Is thin technology flavour of the month in the datacentre too?

Can it help today's corpulent hardware cores slim down and shape up into the lean, mean, green kernels of the future?

Is thin technology flavour of the month in the datacentre too? Can it help today's corpulent hardware cores slim down and shape up into the lean, mean, green kernels of the future?

It's tempting to suppose that with millions of desktops around the globe shedding (and saving) pounds for their respective IT directors, something similar must surely be taking place in the world's datacentres. But think about it for a minute and you'll remember that the result of desktops slimming down is that the datacentre has to fatten up.

Indeed, deploying just about any kind of thin client architecture and expecting your datacentre to get anything but chunkier is, by definition, a lot like trying to get in shape by going on a steady diet of double cream, lard, and foie gras butties. 

It's certainly a dilemma according to Simon Ponsford, CEO of Cranberry, but one that's not necessarily as cut and dried as it first looks - at least these days. "Thin client technology doesn't really benefit the slimming down of the datacentre (after all it intrinsically means that less processing is done on the desktop and more is done in the datacentre)." The power and cooling requirements alone are enormous.

But several technologies and enhancements to those technologies - blade servers, consolidation, virtualisation - have of course emerged in recent years to address the issue. "Improvements in VMWare over the past couple of years means that higher performing virtual machines can be deployed on a single server", says Ponsford, "while other technologies such as Parallel's Virtuozzo allow for the more efficient creation of virtual machines."

Jamil Aboulzelof, CEO of Netvoyager adds however, that before trying to thin down your datacentre, it's vital to understand and appreciate thin computing's roots.

He comments: "Thin starts at the Desktop. Slimming down a datacentre for the sake of it is not enough. This exercise will reduce wastage in the datacentre, but when management realise how easy it is to create virtual servers, it will only be a question of time before we run out of capacity on these servers too. Then we'll add some more servers and within three to five years we'll find ourselves right back where we started."

As such, says Nick Ewing, Head of Design at specialist service provider Comtec, it's not so much thinning and down-sizing datacentres as right-sizing them that's important.
"Server consolidation and now latterly desktop and server virtualisation in the datacentre is bringing cost savings and reduced complexity to the network, and bringing an added focus and importance to datacentres and the need to manage and operate them effectively."

With this in mind, he says, with economic and environmental pressures beginning to tell, and with the datacentre design and build community under increasing pressure to respond, solutions have to be made to measure. In turn, this means making sure datacentre facilities are underpinned by intelligent design and that they are properly right-sized (rather than just down-sized).

"(That) has always been the best way to design and build datacentres", insists Ewing, asserting that smart design is one of the key tenets for keeping data cores flexible now and in the future, as well as being a key part of the wider strategy of shifting towards the right-sized datacentres business now want and need.

"The economic climate is merely amplifying that message." What comprises intelligent design? Ewing believes it's about finding the right mix of datacentre components; infrastructure, cooling, UPS, management, and power generation, and bringing them together in a way that makes them fit the specific need - the antithesis of the 'datacentre in a box' approach that leads so many kernels into scalability problems.

Indeed, he believes that scalability is a vital element of both the 'right-size' philosophy and the ongoing success of the design and build community in "stripping solutions of fatty deposits and delivering solutions that are leaner, meaner, and greener."

Steve Yellen, VP of Product and Market Strategy at datacentre management specialists, Aperture says that it's important that IT management keep its eyes on the prize and consider all the influencing factors - not just the immediately obvious ones.

"When it comes down to it, all organisations want the same thing from their datacentres: extreme efficiency without any reduction in service levels", he explains.

"To survive, and to keep fulfilling their purposes adequately, datacentres need to be making sure that they're using all their resources appropriately. Resources, of course, include power, cooling and space, but datacentre management also needs to optimise its processes and improve the efficiency of personnel."

"The most important thing for datacentre managers to do is make sure they can provide the information needed to make these key decisions. Unfortunately, many companies continue to operate their datacentres without discipline. Processes aren't documented, access isn't controlled and critical information and metrics are difficult to gather and rarely accurate."

The consensus is then, that organisations can't hope to turn their datacentres into the hardbodies of their dreams without an accurate picture of how they're operating "pre-diet" and of what the new, improved, athletic versions need to achieve and deliver.

Over time however, suggests Aboulzelof, there's nowhere for IT to go but slim - from thin applications to the easily scalable delivery modules that will provision them. Once that happens and datacentres start delivering true, cost effective, ROI-centric on-demand services, thin computing really will have arrived.

Builders of the host ARCCA

Comtec Enterprises employs what it calls an 'eco-structure' philosophy in its datacentre designs - one such example being its provision of datacentre facilities for one of Britain's most powerful supercomputers, housed within Cardiff University's ARCCA project.

With a theoretical capacity of 24 teraflops per second, ARCCA (Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff University) needed a datacentre environment that could underpin very specific power and cooling considerations and with an exceptional level of resilience.

It had also to operate in line with the University's environmental sustainability commitment - and so it was specified that the supporting datacentre should take the fullest advantage of available technologies and techniques to minimise energy consumption and, in so doing, its environmental impact. 

Other challenges included the need to situate the solution's external 'free cooling' chillers within a confined space to avoid disturbing sensitive laboratory experiments and lectures nearby - a feature that led to typical savings of around 35% on the energy consumed by conventional air-cooled liquid chillers. According to ARCCA's calculations, the new datacentre represents a comparative return on investment of three years.

Grand designs

Head of Design at Comtec Enterprises, Nick Ewing, gives us his ten top datacentre design tips.

• Right-size: Make sure you use a modular, scalable power and cooling architecture

• Virtualise Servers: not technically a physical solution, but it can have a huge impact

• Air Conditioning: choose row-orientated cooling to maximise efficiency and density

• Switch aircon units to 'Economiser' mode

• Synchronise: Make sure your aircon units are configured to heat/cool ~ in a coordinating fashion

• Floor layout: ensure you have a viable hot aisle/cold aisle arrangement

• Power equipment efficiency: New UPS systems commonly have 70% less losses than legacy systems

• Locate vented floortiles correctly: a professional assessment will ensure best results

• Deploy energy efficient lighting: so simple, but a key option for most datacentres

• Install blanking panels: Cheap and easy with snap-in blanking panels now available