Irish customers are expecting more than ever from their data centre investment, with flexibility of service and monitoring topping the list of desirable features. Head of data centre services with BT Ireland, Mark Fagan said that while traditional demands remained "security, availability, performance and ability to scale", these must now be matched up with "efficiency, agility and innovation".
Rittal IT sales manager Paul Hanley commented that a process of "on-going education" in the Irish data centre market shows no sign of slowing down, while IBM Ireland’s head of managed services, David Carvill, said that the "dizzying pace" of development in the data centre space may be confusing some CIOs, but added said it’s also inspiring a greater demand from clients for great services levels and more value for money.
According to BT’s Fagan, these days "data centre service companies must demonstrate how they can change their products and capabilities in line with both the operational and commercial requirements of their customers". The BT man added that it must be clear to clients that the data centre they choose to do business with can be seen as "centres of excellence where industry best practise is easily evident and evolves in a controlled and meaningful manner".
Expectation
George Dowling, managed services solutions manager with Ergo listed "availability, reliability and security" as the cornerstones of worthwhile data centre offerings at present. Asked the same question, sales and marketing manager with Servecentric, Helga Muir chose to highlight "flexibility" as being key, adding that the level of flexibility in the solutions on the marketplace "continues to increase".
There is, she said, an expectation among customers that their data centre "can now provide an à la carte approach, enabling them to pick and choose the services they need, when they need them, whether it be basic co-location or a fully-hosted managed service".
"Customers expect to be able to scale services up and down depending on business requirements at a given time," continued Muir. "This is especially important given the current economic environment where organisations are seeking to only pay for what they need today, as opposed to paying for and guessing future requirements."
As for Dowling, he said that model that customers expect has changed rapidly in recent times. "Previously, you were always able to contract a data centre, order a rack, load it with servers up to a certain capacity and get connectivity to that rack from your business. Indeed this was a common approach to disaster recovery or production system implementation," added the Ergo representative. Today though, he said companies are often taking the step of "simply going to the local cloud provider and renting a system accessed securely over the Web via a virtual private network (VPN) circuit".
Application-based
HP Ireland director of enterprise services Brian Hurley said that when clients deal with vendors at present they want them to "quote and provision on the basis of running OS instances or virtual machine requirements". He added that customers now demand an application-based approach for common applications "rather than a per-server" type approach. "Increasingly clients are expecting a cloud-based offering with the benefits of elasticity and utility-based pricing," said Hurley.
Asked what expectations customers now have of their data centre offering, Peter Trevaskis, enterprise marketing manager for Dell Ireland pinpointed the ability to run at higher temperatures, with Trevaskis adding that "25-27 degrees Celsius should be the norm". Elsewhere, Rittal’s Hanley said that while the perceived "green agenda" of the Celtic Tiger years has tumbled down the list of priorities for customers, potential investors are however still hoping that data centre operators will put "a lot of focus around energy efficiency for keeping costs down".
"I think if you spoke to any IT manager or facilities manager the focus today it’s very much about reducing costs," added Hanley. "If they’re doing a review of a data centre they want to see whether that situation will be improved upon." David O’Connor, Irish country manager of APC by Schneider Electric, felt Hanley was on the right track, saying that the need for greater data centre efficiency has become more pressing "not only as the cost of energy has risen, but also as the sector has grown and come more into the public eye".
In this respect, O’Connor said that data centres have made great advances in the efficiency of individual components, largely at the physical infrastructure layer, and the number of data centres with low power usage effectiveness (PUE) has grown. "Recently," he added, "the real efficiency of the data centre as a system (ie, the IT equipment as well as the equipment that power, cools and protects it) has been highlighted since it costs just about as much to run a room full of idle servers as it does to run the same room at full tilt. The problem for a lot of end users is how to differentiate between the highly utilised servers and the one which could be switched off or consolidated out."
Monitoring
One of the recurring themes when discussing the modern data centre was the importance of bringing intelligence and monitoring options into the equation. John Shorten for example, technical director with Telecity Group, said that in terms of facilities, "intelligence and monitoring are key to the operation of a modern data centre".
"Any facilities systems," he said, "that have variables that contribute to the function or efficiency of the data centre must be monitored to ensure that they are working correctly. Given the quantity of facilities systems used in running a modern data centre and the corresponding number of variables for each facilities system there is a large amount of data produced which in itself is another challenge."
Shorten would also say that in terms of the managed services that can accompany a data centre deal, it’s a "prerequisite for managed services to have corresponding intelligence and monitoring available".
