Seeing into the future - Extend the life of your planned data center

Over at ComputerWorld, Sandra Gittlen has a nice article on extending the life of your data center. There are some good tips for those who need to get a few more years out of an existing data center, but I think this article should give pause to those organizations planning now for a ten year data center. We all know the difficulty of divining the conditions of business and technology even two years ahead, let alone really knowing what things will look like in ten years. Adjusting to changes in business goals and technological advances is a continual process and data center flexibility is key. One of the aspects of this required flexibility that is not really mentioned in the article is that of continual monitoring of power usage for individual devices. Building this capability into a new data center gives the future data center managers the ability to understand which devices, which applications, and which departments are using how much power and when. Tracking power to best utilize branch circuits, plan for growth, and optimize application utilization schedules is becoming a critical part of good data center design. Doing so will help prevent hitting the limits of the data center before its time, and even allow it to go beyond the initial expectations.

Comments

[Gary Anderson]

I agree that building monitoring of all the devices into the data center is essential when designing a new data center, but even more important is to build scalability into your design on day one so you aren’t perpetually locked into the expect future state data center demands. Traditional data centers are very inefficient at low loads and building a data center to operate at a higher load than necessary can cost millions in operating expenses. The best idea is to figure out how you can effectively change the data center supply to meet the demand.