The Future Data Center Is… Part II

Last month, I wrote The Future Data Center Is… and alluded to a shift in demand for data centers. Just to be clear, I don’t believe data center demand is decreasing. Quite the contrary, I believe demand is exploding! But how is demand for data centers going to change? What does the mapping of organizations to services look like?

First, why should you care? Today, the average PUE of a data center is 1.8. …and that’s just the average. That’s atrocious! Very Large Enterprises are able to drive that to near 1.1-1.3. The excess is a waste of energy resources. At a time when Corporate Social Responsibility and carbon footprint are becoming more in vogue in the corporate arena, data centers are becoming a large target. So efficiency matters!

Yesterday, I presented a slide depicting the breakdown of types of organizations and (respectively) the shift in demand.

It is important to understand the details behind this. To start, let’s take a look at the boundary situations.

SMB/ Mid-Tier Organziations

Data center demand from SMB and Mid-Tier organizations starts to shift to service providers. Typically, their needs are straightforward and small in scale. In most cases, they use a basic data center (sometimes just a closet) supporting a mixed workload running on common off-the-shelf hardware. Unfortunately, the data centers in use by these organizations are highly inefficient due to their small scale and lack of sophistication. That’s not the fault of the organization. It just further supports the point that others can manage data centers more effectively than they can. Their best solution would be to move to a colocation agreement or IaaS provider and leverage SaaS where possible. That takes the burden off those organizations and allows them to focus on higher value functions.

Very Large Enterprises (VLE)

At the other end of the spectrum, Very Large Enterprises will continue to build custom solutions for their web-scale, highly tuned, very specific applications. This is different from their internal IT demand. See my post A Workload is Not a Workload, is Not a Workload where I outline this in more detail. Due to the scale of their custom applications, they’re able to carry the data center requirements of their internal IT demand at a similar level due to their scale. If they only supported their internal IT demand, their scale would pale in comparison and arguably, so would their efficiency.

Enterprises

In some ways, the VLE without the web-scale custom application is a typical Enterprise with a mixed workload. Enterprises sit in the middle. Depending on the scale of the workloads, characterization, organization and sophistication, enterprises may leverage internal data centers or external ones. It’s very likely they will leverage a combination of both for a number of reasons (compliance, geography, technical, etc). The key is to take an objective view of the demand and alternatives.

The question is, can you manage a data center more effectively and efficiently than the alternatives? Also, is managing a data center strategic to your IT strategic initiatives and aligns with business objectives? If not, then it’s probably time to make the shift.

Related Articles:

Mark Thiele: Measuring the Size of a Data Center – Yes, it Matters

The Green Grid: Metrics and Measurements