FOCUS. Welcome to ACN s new datacentre section. We will be featuring cutting edge analysis and major datacentre implementations every month. Enjoy...

Transcription

1 Welcome to ACN s new datacentre section. We will be featuring cutting edge analysis and major datacentre implementations every month. Enjoy... FOCUS DATACENTRES July 2007 ACN 45

2 Welcome to

3 DC ANAYLSIS the machine The datacentre has landed and Middle East enterprises are rolling them out as fast as they can. These projects are probably one of the largest capital outlays a company will make for several decades so becoming a critical business project, rather than a mere IT deployment. ACN reports on what regional decision-makers need to know. DATACENTRES Datacentres are probably the nearest thing large enterprises have to the newly-launched Apple iphone everyone s talking about them, a lot of people want them, and they re incredibly expensive. In addition, they re still very much a work in progress vendors are announcing new technologies all the time, and standards are still coming out to cover every aspect of the modern datacentre. Also like the iphone, datacentres are far bigger in North America than they are in the Middle East. Simple economics have dictated this the vast US market has meant more companies have needed the high resiliency and efficiency of a standards-driven datacentre than in the Middle East. For regional organisations, being one step behind in datacentre deployment has now left them one step ahead. For companies with older datacentres, the cost to upgrade to the latest, greatest technologies is far higher than it would be to build a new datacentre from scratch, especially when the companies are obliged to justify their previous datacentre investment. Middle Eastern organisations, then, have the current pick of datacentre technologies and a much clearer idea of where datacentres will be going in the future. While this technological shift has been going on, the regional economies of the Middle East have also been evolving and expanding at sometimes alarming paces. This has placed regional organisations at a tipping point many are now moving from being local firms, to regional or even global players. Regional growth is driving this demand for datacentres a lot of local companies are growing, and going international, so their requirements have suddenly shot through the roof, says Mohamed Fouz, the new CEO of ehosting DataFort. There are a lot of companies being launched new telcos such as du have massive requirements, and a company like Dubai Ports World, which took over ports around the world, needs to have many datacentres. Players are also moving into the region banks are moving in to the Middle East from Asia, from Europe. Some companies are even setting up their headquarters here such as Halliburton, he adds. Herbert Radlinger of Schnabel offers one prediction for datacentre growth for the UAE alone: We estimate a minimum of 20 new datacentres within the next financial year, of between 200 and 500 square meters. July 2007 ACN 47

