Recently HP announced new offerings to make consolidation, power conservation and data-centre administration easier. These advances are designed to help reinvent ageing data centres.
Green isn’t the whole game, managing change is.
Green computing is “in” these days, causing data centres to look for energy-conserving solutions.
But conserving power is just one part of the issue for IT management, says Jonathan Eunice, an IT adviser at Illuminata.
The larger issue
“You need to ask not just how much can you save, but how are you constrained?” he says. “[T]he new model requires that the means to cope with it on a regular basis has to be designed – or retrofitted – into the data centre.”
Accelerating change is increasingly confronting companies, says Eunice, making obsolete the huge IT investments of the late 1990s.
“In some data centres you have cables everywhere…stuffed under raised floors that are supposed to be primarily supporting cooling – and you can even see hardware-store fans on the floor,” he says.
Those who can’t manage change are doomed to a cycle of crisis management, says Eunice.
“I’ve been in data centres where people knew some network connection was down, but there were miles of cable and connections that had to be checked” says Eunice.
The cost of brittle systems
In data centres like that, says Eunice, “Problem resolution is probably going to be measured at least in hours, not minutes or seconds.”
Part of the solution is modular computing, like server blades.
“[M]odularisation can help solve the cable mess, as well as the installation mess that happens when you…coordinate new server changes and additions” he says.
Tony Linville, senior manager of infrastructure services at Cerner Corp., agrees. “Cabling is…expensive, takes up too much space, and is difficult to troubleshoot. We looked at integrated blade switches…but they have to be managed by our network services group. Virtual Connect has many of the same benefits of a switch and our networking group doesn’t have to manage them.”
Some companies can afford to buy all new gear. For most, this isn’t feasible.
“The best thing for data centre operation is to put in better command-and-control systems, so you can be systematic in understanding where you are, seeing what’s most egregiously inefficient, and figuring out what you need to phase in,” says Eunice.
Power conservation tech makes software smarter too
A result of the drive for power efficient infrastructure is that more components communicate what power they’re drawing.
“Many of these components can be controlled by software, so that something like HP Systems Insight Manager or HP Insight Control Environment can use this information to help you cap or throttle power.” says Eunice.
Late at night, you might not need full power. “You get more ability to control that at the system level,” he says.
It’s all part of designing for both physical and organisational change. Some products, such as Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, handle what Eunice describes as the “plumbing layer,” coordinating physical infrastructure with blades. Using this to plan for later expansion can help avoid inefficiencies that one-off, immediate decisions entail.
“You can decide ahead of time how you’re going to connect a SAN” he says, “pre-allocating pools of storage and servers that can be…accessed by management software. Then, when you need to install new servers…the decisions have already been made.” he adds.
It’s all part of designing for the inevitable change. “[W]ith new technologies, you can sort it all out in a quiet moment…you’re not having to figure things out when something breaks, or when something needs to be installed now. So you’re reducing your need to react.”
Related topics:
» Innovating for the environment: From the smallest nanoscale devices to the largest data centres, researchers work towards greener IT landscapes.
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