New Data Centres Deliver Triple-Capacity Upgrades

IT research company Gartner has reported that most data centres currently being planned and built will have inherent efficiencies that will enable up to 300 percent growth in storage capacity and use 60 percent less floor space to do it.

According to consistent reports from eWEEK industry and analyst sources, a large number of current data centres that have been around for 10 years or more are reaching their limits in physical space or in power allocation.

Floor Space At A Premium

Thanks to new virtualisation options and improving efficiencies in application and middleware software, storage capacity, processor performance, and cooling apparatus, new data centres are being specifically designed to be efficient in terms of power utilisation, space allocation and capital expenditure.

In the past, organisations would temporarily solve power and cooling issues in data centres by simply spreading out the racks in the physical infrastructure across a larger floor space, Gartner said. But this trend is coming to an end because more servers are needed to handle the increasing deluge of data being stored. Floor space is also becoming a premium.

This is forcing organisations to cram more servers and storage arrays into existing server racks, thus causing increases in localised power and cooling demand.

“There is a real and growing desire to increase productivity in data centers,” said Gartner chief of infrastructure research Dave Cappuccio. “Organisations are starting to take a serious look at consumption ratios of compute-power to energy-consumed and then compare them against estimated productivity of applications and the equipment to deliver that application.

“Couple this with the realisation that most IT assets are underutilised; for example, x86 servers are [generally] running at 12 percent utilisation, racks are populated to 50 to 60 percent capacity, floor space is ‘spread out’ to disperse the heat load. It becomes clear that an efficiently designed and implemented data centre can yield significant improvements.”

Cappuccio said the trend toward higher-density cabinets and racks will continue  through 2012, increasing both the density of compute resources on the data centre floor and the density of both power and cooling required to support them.

IT managers for the past few years have focused solely on solving the power and cooling issue with hot and cold isles, distributed equipment placement, speciality cooling and self-contained environments.