Business Innovation Homepage > Infrastructure Optimization

Organizations are transforming the way they design and operate their data centers. The emergence in recent years of several key technologies and trends, such as server consolidation, server and storage virtualization, and more energy-efficient systems, is helping to spur the creation of these new data centers.

The results of these developments are IT infrastructures that enable organizations to respond more quickly and efficiently to demands for information and capacity, and to meet corporate goals for running greener technology operations.

“The overarching characteristic that companies want in a modern data center is flexibility,” says Richard Villars, vice president, storage systems research, at IDC. “ When they look at the biggest challenges in their old data centers, one of the biggest was the slow but continuous accumulation of many different systems, ranging from mainframes to thousands of small servers. Over time, this accumulation has reduced the companies’ ability to innovate, make effective disaster recovery plans and improve data center efficiency.”

In the modern data center, Villars says, “companies are looking at more modular/standard platforms and technologies like virtualization, which give them the ability to rapidly and predictably provision and retire hardware. This flexibility is also a key characteristic that companies look for when trying to build more energy-efficient data centers.”

Indeed, server and storage consolidation and virtualization are having a huge impact on the data center. “In general, consolidation is a critical first step,” Villars says. “IDC likes to say that consolidation is the trend of the future; it always has been, and it always will be. What's different this time is that companies are thinking beyond just physical consolidation of IT assets into few data centers. Thanks to a wide range of virtualization technologies, including server and storage virtualization — but also including new grid architectures — companies are actually consolidating many different applications and data sets into more highly utilized systems.”

Villars says this consolidation, which is based on standard components and virtualization, also changes the resiliency of most data centers. “Before, resiliency was about the reliability of each independent system,” he says. “Companies invested a lot in service and support to ensure that any data center failure was quickly addressed. In these new virtualized environments, a failure in any single component is less critical, because the application or data can quickly be moved to another system so that fixing the failed component can now be done in a more leisurely fashion.”

As server and storage virtualization becomes increasingly strategic to organizations, “they start considering their plans for virtual infrastructure, in which the use of virtualization spans multiple servers or even the entire data center,” says Tony Iams, v ice president and senior analyst, system software research, at Ideas International .

“With virtual infrastructure, multiple servers are joined into a pool of resources that are allocated on demand to workloads,” Iams says. “Workloads can then be seamlessly migrated to servers on demand, based on varying workload and uptime conditions. Building or adapting data centers for virtual infrastructure can have a significant impact on storage and networking infrastructure in addition to servers.”

The push for more environmentally friendly IT infrastructures has also had a major impact on data center design and construction. “Energy efficiency has risen to become one of the greatest concerns in many data centers,” Iams says. “This concern is being driven not only by costs, but by the simple fact that these data centers are fundamentally constrained by limits [on the amount] of power and cooling that they can support.”

Click here for more IT Optimization articles