4 DC ANAYLSIS Show me the money So private companies, government departments, state-owned enterprises and multinationals across the Middle East are now facing some serious demands for a datacentre, probably from increasingly vocal managers in the IT department. But the expense behind building and running a datacentre is considerable what s the business case for building one? The business case for a datacentre is self-evident: your company either needs secure IT and communications facilities or it doesn t, bluntly states Barry Elliott, technical consultant at Connectix. Elliott s straight-forward assessment of the requirement for datacentres is based on the now wellestablished reality that for the vast majority of organisations, their data is their business. Fouz agrees: I think organisations understand the criticality of their businesses and the business depends on IT. They understand the need to keep their data assets in a safe place, and they re willing to spend money on the datacentre. While stating that data is now critical to the business is all well and good, it still doesn t illustrate what a datacentre can actually deliver in terms of a return on its significant investment. This calculation is as individual as a company, but there are real savings to be made, according to most observers and vendors. Tenzing Chopathar, marketing manager for adaptive infrastructure Chopathar: CEOs like to make wise investments. at HP EMEA, says his company made a very significant saving by consolidating its dozens of datacentres to just a handful: Within HP, we estimate we will save around US$1 billion over the next few years by consolidating our datacentres. He doesn't give a figure for HP s total IT spend, but says the saving is close to double digits as a percentage of its overall IT budget. Do you care enough? A datacentre is one of the most critical projects IT or otherwise The CEO and business heads start asking questions where is the disaster recovery site, how will the business continue if the main site is down? They ve come a long way. any enterprise can undertake. It is a long way from being a regular IT implementation of a new application, or updating the network infrastructure. As such, a datacentre project is one that demands attention from the highest level of the business the board of directors, the CEO, and down. The direction and the requirements should come from the executive management team, to ensure the project is completely in synch with the long-term business requirements of the organisation. CEOs should care about datacentres, because their businesses depend on secure datacentres. They like to make wise investments with a long-term payback. They want their data to be confidential, available, reliable all things to help their businesses survive, says Chopathar. Business continuity is very important. If you re a large organisation, even half an hour s downtime can heavily damage your business and your image. So CEOs are worried unless they have a proper way of housing and protecting their data, their business is going to be impacted, he adds. Increasing numbers of top executives in the Middle East are starting to take an interest in their organisation s strategic IT issues and are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about IT as a result. This varies from industry to industry, but as Fouz, a former CIO of Mashreqbank, experienced the level of knowledge can be very high. I know how we used to educate the CEO and the rest of the business heads at Mashreqbank to highlight IT issues, says Fouz. They start asking questions where is the disaster recovery site, how will the business continue if the main site is down? One day the business group heads came What is a datacentre? While it may look like a long row of fridges behind metal grilles, the datacentre is a complex beast. An evolution of the comms room or server room, a modern datacentre is a completely integrated facility for all core IT systems from application servers, to routers, to telephony, to storage and archive systems. By consolidating all the mission-critical systems in one location, datacentres make management and maintenance much easier. IT staff can work from one central location to tackle all core IT issues. But by moving everything to a central location, the datacentre has also become a potential point of failure catastrophic failure in the case of enterprises which are highly dependent on IT systems, such as banks or telcos. This makes planning a critical aspect of building a datacentre the enterprise needs to know it is as resilient as required to ensure the business s operations can stay up. In practice, this often means investing in a second datacentre in a remote location, to act as a disaster recovery site. While a major investment, this ensures continuity of business and still represents a saving in facilities compared to running several datacentres spread over a city or country. 48 ACN July

5 DC ANAYLSIS down and asked when we had done the last failover test, for example. They never used to ask these things before they would say I didn t have disaster recovery for the last 20 years why do I need it now? From there to asking about specific DR tests they ve come a long way. The case for the CEO taking a personal interest becomes even more stark when the position of the datacentre within the business is made clear. From a fairly basic server room housing a few racks of equipment, the modern datacentre sits literally at the heart of an organisation. Once deployed, a datacentre becomes the core of all businesses, maintaining continuity and availability, but also allowing sustained growth and security of its core asset: information, says Schnabel s Radlinger. Hot or not? The major shift in datacentres has been the adoption of widely-accepted standards, giving organisations a defined basis on which to make decisions regarding their needs. Specifically, the system of tiers ranging from no-redundancy Tier I to ultra-resilient Tier IV (see boxout, page 52) allows enterprises to judge exactly what their requirements are. A multinational bank that measures its turnover in millions of dollars an hour will easily justify three or more Tier IV datacentres, as the whole project is likely to represent less than one hour s turnover, explains Elliott. A small local college or authority will not have the same pressures to remain online 24x7, and so will more likely adopt a lower cost Tier I design. Underpinning the standards, come a new set of advanced technologies which have increased the efficiency of datacentres dramatically. The driving factors behind nextgeneration datacentres are automation and virtualisation these are the two major trends we re seeing at the moment, says HP s Chopathar. Virtualisation running several virtual servers on one physical machine has solved one of the banes A datacentre becomes the core of all businesses, maintaining availability, but also allowing sustained growth and security of its core asset: information. Radlinger: A critical issue is to guarantee enough power and cooling to cope with high density heat loads. of IT managers lives: poor server utilisation. It might seem a minor issue, but if a server is only being used 40% of the time, this represents a major cost no factory would be content with 60% dead time. Virtual machines can run across whole banks of physical servers effectively making them a pool of processing and storage resources. The bigger the pool, the more efficient it becomes and the fewer physical servers the business needs overall. Automation revolves around making IT systems do most of the routine maintenance work themselves with little or no intervention from human IT staff. While a centralised location is not vital to automate systems effectively, it does simplify Critical questions for CEOs To ensure a successful datacentre project, a CEO needs to be prepared to ask his IT department the right questions not detailed IT questions, but fundamental, strategic points. This will make sure the IT department builds a datacentre which fits in with the enterprise s long-term business goals. One issue is who needs to make the decisions on a multi-discipline project such as a datacentre? Don t expect IT people to be expert in power supplies and air conditioning, says Barry Elliott, technical consultant at Connectix. One can t expect facilities managers to be expert in IT either. It takes a separate set of skills to convert the IT requirement into the language that facilities and estates managers are happy with. IT managers should seek specialist help in the exercise to design the best possible workspace for their equipment. Some additional points which a CEO can raise are: Is my data available 24x7, and is it secure? What kind of business continuity plan do you have even if one application goes down? Is IT geared up to handle the growth of the business? Have you planned for this growth? Do we have the capability to make decisions around a merger or acquisition? How fast is our data growing? What capacity planning processes do you have in place? 50 ACN July

