Virtualisation
Get more for less: Active Continuous Optimisation solves the data centre riddle
Smart devices, wireless technologies and evolutionary employee behaviour place heavy demand on the data centre, causing further overstretching of resources, writes Kevin Cornell, CEO, Veloxum.
The boundaries between personal and professional activities are becoming blurred in our pervasive digital world. Social computing, while not strategic to every business, is changing consumer and employee behaviour, which ultimately has an effect on the entire IT infrastructure.
These changing behaviours are marked by the explosion of remote and mobile working and the evaporation of the cloud hype into reality. Employees work and play on the go, teams are interacting virtually, communicating via face time, collaborating in the cloud and bringing personal quick-access storage devices to work. The ties that bind workers to their desks have been cut, placing heavy demand on the data centre to serve enterprise data, process transactions and make available business applications quickly and efficiently, thus requiring the data centre to perform at maximum potential utilisation.
The trend towards cloud computing, fabric based computing and advanced analytics creates a truly dynamic environment and requires more flexibility and more processing power. In such a dynamic environment with
its myriad permutations of configurations, the CIO is hard pushed to ensure application and server performance, while managing costs. With all these interrelated settings between servers and clients comes the risk of decreasing workload densities and severe latency problems if these settings are not tuned for optimum performance.
The challenge, as the data centre environment becomes more diverse and disparate is to avoid the decline in server and application performance that creates untold frustration, jeopardises productivity among users and costs the business millions in unnecessary investment.
As the demands on the data centre become more complex and immediate, the focus remains on cost management Data growth, system performance and scalability, and network congestion and connectivity architecture were ranked as the top three challenges among respondents to a recent survey by Gartner.
Latest generation servers with multicore processors demand significantly higher throughput, and if
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www.datacentresols.com Winter 2010
these servers are virtualized, this requirement further goes up. Increased reliance on WAN can be a trigger for network-related challenges as users are consolidating their IT systems, especially as individual users are increasingly working remotely or going mobile. These challenges must be met strategically rather than addressed with a silo approach. To compound the issue, Gartner predicts that by 2016, sustainability will be the fastest-growing enterprise compliance expense worldwide. As the UK power grid approaches saturation, more and more data centres are facing a hard limit on what power they can draw from the grid and it is simply not acceptable
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