A Crystal Ball Look into the 2009 Data Center

Tuesday, 30 December 2008 16:16

Written by Michelle Savage

With 2008 winding down, it's time to look into the crystal ball and see what the future holds for the data center industry. Data center experts around the world envision a year of innovation, which they hope will alleviate or possibly even resolve today’s data center challenges.

Greening the Data Center
In 2009, data centers will be all about the green, with companies striving to save energy and reduce costs by investing in green hardware and services. “A lot of the biggest challenges we’ll face in 2009 will be the same as those we’ve seen in data centers all along,” predicts Pete Sachel, president of PTS Data Center Solutions. “Companies are running out of power, space, and cooling, and there’s no sign of those problems going away.”

“With the demand for energy and the cost of energy and cooling skyrocketing, the capacity for increasing energy availability has not kept pace with need, and is not expected to keep pace over the next few years,” says Jill Eckhaus, CEO of AFCOM. “More energy efficient servers and cooling equipment are the two highest priorities for data centers today.”

Green data centers promise to address these power, space, and cooling concerns while cutting cost, which explains why many companies perceive them as somewhat of a magic bullet. “Energy and green data centers are really overwhelming today’s data center discussions, whereas the dominant issues used to be reliability and security.” says Gary Orazio, president of data center consulting firm Swanson Rink. “Today, just about every project is stopping and looking at energy use.”

A 2008 Gartner study suggests that, by 2009, more than one third of IT departments will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods. Their primary motivation for doing so will come from a desire to contain costs, as data centers will struggle with even greater power requirements when it comes to maintaining their infrastructures. Expect IT organizations to shift their focus from the power efficiency of products to asking service providers how they can help them improve energy efficiency, predicts Gartner.

The big difference between 2008 and 2009 is that more companies are hip to the green marketing hype and will be weeding through this hype to find the solutions that directly impact their bottom line. They’re looking for green as in dollars, not eco-friendliness. If the two can intersect smoothly, this will be a major growth market, notes Sachel.

A 2008 Uptime Institute report revealed that data center energy use doubled between 2000 and 2006. And by 2012, it's expected to double again. In addition, between now and 2010, U.S. demand for data center energy will require the equivalent of 10 new power plants. For these reasons, data center managers like Michael Manos at Microsoft expect the government to start monitoring the carbon emissions of all U.S. businesses. If this happens, we can expect the data center industry to be closely regulated, says Manos.

Businesses today are expected to create better data center designs that optimize their use of power and increase efficiencies in cooling, according to Joshua Woodruff, senior architect at online retailer Cafepress, and they are preparing for regulation.  “I’m not sure we'll see a huge amount of new regulation being imposed on businesses employing data centers in 2009 itself, but we'll undoubtedly start to see some,” states Woodruff. “It would behoove any business that uses a data center to start thinking about how they'll meet these demands and prepare for compliance sooner than later.”

Technologies to Watch
As the green buzz continues strong into 2009, experts expect significant innovation in technologies that drive green adoption in data centers, especially in areas like virtualization and cloud computing.

“Technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing, which achieve greater processing capability with less actual hardware and less power demand, will be the most adopted in the near-term,” says Eckhaus. “That being said, how effective cloud computing will be is yet to be seen. It is difficult to gauge its impact at this time considering the current debate over just what cloud computing really is and whether or not it brings real benefits over other existing technologies. 

Data center virtualization was wildly popular in 2008, as a large number of companies took on virtualization projects in an effort to consolidate their servers and data centers. Long-time market leader VMware faced increased competition as other vendors, including Microsoft with its Hyper-v launch, began aggressively targeting the data center with new products and solutions. 

“I believe that the embrace of virtualization is really just beginning,” observes Charles King, principal analyst at research firm Pund-IT. “Most data I’ve seen suggests that virtualization is only used in about 15-20 percent of the servers that could be virtualized, so I expect the drumbeat from VMware and a growing number of competing vendors to continue.”

As this happens, hypervisor providers and management vendors alike will be working over-time to deliver a platform on which virtual servers from multiple vendors can be effectively managed, adds Woodruff.

In an effort to hold it market share, VMware recently announced a line of new virtualization products that it claims will allow customers to extend their use of virtualization beyond servers and into all corners of the data center, including storage and network equipment.

These products will hit the market in 2009 and will enable what VMWare calls a "virtual data center operating system," which will allow users to allocates resources to applications based on the workloads they’re handling. The VDC-OS also delivers a set of application services, such as security and scalability, which the company says will be independent of operating systems, development frameworks, or architecture.

