Nick Ewing, solutions consultant, Comtec Power looks at building an ecological datacentre.

Like the furnace of a steelworks or the engine room of a ship, working in an enterprise datacentre is an industrial experience.  The raw sounds and heat, and delicate precision of the controls, suggest the datacentre is alive rather than just an inert assembly of racks, servers and cables.  It’s not infrastructure - it’s an eco-structure…   Now give it a hug, ahhhhhh.

The idea of thinking of your datacentre in this way is not as bananas as it might appear.  With an increasing array of external and internal pressures threatening to undermine the performance and availability of datacentres, using a framework for understanding the sensitivities and symbiotic inter-reliances that exist within those walls of tin will help you anticipate change, generate operational efficiencies and safeguard the success of core business operations. 

An ecological standpoint is also helpful for other reasons.  The UK’s green revolution isn’t just being driven by a fear of global warming, there are also economics at play; use less energy, spend less money on energy.   Fact is, datacentres use it in spades, and the upward curve toward more power consumption is unlikely to abate anytime soon.  Understanding how energy can most efficiently flow from one element to the next within this closed community of physical cause and effect is not just environmentally friendly, but financially imperative.
Here are some approaches to consider when designing and managing your own datacentre eco-structure.

 Anticipate External Factors

Eco-structures don’t like being disturbed, but they can adapt.  Factors beyond the organisation’s control can have a major impact on the datacentre, so conduct some contingency planning.  Consider:

•  Energy price increases.  The more power costs, the more the datacentre will come under internal scrutiny. 

•  Weather fluctuations.  You don’t have to be John Kettley to anticipate hot or rainy days, but is peak cooling and flood prevention factored into the design/management of your datacentre?

•  New legislation.  Analyst house Gartner recently predicted new EU laws to penalise organisations with large datacentres who don’t take action against energy inefficiency.  Measures could be introduced as early as 2008.

Manage Internal Conflicts

Eco-structures are intended to serve a purpose, but which purpose?  Many internal business drivers and objectives seem innocuous to the day-to-day operations of the datacentre, but they actually play a crucial role in shaping its evolution.  In the modern enterprise, the datacentre is the foundation for all business processes.  Network critical physical infrastructure has to support whatever the business seeks to achieve, so consider:

•  Business Growth.  More users, customers, markets and products all point toward increased pressure on the datacentre environment.  How will it scale up to these demands cost-effectively without affecting performance?  Following a merger or acquisition, will it be your datacentre that absorbs the other; or will your’s be threatened?

•  Cost Reduction.  Bean counters find efficiencies everywhere, but will your datacentre be scrutinised as an ‘IT’ asset that needs nurturing or a ‘facilities’ burden that can be trimmed?  Evaluate whether the future development of your datacentre is best served by a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ design, or a larger upfront investment that will provide value over time.

•  Relocation.  IT infrastructure strategies such as server consolidation can lead to relocation and drive a train through your datacentre planning.  Put some thought towards a ‘wish-list’ datacentre design approach; one day you could get the chance to implement it at a Greenfield site. 

•  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).  CSR is a governance framework that large organisations adopt, requiring them to account for the actual/potential economic, social and environmental impacts of all their decisions.  If your organisation has a CSR action plan, then sooner or later this could involve reducing your datacentre’s sizeable ‘carbon footprint’.  Many public sector organisations are already being squeezed to minimise or offset the environmental impact of their datacentre eco-structures.

These factors consistently return to the need to generate efficiencies within the datacentre.  The challenge of accomplishing this without introducing unnecessary elements to the closed eco-structure is eloquently demonstrated by the perennial question of cooling.  Cooling’s seemingly unbreakable cause and effect relationship with heat generating equipment (particularly its own) has provoked some extremely novel technologies that break the vicious circle of heat - cooling - power - heat - cooling – power, etc.  These approaches reduce energy usage by virtue of their intelligent eco-structure orientated design, and deliver greater value to the organisation.

Datacentre managers can benefit from emergence of  ‘eco-structures’ if they ensure that they – and others within the organisation – do not underestimate the integral role that network critical physical infrastructure plays in business stability and success, or the potential damage it can bring if its needs are not considered or planned for. 

Taking a considered approach toward those external and internal impacts provides a framework for datacentre managers to have confidence in the future of their prized assets, and right-size performance, stability and efficiency across the enterprise.