Fairfax Business Media Asia managing editor Ross O. Storey, also editor of MIS Asia and CIO Asia magazines, opened the Data Centre Forum 2009 in Hong Kong on 7 October 2009 by highlighting key results of FBM’s annual State of the Asian CXO 2009. The theme for the half-day forum was: ‘Managing the Data Centre Crisis: Energy, Complexity and Capacity’. The event was sponsored by IBM, Avocent, Juniper Networks and Huawei Symantec.
Storey said the CIO Asia magazine survey revealed that the current top technology priorities for senior IT executives are: business intelligence; integrating and enhancing existing systems and processes; business continuity planning; cost management and business process optimisation.
Most profitable
“Business intelligence has jumped to number one,” said Storey, “no doubt due to executives wanting to know precisely where their enterprises are most profitable in this recession.”
He said the profitability of data centres was under threat. “Best practice ‘green’ data centres use 15 per cent of their energy for cooling,” said Storey, “but most companies are using half their energy for this single purpose. Research by Deloitte shows that organisations are still wasting energy by providing data centre temperatures and air refresh rates for humans, instead of for the machines they house.”
Planning for efficient power use demands precise metrics and Avocent has developed a unique system for gathering these. “The Avocent tool DSView 3 Power Manager gathers information from supported power devices to generate historical graphs and reports,” said Charles Chang, technical consultant, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, Avocent. “IT managers can analyse overall cost and capacity across individual PDU’s, racks, rows of racks or entire data centres.” HSBC has just constructed a 500,000 sq ft (46,450 sq m) data centre in Hong Kong. “Ross Storey referred to 15 per cent of total power for cooling, but we found 40 per cent is more realistic,” said Johnny Ku, manager technical services, data centre facilities and service placement, HSBC.
“We raised data centre temperature from 18 deg C to 24 deg C, we used water cooling, we have a big atrium and skylights. Our escalators operate only when needed, by means of weight detectors. But overall energy consumption is still rising, with a monthly bill of HK$2.2 million [US$284,000] for the data centre.” IBM said it had worked with one customer to reduce energy costs by 40 per cent. “The key is to start with a comprehensive fact-based analysis to determine the efficiency of all electrical and cooling systems,” said Y.K. Chiu, managing consultant, IBM global technology services, IBM China/Hong Kong.
“Increases in energy efficiency come from a large number of detailed improvements, such as cooling capacity with high density zones and better air circulation with variable speed fans.
“In IBM’s own data centres, IT consolidation and virtualisation had yielded energy savings of 80 per cent, floor space reduction of 85 per cent and replacement of thousands of servers by 30 IBM System X servers,” added Chiu.
The average data centre uses only three of every 100 energy units for effective computing, but water cooling could improve this. “We are developing a fine grid of water streams as wide as hairs to take heat from the chips,” said Fung Kam Tim, systems architect, systems and technology group, IBM China/Hong Kong. “We are also pumping chilled water through processor boards, to bring 80 per cent of the heat out, instead of dissipating it though the data centre.”
Reducing complexity
Simplification is always on IBM’s agenda. “We reduce the number of data centres,” said Fung. “Reduce the number of servers; centralise data from different sources and where possible, consolidate enterprise applications into fewer, more powerful, applications.”
Virtualisation of servers, storage and networks, which IBM has been pursuing for several decades, can also reduce complexity, as can storage optimisation, including information lifecycle management, de-duplication of data to reduce stored copies, and single-copy storage.
A simpler way to get information out of a data centre is with Avocent’s tools, including DSView 3 management software, which provides centralised reporting on physical and virtual IT assets. The tools also enable managers to model the whole data centre and analyse changes before they are made. “You can simulate different scenarios, comparing the location of servers in different racks and the effect on temperature,” said Chang. “A rack reserved for some future use can be colour coded. If you want to know what a particular port is connected to, you can see that immediately, much easier than physically tracing cables.”
These tools are especially useful for large companies with multiple data centres. “Our goal is to simplify the complexity of data centre management,” continued Chang. “In DSView 3, you can see your data centres in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anywhere else, with an overview of the organisation’s IT assets, broken down for analysis as required. All from one console.”
Networks are very complex, due to convergence of data, voice and storage, and also the high-performance needed by cloud computing. A bunch of simple ethernet switches and routers is not ideal in the data centre. “Low utilisation of devices means power wastage, and multiple switches means it is not reliable and scalable,” said Travis O’Hara, senior solutions architect, Juniper Networks. Multiple layers of switches can be fast, secure and reliable, but have high latency and are still complex to manage. “Juniper has a new vision: virtualise switches into one, or perhaps two for redundancy, logical switches,” said O’Hara.
“With single logical switches, the data does not have to go through many layers, so latency is reduced and applications run faster. This combination is scalable, fast, reliable, secure and simple to manage. This architecture can bridge multiple data centres,” he added. Raymond Ng, principal consultant, storage solutions, Asia Pacific, Huawei Symantec Technologies, spoke about building a data centre on a platform of virtualised storage.
“Storage virtualisation requires classification of applications into service tiers, such as platinum, gold, silver, and bronze tiers,” said Ng. “Benefits include improved application availability and service levels; improved operating efficiency, and enhanced manageability, and lastly, reduced TCO [total cost of ownership].” Whatever you are doing in data centres, you will be doing a lot more in future, said Storey. “Research firm Gartner says that over five years, storage has been the fastest-growing component of cost in the overall data centre. The researchers say that, within three years, users will install 6.5 times as many terabytes as they did this year.” Extra capacity is certainly the drive behind HSBC’s flagship data centre built at Tseung Kwan O, which is also a workplace for 800 staff and will serve users in 30 countries with around 1,800 services.
