Issue 2, February 2009
FOCUS BANKS
MOVING OUT
It started half a decade ago, with banks looking to bigger houses for their data centers. Like all house hunters, the space they needed was in short supply in either Manhattan or London’s square mile. Even in the docklands, suitable housing was hard to find. If it was available, the price per square foot was unfeasible.
The suburbs offered much richer choice. You could get a house the size of an airport hangar in Heathrow for the price of a cupboard space in Canary Wharf. Places such as Croydon and Watford offered fast transport links to the info superhighway, so a data packet could be whisked into the City instantaneously. There’s negligible latency between the suburbs and the City now. Go beyond the wider city limits, however, and that might change.
Best of all, the new homes for the data center offered many schools of electricity supplier. For a premium, some banks learned they could get their names listed at the top of the waiting list, so they’d get priority over the locals. Morgan Stanley, for example, sent its data center out to West London. Thanks to a deal with the local supplier, it has the peace of mind of knowing that the first 55 mVA are guaranteed, no matter how intense the competition is for power locally. Having said that, the population around that part of Hounslow isn’t anywhere near as dense as it would be in Canary Wharf or the City.
Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort relocated its London data center from the Docklands to a new Tier IV facility in Watford. Space wasn’t the motivating factor – rising energy bills were the key reason for relocation. “There is a shortage of power and we have planned the new data center so it’s efficient and resilient when it comes to power consumption,” says John Bratkovics, Dresdner Kleinwort’s global head of networks.
Concerns over power were raised recently when an application to turn a warehouse into a data center to service the banking sector was made in Chessington, South London. The planning committee at the local council in Kingston Upon Thames heard concerns over power blackouts to local residents and demands that the developers had made sufficient provision for power from appropriate sources.
SPACE FOR HIRE
Apart from power, the stampede to find property in the M25 region was about space, but that constraint may not be as important as it once was. Morgan Stanley has enough room for three 747s in its Hounslow warehouse, says Vijay Mistry, executive director at Morgan
CASE STUDY: HBOS
HBOS has two data centers in the UK, housing approximately 20,000 servers. At the heart of HBOS’ data center operations is a customised inventory management system. The system was specifically created to protect the tens of thousands of assets under management. KVM solutions are critical in that they control remote access to HBOS’ server base. The access varies depending on who needs it, as physical presence is impossible to control once someone is inside the data center. A robust set of remote controls is the preferred option. A remote KVM solution is ideal as it remains active through the reboot cycle or in the case of a system crash. These solutions don’t need a software agent on the target server and they can be used across a wide range of operating systems. “We wouldn’t have any commercial advantage without these remote access systems. The bottom line is cost. We’ve been able to protect our investment in Adder equipment and bring its use in line with current IT security requirements.
“The hidden cost in any KVM over IP solution is the cost of connectivity. The Adder range is quite light in network traffic; as a result, our current model uses just a single network port per 1,000 servers for management,” says Dave Bevan, HBOS team leader for data center management.
The Adder KVM over IP solution has enabled HBOS to leverage remote management functions and reduce the physical access to the servers. The company estimates that more than 25,000 hits (or log-ins) to the KVM over IP system have replaced what would have been 25,000 physical visits to the computer rooms. HBOS has a cluster-based model, where it banks KVM switches together to control 128 servers at a time. In the past year, HBOS has moved to AdderView CATx switches because it enables cabinets to accept 24 servers.
“We tried a couple of the early Adder switches, which showed that a remote KVM solution was the way forward,” says Bevan. “The introduction of the little AdderLink IP unit was the ‘Eureka’ moment for us.”
HBOS has Adder SmartViewPro, SmartViewXPro and AdderViewCATx switches in place, as well as a substantial number of AdderLink IP units in use. They are customised for HBOS use, both at a firmware level and at a client level. The whole population is controlled by a web-based front-end that is unique to HBOS as Adder was able to add extra security by reprogramming its firmware.
Stanley. But it’s probably only using up less than one 747 at the moment. “There’s plenty of room for growth,” says Mistry. “The important consideration for us was that we could adapt to changing market conditions.”
Since the stampede out to the suburbs, priorities have changed, says Ed Ansett, MD of data center builder EYP Mission Critical Facilities (now owned by HP). Ansett’s speciality is power management, the increasing importance of which persuaded HP to make a strategic acquisition. He says the turning point came recently, when operational continuity hinged not so much on applications or providing the space for more computing engines, but on providing the power to drive them. Andy Gallagher, consulting director at international performance analysts Compass, agrees. “Computing hardware is a commodity that’s come down in price over the last decade. Year on year, you could get five times the capacity for twice last year’s budget.”
For obvious reasons, IT budgets won’t be doubling, increasing or even staying the same for a few years. The cuts won’t adversely affect the continuing evolution of the data center, however. Software projects – which often fail to provide a return on investment
– are more likely to be axed, he says. If anything, efforts are likely to be concentrated on the data center.
As the costs of IT have steadily declined, the cost of electricity has risen so astronomically that it has forced many banks to take a new position on global warming. They’re appalled at the damage that power consumption has on the environment and, far more importantly, to their profit margins.
CHANGING PRIORITIES
Ansett says that during the ‘gold rush’ to the M25, some financial institutes got left behind. But it might not necessarily matter anymore that they were last in the queue when warehouses the size of football pitches were being bought up. “Priorities have changed,” he says. Banks need data centers that reflect the changing needs of their new computing models. “If they’re looking for an edge on computing power, or availability, the new models are more complex,” he says. Instead of one giant data center, you can have several smaller centers, each built to suit the needs of the computing models used and the applications they run.
Trading system transactions will have to be run on systems with the highest levels
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