Threshold
IBM’s Carvill emphasised that monitoring is "absolutely something that clients are looking for". He continued, "The more closely you can monitor all aspects of your data centre-from power usage to air conditioning units to whatever type of cooling is being used and the individual infrastructure itself-people want to know what’s happening.
"Then there’s monitoring leading into automated responses. So, if certain aspects of CPU, or disk usage or storage are reaching above a certain threshold more infrastructure [can] be allocated automatically." Data centres, said Carvill, need to ask can they handle spikes in activity for certain clients. He takes the example of an IT research facility, saying that the data centre must confirm that it can "handle spikes of R&D or spikes of testing".
Added Carvill, "Can they plan for that, can they buy that on demand, can they aggregate workloads or divert workloads? The beginning of all that is more effective monitoring."
APC’s O’Connor revealed that the need to provide greater transparency to the customer has seen Interxion introducing an extranet for its customers in France because they need more real time information about their servers. "Monitoring and also the use of data centre software provide the basis for this offering," he said.
Interxion Ireland’s own Doug Loewe, interim managing director, said that in fact a lot of companies "want to maintain 100% exclusive control over the data and so they’re going to, what we refer to as, carrier-neutral data centres".
"They’re procuring quality space but then they still maintain complete control-so it’s almost a data centre within a data centre. It’s fully contained and non-accessible by the data centre service provider itself."
Dell’s Trevaskis said that monitoring at the varying levels within the data centre is becoming "essential". Elaborating, he said that "environmental loadings are now such that the margin between efficient running and criticality are much closer. To achieve the minimum energy use demands temperature, power and humidity monitoring at a much more granular level than used to be required."
Data centre future
With a more educated customer base and more demands than ever before being placed upon those developing the technology for the industry where does the future of the data centre lie though? HP’s Brian Hurley said that while there will be acceleration towards a "complete lights-out environment" in the data centre, based on remote management technologies. The main leap forward in the next year or so is increasing developments in consolidation which will allow "ever greater scale in each data centre".
Said Hurley, "With the move to a cloud-based environment we will see more end-to-end automation in terms of provisioning, management and re-use across the data centre infrastructure."
Offering her view on where the industry is going, Servecentric’s Muir said that "over the next 18 months, data centre operators will continue to focus on green technologies that can provide greater efficiencies, as the cost of power increases and environmental issues become even more important".
On a similar note, Telecity’s Shorten said the old chestnut of "getting more from less" will be a key goal in the next year to 18 months, adding that new developments in power delivery and cooling require high initial capital outlay however the costs can eventually be recouped through better power utilisation efficiency. "It’s one of the key metrics for data centres," he added.
The subject of software defined networking was also high on Shorten’s list of trends for the next year. "We would see the extension of virtualisation and the associated technologies that the likes of the major virtualisation vendors offer to be further extended to the network layer," he said. "Traditional hardware that has been purchased to support network connections in an IT environment can now be deployed as a virtualised workload. The majority of hardware vendors have embraced this trend and are offering virtualised alternatives to their traditional tin box offerings."
Density
For Interxion’s Loewe increasing power density was the big talking point in terms of the data centre’s future. "For example, the ability to utilise more computing capability per square meter is just as important, if not more important, that the source of the power being from renewable power sources," he said.
Loewe continued his point, adding, "A data centre in 18 months is only as good as its ability to provide two kilowatts of electricity per square meter, otherwise the equipment needs to be spread out in the data centre and underutilised technical real estate is then born as an increased cost to the client. Density matters."
It was a point with which BT Ireland’s Fagan and Dell’s Trevaskis agreed. The latter saying that more hardware per square metre and dealing with higher temperatures in the data centre will be common themes for 2013 and beyond. For his part, Fagan said that that greater power density with lower cooling overheads will be discussed at length over the next 12 months. "In addition," he said, "there will be more adoption of accreditation to prove facility excellence, security, service provision, quality or environmental impact."
With density-related issues dominating the debate on the data centre’s near-to-medium future, one other industry development may be worth keeping an eye. APC’s O’Connor was one of a number of data centre experts to point towards the recent launch of the Data Centre Genome project which is hoping to "herald a community effort to build a repository of real world power consumption data for data centre equipment".
It’s a campaign, O’Connor added, that aims to get the data centre community to overcome the cost and emissions of wasted data centre energy caused by the "oversizing of equipment". It’s hoped, he said, that a data library can be built up to provide a basis for designing capacity requirements based upon the "real power requirements" of equipment "rather than the nameplate designations provided by equipment manufacturers". For those in the industry it could prove a valuable resource as 2013 develops.
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