Conquering Density

With smarter designs and green pressures, data center managers and designers have begun to focus on the compute density in their environments. Most data centers are woefully underutilized from a space perspective. The physical floor space may be nearing capacity, but in many cases, the actual compute space within racks and servers is very poorly used, with average rack densities approaching just 60 percent worldwide.

Newer designs focus on this issue and are developed to allow optimal rack density, often approaching 85 to 90 percent, on average, thus increasing the compute-per-square-foot ratio dramatically. The advent of private cloud environments and resource pooling will provide methods to enhance vertical scalability in the data center, while at the same time improving the productivity-per-kilowatt ratio.

Cloud Computing

Data center managers are beginning to consider the possibility of shifting nonessential workloads to a cloud provider, freeing up much-needed floor space, power and cooling, which can then be focused on more-critical production workloads, and extending the useful life of the data center. Shifting workloads is not new; many companies use collocation facilities as an overflow mechanism. However, the difference is that, with collocation, the compute resource is still owned and managed by the application owner. With offloading services to the cloud, ownership and management of IT assets is shifted to the provider, essentially outsourcing the service to someone else.

As this practice increases in popularity, the landscape for what remains of the corporate data center will change significantly. Only core business functions - those that differentiate a business from its competition, or are truly mission-critical — will remain in the primary data center. All other noncritical services will eventually migrate to external providers, having the long-term effect of shrinking physical data center requirements. Gartner predicts that by 2018, data center space requirements will be only 40 percent of what they are today.

The focus of these data centers will be on core business services, and, as those services continue to demand more IT resources, the shrinking size of servers and storage (and telecom equipment) will more than offset that growth.