Operational challenges
Also speaking on the changing architecture of data centres, Dell’s O’Regan noted that “most of today’s data centres [were] built just before or during the economic boom”, and in turn just before the ‘tipping point” of widespread server virtualisation and mature cloud-based enterprise applications. All of which, he added, presents “financial and operational challenges” for the data centre.
“These business assets must somehow be upgraded or extended into a future-proof model without the impact of additional investment where possible,” he said. This, said the Dell man, meant the adoption of energy-saving measures such as “moderate consolidation” of data centres, “aggressive” adoption of energy-efficient servers, as well as and the use of improved fans, chillers, and free cooling as well as the adoption of private and hybrid cloud.
“Over the past 12 to 16 months, we have seen organisations turn to new and sustainable IT service delivery models in order to address the common data centre issues of energy efficiency, power and cooling,” added O’Regan, who said this has all been “accelerated by the maturation of cloud computing, widespread virtualisation across the data centre and select and strategic partnering to enhance design and delivery of the modern data centre”.
“It’s not so much how the data centre has been designed or engineered in a sense, which has changed all that much lately, but the way that it’s deployed. So rather than build a massive data centre which on day one operates in its entirety and therefore inefficiently, we build data centres very modularly in response to customer growth demand,” Tanya Duncan, Interxion
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He added that “modular building is gaining popularity in Ireland and indeed worldwide” as it allows data centres to obtain a high level of energy efficiency as power and cooling can be regulated per unit. “Thus, technological innovations in that area can be applied much quicker and more cost effectively,” said O’Regan.
BYOC
On a different note, Mark Fagan, head of data centre services for BT Ireland, felt a knock-on effect of businesses having to “grapple” with the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon is that “this consumerisation trend will start encroaching on the data centre in the form of ‘bring your own cloud’ (BYOC)”.
Continuing the point, Fagan added, “This has become a natural consequence of BYOD, because end users want an easy way to access data across multiple devices and share with others, so they often rely on third-party cloud platforms like DropBox to do that.
“Employees store sensitive corporate information on these platforms and constantly interact with it on desktops, smart phones and tablet devices,” explained Fagan.
He continued, “This demand from end users to click and buy IT services has raised service expectations to new heights. The IT function is becoming a service provider in its own right competing with external alternatives not even thought of a few years ago.”
All of which, Fagan added, has led to data centre vendors “helping clients manage this trend in a controlled manner” by offering “more efficient, scalable and responsive” data centre offerings which can provide “infrastructure as a service (Iaas) in a flexible, easy to consume model within a secure managed data centre”.
Echoing Waite and Duncan regarding oversight of the data centre, Fagan added that the most important element of such solutions, is that “it allows data to be controlled and managed by IT”.
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