| February 5, 2010
Designate 2010 the year of data centre design
By Gordon Makryllos*
Data centre power consumption is now a global issue -- as both an environmental concern and a business matter. As energy costs skyrocket, IT departments are facing increased C-level demands to bring the escalating power and cooling expenses of today's high-density deployments under control.
To meet these demands, APC believes 2010 needs to be the year of data centre design. Data centres cannot be built like they were three or five years ago. IT strategies and IT trends are changing the way data centres are run, operated, and configured, so data centres now need to be designed in relation to the IT evolution and IT business model.
Below are APC's top 10 predictions for the data centre market in Australia this year:
1) Governments, NGOs, and customers will increase the pressure on business to improve energy management and usage. Energy efficiency will jump the to a priority consideration for IT procurement.
2) Electricity costs WILL increase significantly and come into the spotlight. CFOs will start to see the operational cost of electricity and will increase the pressure on data centre managers.
3) High density footprint will be increased inside data centres. The standard is becoming majority high density and minority low density areas in new data centre design requests.
4) Data growth will continue to accelerate. More data storage and sharing will lead to more high density systems, which will result in more of the IT budget being allocated to power and cooling infrastructure investments.
5) Cloud computing (internal or external) equals high density centralised computing and more focus on the data centre model.
6) Demand for multipurpose (high and low density capable) data centre hosting services will increase.
7) Integrated energy management systems to manage power and cooling systems in the data centre will become critical.
8) Data centre design has reached the tipping point where modular scalable designs will win out against one-time, site-specific engineering of data centres.
9) CTO plans will include a plan for measuring the carbon footprint and strategies for cutting energy operating costs. One of the key approaches will be hot aisle containment to reduce power costs.
10) IT and facilities will need to come together to tackle and support business energy efficiency. Decisions made in isolation by one of these groups will impact negatively the energy goals of the other.
*Gordon Makryllos is vice president Pacific, APC by Schneider Electric
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