Warning! Data centres at breaking point

Added by The Editor, 4 months ago.

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After years of uncontrolled growth, data centres now face a crisis as they run up against potentially crippling space and power constraints.

That's the stark warning from Global Data Center Management (GCDM), which recently commissioned a survey of 301 "senior IT influencers and decision-makers", conducted on its behalf by independent IT analyst group Quocirca.

The survey found that, even though remedies to the problem exist, current business practices do not encourage the prioritisation of power reduction within one of the most power-hungry areas of a business. It also found that a widespread lack of awareness of the key data centre issues may result in firms being unable to deploy the IT resources required to support business growth.

Just over a quarter of respondents, for example, said they didn't know how many servers they had, with almost a third ignorant of how many devices were connected to their network.

When it came to utilisation rates, 47 per cent said they didn't measure it and, and when asked to estimate the proportion of computing resources that were being utilised, could only hazard a guess of around 75 per cent.

"This is dreamland," commented Quocirca analyst Dennis Szubert, adding that, in his experience, a reasonable industry average stands at more like 15 per cent.

The other key issues in the report were space concerns and power usage. Quocirca found that 11 per cent of firms will run out of data centre space this year.

"The lead times in new data centre build is measured in years, so firms need to have a good idea of what space usage is and when run out. 14 per cent have reached a power limit and cannot feed any more power into the data centre. It's is a common situation in a lot of metro areas where some data centres have space but cannot deploy any more IT equipment because of power constraints."

This could seriously hamper firms' ability to grow, as in some areas, it may take up to 18 months to lay new cable into a data centre. Putting this into context, Szubert estimated that data centre power consumption had doubled in the last five years.

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Stuart Hall, 4 months ago

This is very worrying from an energy point of view too. This suggests that 47% of IT departments in the UK have no idea about server utilisation rates, while a third don't even know how many machines are connected to the network. The potential amount of wasted energy is mind-boggling and, to my mind, almost criminal. Organisations have a moral and ethical responsibility to know how much energy their servers are wasting.