With all these advances in virtualization, Venkat S. Devraj, Co-founder and CTO at Stratavia, says that the time is ripe for exploring opportunities in data center automation (DCA). “Software as a service and cloud computing models will continue to be hot and they’ll place significant demand on the infrastructure in terms of agility and response,” he observes. “When public or private cloud architectures are increasingly leveraged, conventional ways of infrastructure management and the subsequent delivery restrictions are no longer acceptable. 2009 will see an increasing need for the infrastructure to be capable of self-provisioning capabilities, identifying and correlating problem signatures, and responding in pre-approved ways in real-time.”

“Until recently, DCA used to be equated to just automated server provisioning,” he adds. “However the newer generation of DCA technologies, especially Run Book Automation (RBA) Version 2 and decision automation product-sets, cover the entire lifecycle of asset management in the data center. This offers managers the opportunity to streamline, standardize and automate complex processes across heterogeneous environments – thereby enhancing service levels and keeping head-count requirements steady in the face of increasing workload.”

PTS’ Sachel believes that, as automation increases, data centers will be at the focus of IT discussions in 2009. “To meet the production demands of today’s consumer economy, we need automation and this smacks of IT,” he says. “IT systems must be working in full swing. The data center is a major by-product of IT and will be one of the industries that remain strong through 2009.”

Storage Matters
Justin Lewis, a technology specialist at eLINIA, a managed services provider, believes that 2009 will bring significant improvements in data center storage systems. “We’ll see more sophisticated storage systems that provide clever ways to reduce duplicate data, increase capacity, and scale easily.”

CafePress’ Woodruff expects evolutions in technologies that can easily manage massive amounts of data storage, resulting in less expensive resources required to manage it. He also predicts greater innovation in providing more capacity in smaller form factors, reducing the amount of space required in the data center to accommodate the massive storage demands of today's businesses.
“While I don't believe we'll see mainstream adoption of solid state drives in 2009, we'll certainly see the reduction in cost by the big storage vendors and most likely more adoption of such technologies by key players that have the budgets to start working out the kinks,” he predicts. “I see a lot of exciting and unique opportunities in the solid state disk market emerging more broadly in 2009.”
Where Will the 2009 Data Center Live?
Business continuity continues to be critical to businesses in 2009 for all the reasons stated above. For this reason, companies are expected to increasingly seek out geographic segmentation to help reduce the risk of single points of failures and data silos.
“Year over year, we’re seeing up to a 23 percent increase in companies wanting to move their data center from one location to another, retrofit their existing data center, or at least analyze what they should do from a growth standpoint,” says Ed Espinosa, Consultant at the Collective Group, an IT services and solutions provider. “A lot of companies are realizing that their existing facilities are not meeting the new demands of the IT infrastructure they have in that data center, and are not meeting the power and cooling needs because they have not been updated for a significant amount of time.”

To help companies meet their power, cooling, and space needs in 2009, data center colocation companies are stepping up their game. For example, Next Generation Data Ltd. (NGD) is investing almost $400 million to build one the largest data centers in Europe, which will open up 400,000 square feet of space that can be used by clients who want to leave behind their worries about planning for and adapting to changing data center needs. With colocation, they simply lease more or less square footage if their needs change.

“Colocation vendors will continue to offer more choices, which will make them more attractive,” says Espinosa. “Four years ago, these data centers were lights-out facilities, meaning that someone was there from nine to five. More and more data centers are offering a full range of managed services, 24-hour security and support, and remote technology, all of which bring huge benefits to companies.”

The portable “data center in a box” concept is also expected to grow, partially due to Microsoft and other large companies publicly touting modular data centers’ ability to provide economies of scale for SaaS. “In 2009 I expect to see innovations in larger, more modular units of scale for data centers, such as container- or pod-based approaches,” says Woodruff. “Most all of the big hardware vendors have an offering in this space now, which is increasing data center collocation competition and ultimately driving down cost, creating a budgetary win for businesses that have a data center presence.  2008 seemed to be the year that introduced a big leap in these concepts, whereas 2009 may be the year where these concepts are actually implemented at a broad scale.” 

IT Tightens Purse Strings

While 2009 promises to deliver cool new data center services and solutions, the question remains: Who will invest in them?

In 2008, AFCOM surveyed its members on the issues facing data centers, and found that one of the primary concerns is budget. “Budget, of course, is the linchpin and impacts a data center manager across all other fronts,” said Eckhaus.

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