The Background

The Shift

From a technical perspective, the change in the physical make up of the datacentre will essentially take the form of virtualisation and consolidation, says Hammond – fewer servers occupying less space, using less energy, at lower costs while processing more data.However, while virtualisation has quickly become quite the sweetheart of the IT
industry, just four or five per cent of datacentre servers have as yet actually ‘been’ virtualised, so it will be some time before virtual datacentres appear en masse.By way of specifics there’s an array of current thinking as to what the immediate curve will look like – though most commentators predict huge change.According to AFCOM, more than half of all datacentres will have to relocate to
new facilities, for example, while power constraints will also become a big factor – with power failures and availability limitations “halting datacentre operations at more than 90% of companies”.Large numbers of datacentre refresh projects seem the likely outcome, with
recent research from outsourced datacentre operator Digital Realty Trust bearing this out. In its survey of senior, Fortune 2000 datacentre decision-makers, a huge 86% of respondents said they would probably or definitely be expanding their number of datacentres sometime in the next 12 months, with almost half planning to expand in three or more locations – an uplift of nearly 20% over the previous year.Datacentres look likely to take up more room too – with planned square footage
for the average expansion rising by an enormous 50% from 10,000 last year to
15,000 this, with the DRT survey reporting that a whopping 83% of respondents were planning to expand the physical space of their datacentres. 77% and 76% respectively are planning to expand their power and cooling capabilities too.All these are extremely telling statistics  says Michael F. Foust, Digital Realty Trust CEO. “This survey confirms what our team has suspected... the demand for datacentre space is accelerating... across a wide cross-section of industries. It’s particularly significant that 86% of companies are planning datacentre expansions in the next 12 months – especially in the context of the current economic environment.Despite challenging market conditions, companies are making major investments in IT infrastructure, reflecting the critical nature of these assets to today’s corporations.”
The survey also found that datacentre power usage is continuing to grow (and fairly alarmingly given the trend for increasing power costs), with racks using an average of 12% more kW each in 2008 than in 2007.

The Impact

The long term ramifications of the datacentre’s immediate and ongoing evolution are difficult if not impossible to fathom fully – though they are sure to be felt the length and breadth of the business in one way or another.
Predicting the immediate future for the datacentre itself looks a little easier however. Several commentators predict a return to mainframe principals of old, for example. “Future-gazing conjures images of almost a new form of mainframe”, says Hammond. “Ultra-datacentres” in remote locations, hidden underground or under bodies of water using local renewable energy sources. (Indeed some companies have already made headlines by following just this pattern).” Kelly Smith, MD of Smartbunker also sees datacentres de-coupling data from systems in mainframe fashion. “A datacentre that fully virtualises becomes incredibly flexible in its ability to deliver services on demand, as well as becoming more efficient and easier to manage. So in concept it would have similarities with a mainframe computer.”

“Mainframes are defined by their overall computational power, high utilisation rates, reliability, and the fact they can be maintained and upgraded while still in service.All these attributes will be realised by a fully-virtualised data centre. (But because it) is constructed from small computational units it will be far more flexible than would be the case with a single mainframe.”

Here, says Smith, the datacentre could effectively become a single, shared hosting platform, consolidated to a single point – making load balancing, security, and contention easier to manage.
Consolidation will be the watchword according to Ranga Bakthavathsalam, Senior Product Marketing Manager with Emulex Corporation – with enterprise datacentres in particular facing ‘infrastructure sprawl’ even as the datacentre itself consolidates – more rather than less servers, networks, and storage hardware.
Here, IT management will need to think about consolidation at the most fundamental, granular level. i.e. from the datacentre outwards and upwards.
The trend towards server and storage rationalisation and virtualisation will continue therefore, with technologies such as blade servers and thin provisioning helping to increase rack densities in the datacentre.
A further trend will be the increased adoption of higher I/O bandwidth and external SAN storage to facilitate consolidation and mobility, says Bakthavathsalam.
“Ever since the emergence of Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Networks (SANs) in the late 90s, enterprise IT managers have invariably maintained two sets of networks – one for storage I/O traffic and the other, a Local Area Network (LAN), for data networking traffic. While IT managers could continue to maintain two separate networks, the increasing need for SAN expansion and consolidation in the datacentre is driving the need for a unified fabric where multiple traffic types – networking, storage, and clustering are all carried over a single network infrastructure.”CEO of Scalable Software Mark Cresswell thinks the outskirts of the datacentre will also see some significant changes, with companies becoming much more vigilant about the nature and scope of their software deployments for example.

“For many organisations, the use of SAM (Software Asset Management) tools
in preparation for an audit or ‘true-up’, turns out to be an exercise in little more
than understanding early on what the cost exposure of an audit is likely to be”,
he comments.
“Traditional approaches to SAM don’t consider how much software is actually
needed, because the concept of need doesn’t feature in entitlement definitions.
Has anyone ever seen a EULA that says a license is required for every user that needs the software? Instead SAM analysis of the number of licenses required is based on discovered installations or a misleading notion of usage.”
This is particularly crucial given the current financial climate, says Cresswell, with “the nagging doubts” as to whether software is actually needed putting pressure on CIOs to turn SAM into a cost-mitigation process.This is something that’s sure to impact the outer reaches of the datacentre –
consolidation applies to software too. Though many organisations still haven’t
made this connection, it is an important one. Cresswell cites a recent example wherein a 20,000-employee company had spent several years spending over $20,000 per month on just three popular software titles.
Following a study of its actual software usage it found enough unused copies of
those three titles within its estate to halt that spend for four years, a total cost-mitigation of almost $1m.

The Outcome

Expect the face of the datacentre to change almost unrecognisably – hardware, software, storage, plumbing, architecture, everything – just don’t expect it to change overnight. It’ll happen over an extended period.
But it will happen.