Chris Smith, Sales & Marketing Director, on365 looks at how business continuity will be vital as power becomes more precious
This month a national TV franchise was off air, losing an entire day’s advertising revenue after a faulty generator again broke down, minutes before transmission.  This incident was the latest in a telling series of power failures affecting organisations including ISPs, hospitals and financial trading firms. These incidents highlight the growing need for effective assessment of emergencies and disaster scenarios. This encompasses effective IT infrastructure planning, provision of power supplies and environmental concerns influencing organisations’ daily operations.

The scope for such alarming events and knock-on effects such as system failure and critical data loss has been intensified in recent years by the expansion, complexity and power constraints on ICT infrastructures as ‘UK plc’ migrates much of its business processes and systems online.

Constraints on power for computer rooms and data centres have quietly crept up on many CIOs. While in 2008 analysts Gartner made a global prediction that half of data centres will start to run out of effective power supplies, local conditions sometimes present more immediate difficulties.  The lack of data centre sites inside the M25 with effective power supplies and connectivity is already understood but the “ring-fencing” of power allocations in favour of the 2012 Olympics infrastructure has exacerbated this trend.

The prospect of DEFRA local taxes from next year on all organisations with annual energy costs exceeding £0.5 million, is leading to greater interest in more energy-efficient operations, server virtualisation, consolidation of IT estates and more comprehensive Corporate Social Responsibility and ‘Green IT’ plans.  Whether an environmental or a cost-cutting issue for an IT manager, there has been a rush of interest in high density computing infrastructure using more energy-efficient servers and cooling equipment. 
However, these tactical, or even haphazard, approaches to cost and energy efficiency is threaten to put extra strains on data centres’ existing infrastructure and power supplies.  They also highlight the split of responsibilities found in many data centre operations between owner and user. A more joined-up approach is vital and a number of key areas need to be addressed:

Operational reviews
IT managers need to plan regular reviews of their ICT infrastructure’s power supplies. This is not a gold plating on IT - in recent years many companies have built up high density server estates in an ad hoc fashion without considering the wider impact of power demands on a data centre’s utilities.  Regular assessment from expert providers will identify future power supply issues or equipment fine tuning – why not turn a data centre’s lights out? - that reduce energy costs and nips a potential power outage in the bud.

High density and consolidated IT infrastructures
The rise of high density computing (HDC) through breakthroughs such as blade arrays can heighten business risks.  HDC requires planning and adjustment of associated cooling platforms.  Simply increasing the number of air conditioning units in a computer room is often a false economy – it can generate extra heat and inevitably higher energy bills. Machines can be operated in hot and cold zones and their panelling and their cabling configured to maximise free air cooling.  In virtualised environments, power needs to be distributed to support the movement of applications on machines.

The rush to ‘green’ data centres has created another risk factor too: the start-up loading of energy efficient blade servers often causes greater strain on existing power units such as uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) despite their correct original specification when the data centre was commissioned.

The drive towards environmental sustainability will gradually add to the regulation of IT infrastructures and lead to power continuity planning, all of which will ultimately increase businesses’ operational costs. The recently published EU Code of compliance is an effort to encourage organisations to ensure that power costs and ensuring power delivery systems are both efficient and cost effective: it is likely to be the forerunner of legislation in this area.

IT capacity: building new data centres
Organisations that are considering expansion of operations or strategic consolidation to a smaller number of larger data centres need to plan ahead more carefully too. In the UK, Government energy requirements and guidelines – in London, the Greater London Assembly (GLA) now specifies a proportion of recovered heat for new buildings – will add to an organisation’s running costs or simply deter firms from building new data centres. This will be an issue for some years unless a wider, more sustainable building development for the capital’s industrial and commercial properties is developed in the next few years.

Risk management
Given the heightened risk of power outage, CIOs need to develop continual business continuity planning.  They need broader risk assessment – understanding of power demands, for what purposes they’re needed and for how long, and so on.  Where IT infrastructures must run continuously – such as for clinical trials or for financial trading – the CIO needs to consider systems such as UPS that operate in conjunction with a generator to cover any gap (seconds or minutes as required) between a power interruption and the back up generator being able to provide full power.

Finding the time for continuity planning may seem a task in itself. However, it is essential that CIOs plan actively with their data centre facility owner, facility management company and power utilities provider to assess the provision of power, manage the balance between infrastructure and power supplies and develop plans to mitigate future risks. A TV studio that invests in new generators is simply helping its TV channel partners to fulfil their obligations to advertisers, not indulging in luxury IT spending.