Copy That?
Even as companies centralize hardware and software, they are choosing to distribute data storage. The idea is to maintain identical sets of data in different locations to protect against service interruptions.
"If data center A goes away, we can bring all the same data up instantly on data center B," says Allan Woods, vice chairman and CIO at Mellon Financial. This is a trend all CFOs — not just those at banks — should be aware of, he believes. "It will be on most CFOs' radar soon if it isn't already — the acceptance that disaster planning and business recovery are investments that companies will have to make," he adds.
Costs per gigabyte of storage continue to plunge — bad news for vendors, since a concomitant rise in demand has not materialized, but good for customers. When it comes to storage, at least, "absolute dollar expense is not something that drives most CFOs crazy," says Woods.
Helping to drive costs lower: the trend away from traditional direct-attached storage and toward various forms of networked storage. According to a study from McKinsey & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co., a company with five terabytes of data storage would save $2.5 million during a three-year period by opting for networked-storage technology.
Glass House or Greenhouse?
The data center has long been renowned for its specialized needs in terms of the care and feeding of a mainframe: raised floors, special cooling systems, and plenty of backup power. But with so much processing power moving to small, low-cost servers, shouldn't any room do for a data center?
Not necessarily. It turns out that newer computers often have gargantuan appetites for energy and require plenty of cooling capacity in order to counter the prodigious amounts of heat thrown off by multiple CPUs.
"The heat output and power requirements of the new generation of rack and blade servers are 6 to 10 times what many data centers are designed to handle," says Carl Claunch, vice president and research director at Gartner. The typical data center was designed to provide 40 watts per square foot of space, versus a demand for 300 watts or more posed by new data centers. "For many companies," predicts Claunch, "this will mean a fairly extensive retrofitting, or else they will have to find emergency or secondary centers to host their new systems."
The problem is anything but trivial: building a new data center can easily run into the tens of millions of dollars. Whether building a new site or modifying an existing one, Claunch says that "the time to plan for the power and cooling needs is at the beginning, because it's disruptive and expensive to build in the additional power and cooling later in the process."
Some buildings can be retrofitted by raising the floor to run additional cooling equipment or ducting to change the airflow patterns. In other cases, underfloor space can be freed up for the installation of cooling gear by rerouting signal and network cables to an overhead tray. A better route, says Claunch, may be to check the local corporate real-estate market for a data center that was part of a failed dot-com or some other fast-shrinking business that no longer needs a 21st-century glass house. "There is a lot of space on the market, including improved data-center space that's just sitting there." Who would have thought that the bursting of the Internet bubble would have benefited, of all things, the good ol' corporate data center?
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