When it comes to building a data center, the level of care taken is just as precise as the measures needed when building a house or other physical structure: Faulty plans, or solid plans executed improperly, can make the whole thing come crashing down. The same is true for outfitting your data center with the necessary equipment, so we asked industry experts for their tips on equipping a data center with gear that can serve you not just today, but for years to come.
Many experts pointed to virtualization of the server infrastructure and the consolidation of the data center architecture away from multitiered to a less complex architecture as trends to watch, along with the virtualization of the network infrastructure--all of which represent changes in equipment requirements.
Driving Down The Footprint
Jeff Nessen, practice director for platform virtualization at Logicalis (www.us.logicalis.com), agrees that virtualization is a key component in the modern data center.
"Blade servers and virtualization are driving the footprint down," Nessen says. "Virtualization eases disaster recovery implementation, and the cost savings afford having a failover hot site at the ready. Storage density continues to increase and will continue this trend. Network convergence has reduced the footprint, power consumption, and cost of the physical cable plant. All of these trends mean data centers that can scale workloads quickly and dynamically to better support business."
New technologies are affecting how, when, and even why data centers are built and what equipment is chosen to fill them, driven largely by desktop, server, and storage convergence.
"The main driver for these new technologies is simplification of the data center in terms of cost, operational efficiency, green IT aspects, and the like," says Eitan Bremler, product marketing manager for data center and vertical solutions at Radware (www.radware.com). "However, they also introduce a new set of complexities and challenges that must be addressed and sometimes overlook the most essential aspect: applications."
Increased Efficiency
Thinking about new data center technologies inevitably brings up the questions of what sorts of wrinkles will be included in the data center of the future. Experts see the trend toward virtualization and consolidation continuing to play a key role.
"Once data centers reach a level of maturity around the virtualization of the network, we'll see that also other layers of the network might become consolidated or virtualized," Bremler says. "For example, security or bandwidth management at the application delivery level. Applications are at the forefront of these initiatives, as they are the "what" that gets done. They keep the business moving forward. The "˜how" is up to the decisions made at the network and application layers."
Paradoxically, increased efficiency in data centers to come could mean wholesale changes in how they're equipped, according to Logicalis' Nessen."The data center of the future [won't] consume power and produce heat the same way as the data center of the past," he says."Heat load [will be] increased and concentrated into smaller areas and power consumption is reduced. The problem is the old power and cooling infrastructure becomes inefficient when these loads change the way they are."
Bremler advises that caution be used when conceptualizing future data centers so that resources can be allocated effectively, in time, and per need."This seems like an over-simplification, but it's not [when put into] practice, and organizations can find themselves in a situation whereby resources have not been allocated appropriately and therefore applications become ‘starved' in terms of performance or are unavailable," he says."Then a breakdown ensues in the whole model."
Get Ready To Go Green
Mark A. Gilmore, president of Wired Integrations (www.wiredint.com), has done systems integration and data center design since the early 1990s. He says that beyond the developments listed above, there are a couple of emerging trends in data center equipment that are worth keeping an eye on.
One is 10 Gigabit Ether-net backbones. Although they're still somewhat expensive, 10GbE infrastructure is a major leap past the previous Ethernet standard in terms of speed and bandwidth. What now seems like excess capacity could prove invaluable in a few years."10Gb infrastructures are becoming more popular with companies that are thinking toward the future," Gilmore says.
Another pervasive trend is green technology. Now that there are standards by which data centers are considered green, the incentive for more energy efficiency goes beyond just saving electricity. Of particular importance is Energy Star-certified equipment.
"I believe the phrase "˜Energy Star efficient" will soon replace "green data center" as the industry buzzword, giving those with the Energy Star label a huge advantage in marketing their products," says Steven Leidig, manager of enclosure engineering at Emcor Enclosures (www.emcorenclosures.com)."That being said, I believe we'll see an increased push on remote power monitoring tools, (and) we'll also see a higher dependence on closed architecture enclosure cooling solutions, including submergible servers and liquid-to-air heat exchangers, because they require less energy to run than the typical HVAC system."