow as rapidly as was expected. This results in considerable waste due to over sizing, including excess capital expenditure and operating expenses. By looking at the crisis it looks that the risk of under building data center capacity is real, and in the past the only practical way to avoid it is through padding the design and over sizing.

What are other problems that need to be solved for business continuity?

Our studies reveal that a root cause contributor to human error related down time is the changing of IT hardware in the data center. Surveys indicate that the average life of a piece of IT equipment in a data center is only 2.5 years but life of the data center itself is fixed over 10 years. In other words, it is likely each location in a data center can undergo an equipment swap four or more times.

When IT hardware is changed, power, cooling, and even the voltage requirements change requiring the change of live power circuits. This unstable environment, subject to constant change, results in chaos and human error. Planning in the modern IT environment is very frustrating and difficult.  The answer must be that data center environments must be designed to accept and effortlessly handle change.
 

What’s your take on Green computing?

We clearly have understood the importance of green computing and the pressure subsequently built on CIOs. But there’s a lot more than that electrical power that goes into a data center. In the 10-year life cycle of a data center – not including the building itself, - the physical build out, the fit out of the data center itself within the building, consumption could look like:

1.      177 million kilowatt-hours of electricity

2.      60 million gallons (227,124,708 liters) of water

3.      32 million kilowatt-hours of primary  energy used to fabricate all these materials and put them in place

Hence, when we talk about the greening of the data center, it’s not just an electrical power problem. There’s a lot of talk about the “invisible crisis” in the data center. While electricity appears to be kind of invisible, it’s hard to miss 60 million gallons of water.  These aren’t invisible problems, these are real problems. That’s what I think the definition of “green” is.  It’s if you’re getting the job done without unnecessary consumptions of ANY kind, whether it’s electricity, materials, and so on. Every time we avoid inefficiency, we are not only going to save electricity, but also save a lot of these other things.