It hasn’t gone away because of the economic downturn
By Ross O. Storey
23 Jun 2009
With the world’s information technology focus having been pre-occupied in the past 18 months on the global economic downturn, another critical looming issue—energy use—seems to have faded a bit into the background.
Last week I attended, and spoke, at an IT event in Manila, which was entitled ‘Developing a Smarter Data Centre’ and was hosted by Computerworld Philippines and sponsored by CommScope. It was all about intelligent data centres and intelligent infrastructure.
In my research for my presentation, I once again was shocked by some of the analyst warnings about IT’s insatiable appetite for energy. I think I’ve seen some of these statistics before, but they certainly made me pay attention again.
For example, Gartner says that energy bills currently account for between 10 and 15 per cent of IT budgets, but this could increase to about 50 per cent in the not too distant future.
Gartner’s rather dire forecast is that by 2012, three years away, power and cooling bills for data centres will amount to about 22 times the cost of servers. In the near future, they say, data centre operational costs will exceed the capital expenditure required to establish the hardware. Gartner even goes as far as to say that energy will likely become the second most expensive line item after labour.
Top-end companies—some with more than 100,000 servers in their data centre—are now pushing the limits of current technology solutions.
They are running out of space. They are running out of energy and they are struggling to cope with their workloads.
While increased pressure is being placed on CIOs to deliver more business services at a reduced cost, data centres are approaching the limits of their energy, cooling and space resources.
No wonder some big data centre users, with more than 100,000 servers, are already building their facilities next to fast-flowing rivers to use hydro-electricity, or are even using decommissioned ships in harbours to house their data centres on top of a huge source of water for cooling.
Gartner has found that the top three industry sectors, measured by the intensity of their carbon emissions, are government, financial services and retail. The energy industry and manufacturing come fourth and fifth.
As I remarked to the event delegates in my presentation, I find it ironic that the government sector is the number one polluter. They certainly have a lot of work to do to clean up their environmental act, if they want to lead by example.
The clear message is that in the near future—over the next five years—new design, construction and operational principles will be required for corporate IT infrastructure. It’s definitely time for the next generation data centre.
Another key presentation at this event—by CommScope’s technical director Asia Pacific, James Young—also brought the impending energy consumption crisis back into sharp focus.
One of his slides jumped out at me. It showed that while energy costs were indeed rising steeply, the cost of server management and administration for data centres was rising even more. Of course this is where James got into explaining about intelligent infrastructure and smarter data centres. We already have smart cards and smart phones so I suppose it is inevitable that we would get smart data centres.
All these energy concerns have not gone away because of the energy crisis and senior IT executives now face some landmark decisions.
There’s a saying that the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same things while expecting a different outcome, and this seems to highlight the situation facing many CIOs today. They definitely need to be doing things differently to cater for both the energy crisis and the economic downturn.
Ross O. Storey, currently the Managing Editor of Fairfax Business Media Asia, is responsible for the editorial content and production of MIS Asia, CIO Asia, Computerworld Singapore and Computerworld Malaysia magazines.