“The data centre is becoming more important to financial institutions because more transactions are electronic rather than cash,” said Ku. “Secondly, 911 made city centre data centres look vulnerable, so the trend is to move them out of town.”
HSBC took the planning stage seriously. “It’s difficult to do capacity planning for five years,” notes Ku. “We tried to look at 40 years.”
Business is at the centre of pressures to go green from laws, regulations and standards, as well as stakeholder expectations. Of course, a major factor is cost and availability of solutions, which is affected by increasing energy costs. “The key question is how we drive greater efficiency, compete more effectively and respond more quickly by taking action now on energy and the environment,” said Chiu. “At IBM, we devise new technologies and services to help customers go on the green journey.”
In order to plan data centre capacity effectively, managers need to collect a lot of information about energy use, capacity, cooling, space constraints and other variables. “Infrastructure Explorer gives a graphic view of racks, and individual elements such as servers within them,” said Chang. “Infrastructure Explorer enables data centre optimisation for space, power, weight, heat or cooling and network configuration.”
The green journey
A different perspective is needed for a globally integrated world with climate change, financial crisis, energy geopolitics, and global supply chains, according to IBM.
“We need a holistic approach to going green, an overall strategy that would include people, information, products, IT, property and business operations,” said Chiu. “A green data centre could drive operational efficiency, flexibility and resilience.”
Green IT was part of the brief for HSBC’s new data centre. “We had to check where materials came from, for example, avoiding timber from threatened forest resources,” said Ku. “In the data centre, new cooling technologies, especially variable speed fans and devices listed as energy efficient, are important.”
Green energy sources are more of a problem, added Ku. “Hong Kong electricity is coal-based with some nuclear power from China in future. We looked at wind and water power but they may not be widely adopted for 20-30 years.”
For CIOs who want to regularly receive the latest about new data centre technology, Storey also announced availability of a new weekly digital newsletter on cloud computing, virtualisation and data centres, from Fairfax Business Media Asia, accessible on the Web portal at www.mis-asia.com.
BOX 1: Virtualisation—a key focus
Speakers at the Data Centre Forum sat in a panel to field questions on data centre operations.
Why is the Asian take-up of virtualisation only 20 per cent or so?
“At HSBC, we want to implement virtualisation as a sustainability goal, but we are concerned about customer service quality, especially the effect of virtualisation on the performance of our applications,” said Ku. “Our strategy is to virtualise the less critical applications, but we don’t feel that we have enough numbers on the effect of virtualisation to take it further yet.”
“Surveys show that some customers have 80 per cent server redundancy,” continued Fung. “Hong Kong is a regional data centre, so companies here may have one system processing Japanese work, one for US users and so on. They need to consolidate these resources by virtualisation and get rid of wastage. IBM’s practice is to drive server utilisation up from 30-40 per cent utilisation to 70-80 per cent.”
“Virtualisation means consolidation, migration and optimisation,” said Ng. “But, right now, some customers will deploy storage virtualisation for migration only. They have some concern about consolidation and optimisation because they don’t want to create a single point of failure.”
In order to promote green IT, should Hong Kong raise energy prices?
“I’m based in Taiwan where the government provides energy prices among the lowest in the world,” said Chang. “The government wants to reduce energy use, but if they raise the cost of electrical power, they are afraid the manufacturers will move to other locations. Cheap energy is a must, like cheap labour and low construction costs.”
HSBC’s power bill is rising, despite its energy efficiency drive. Can the problem not be solved?
“We are increasing energy efficiency, but our business is expanding at a faster rate, driving energy consumption up, so I don’t want that to stop,” said Ku. “Asia is the focus of economic growth and I expect our energy bills to rise further, but we are gong in the right direction.”
“To manage data centre energy use, you need to analyse the kilowatt hours consumed by user, by application and by system,” said Fung. “Older equipment may have to be upgraded both to facilitate monitoring and also for energy efficiency.
“Another approach is to hire consultants to identify hot spots and find out where changes can be made.”
Is cloud computing encouraging the outsourcing of data centre services?
“If the data centre is important to your core business, you are probably not going to move the computing function out,” said O’Hara. “At Juniper, we are outsourcing some functions, for redundancy and reliability. If there are some applications that you can’t manage in a cost-effective and efficient manner, only then do you look at service providers.”
We’ve heard that water cooling is better than air. What data centre environments are best for this?
“Water cooling will be available for the next generation of processors from IBM, but users must first have a source of chilled water,” said Fung. “Water is an efficient way of taking the heat out of the data centre, by using water circulation at the back of racks, or in the processor boards. But it is only appropriate for high-density processing systems—air cooling is adequate from entry level up to mid-range systems.”
What key points should IT pros have?
“We should be building green data centres and getting rid of complexity by virtualisation,” said O’Hara. “Despite the different approaches of vendors, virtualisation is justified by three keys goals: reliability of the application; maintaining application performance; and rising efficiency.”
“First, in order to consolidate and centralise your data centre, you must audit your systems and equipment,” said Chang.
“In Taiwan, I asked a customer the function of one machine and he realised that he had turned it off two years ago.
“Second, measure the power deployed by the various equipment. Third, start to go green where the equipment is using the most power and where you will make the most savings.”
“We emphasis that customers should increase their storage capacity and carry out virtualisation,” said Ng. “Huawei Symantec supports that by providing end-to-end storage solutions and helping customers to achieve more efficiency.”
