Data Center Survival!

  by Richard Muirhead | 13 Jun 2008 | Permalink |

Day three at the SIFMA conference, and several key themes have emerged – this year’s most urgent issues for financial services IT can be grouped under the following umbrellas:

Extreme Agility
If we now look at the rising expectations of the Facebook and GrandTheftAuto generation – and the fact that in a few short years they will be running the derivatives desk…and from there …the bank – this pace of progress simply will not do! They understand the rate of new features that their favourite websites deliver and have seen the demonstrations of the new handbag rental websites launched on the Amagoogle compute cloud with one dainty tap on the haptic keyboard on their iCommunicator.

Not So Much Efficiency as Survival!
Another thing we heard was there is a more black and white issue that demands attention and a new approach. First data centres ran out of space, then they ran out of cooling, and now they are running out of power. For each $1 of spend on hardware and software a further 50 cents is spent to power/cool them. For the 16 million servers across 7000 data centres in the US that amounts to 350 Bn KWhrs – or around 2% of all the electricity in the US.

In California, the sixth largest economy on the planet were it to be a stand alone country, they were recently 345 MW short of a rolling blackout. The average power consumption of new build data centres is 1000 MW – so they were 4 data centres away from lights out.

Virtualisation allows a shift from coping with client estimated demands and the documented but inaccurate or irrelevant power consumption (and thermal output figures for the many infrastructure components required for their operation) – to an intelligent forecast of the non functional requirements that a given application will place on a virtualised slice of the environment. The difference could be between the 6000W max power draw documented for safety reasons where actual draw is around 2500W….so that is how cooling should be engineered. All of these allow for dramatic increases in energy, space, and hardware efficiency – and virtualsation also means lower certification overhead for different hardware types to boot.

Data Centres Are For Life…Not Just For Christmas
These creatures stick around, sometimes grow into monsters and take a lot of care. Many large organisations have tens or hundreds of data centres….and many would like to consolidate to single digits. It’s just not that easy. You can’t just fire all the teams…and you need some carefully engineered data centre redundancy for availability and indeed compliance. But you also need low-latency for trading apps; SaaS apps; or proximate data centres to support large file transfers around development environments since the world is not yet fully wired with OC192’s.

The imperative for tomorrow’s data centre is to waste no software licenses; drive utilization of the server estate from 10% up to 60%; keep within space and power constraints; all while ensuring you can quickly put apps into production for a given workforce up through automation.

Whatever the people are saying about the new build data centers…within a decade the contents will be obselete. But once we know which data centers need to be kept and where the economics on a typical data centre build are, they can be improved by 150m on 350m by making that shift from 10% to 60%.

Complexity Beyond A Single Man’s Ken
Concatenation of behaviours that distributed applications and now virtualisation depends upon can lead to enormous systemic unpredictability. Soon we will be going from seven physical networks per server to one network with virtualised network I/O, where these then become software configurable. Everything will be virtualised: NAS: load balancer; LAN; SAN. So then everything can be software provisioned. Ports and servers are dead. As VMs allow application workloads to migrate freely around the estate and the configuration of the application infrastructure shifts into software at all the layers…then the policies for network/storage configuration, Q0S, encryption need match the application and move with the application also.

So the initiatives break down into Consolidate; Virtualise; Automate. But the biggest problem in all of this will be the silos that people currently work in. Shifting people from bragging about their deep abilities with a particular technology, product or vendor or the vast number of ports and servers under their management to the high levels of data center utilization; extreme application availability and high velocity of application improvement…and all so that we can beat our highest score on Grand Theft Auto…or make a (bigger) bonus this year.

The “Everywhearable” Factor
Final thought for SIFMA 2008: there is a clear industry need for a collaborative way to openly share best practices, content, war stories and intelligence – in a personal, community-promoting fashion. One of my favorite things I saw at SIFMA? The proliferation of the “Everywhearable” Flip Mino video camera. People stopping on a dime in the exhibit hall and lobby bar pulling this miniscule video camera literally out of their pockets to do impromptu Q&A’s with their peers, customers, vendors, strangers. And posting what turns out to be production-grade footage on-line within an hour so others in the community can know how it feels to be right here with us…