6 DC ANAYLSIS Fouz: I think organisations understand the criticality of their businesses and the business depends on IT. the process and eliminates the need to synchronise operations across multiple sites. Cool customer But beyond the pure IT side of things, datacentres have some very real-world issues which need to be tackled. The most critical of these are also apparently the most mundane heating, power and space. Without making too obvious a pun, the hot topic in datacentres at the moment is heat build up and removal, Connectix s Elliott says. Since 2003 the advent of rack mounted servers and blade servers has raised the average heat load of an equipment rack from 1.7kW to a potential 25kW. Traditional designs of air conditioning just can t cope and building the datacentre in a hot climate only makes matters worse. The second topic is supplying enough electrical power. Radlinger echoes Elliott s view: A critical issue is being able to guarantee enough power and cooling to accommodate high density heat loads and future technological innovations requiring increased power. While apparently straight-forward points, these issues are some of the toughest challenges to tackle especially in the Middle East. A region which regularly encounters 50-degree summers is going to have problems accommodating a concentrated heat source such as a datacentre. These issues can, of course, be dealt with in the case of cooling, by ensuring the datacentre has adequate air conditioning. But it is not just a question of adding extra aircon units to the centre enterprises need to take long-term growth into consideration. The alternative major refits, or rebuilding makes forward planning look even more attractive. Planning makes perfect The datacentre is a long-term project likely to be with an enterprise for decades. And as with any major investment, the business needs to do the usual due diligence procedures and set down a comprehensive plan for the project, including how it will develop in the coming years. If you run a datacentre project, you need to have a monitoring and reporting structure in place, explains Chopathar. The project team needs to report back on a regular basis, based on those metrics defined at the start. If you build a new datacentre, it s not just about the datacentre, it s not just about the technology, not just about servers, storage networks, the applications. It s about business processes. In order to build a new datacentre, you need to align the business processes, and you need to align and scale the people behind it. So actually it s not just buying new gear, buying land somewhere and starting to build the centre it s much more than that. That s why it needs to be reviewed regularly by the board. Here to stay The Middle East has passed the point of no return for datacentres its businesses are now growing so fast that mature IT facilities are now a critical necessity. But the region s IT departments currently lack many of the skills needed to deploy datacentres effectively. They are clearly keen to rectify this, however datacentre training programmes are springing up around the region, and filling up fast. The region s hunger for datacentre knowledge suggests it will not be lagging behind the US and Europe for much longer in the race to secure corporate data. Tier pressure Current datacentre standards go from Tier I (lowest) to Tier IV (highest) but even a Tier I datacentre has stringent requirements that must be met. Tier I costs start at around US$400/sq ft Tier IV starts at $1,100/sq ft. TIER I: No redundancy, single power path, so is vulnerable to external outages. Expect around 28 hours annual downtime. TIER II: Single power source, but redundant components, so more resistant to equipment failure. Around 22 hours annual downtime. TIER III: Redundant equipment and multiple power paths, but only one active at any time. Expect around 1.6 hours annual downtime. TIER IV: Multiple redundant power and data feeds, redundant components and fault-tolerance capabilities. Around 0.4 hours downtime. 52 ACN July