David J. CappuccioHistorically IT people have had a fairly straightforward task – keep the systems running and recover quickly when they fail. I say when, not if, because systems all fail at one time or another, no matter how well we plan. Now this is a far to simplistic view of the real world I agree, but if you look at traditional IT service level agreements they were all designed around the same concept. Data Center managers focus on 99.995 percent availability; network managers are chartered with 24/7 access; while storage or server administrators focus first and foremost on continuous access.
Now there is nothing wrong with these objectives – they satisfy the business needs and give us measureable metrics, but over the years these types of objectives have created a laser like focus on the singular goal, at the expense of the big picture. If our focus is only on the those top line objectives, and not on how we got there, we may in fact be missing some very significant opportunities.
The recent interest in Green IT, or better yet, “cost effective” IT, has opened the eyes of many CIO’s and CFO’s to an underlying problem we have caused over the past 40 years. Ever since the EPA report on Data Center Energy Consumption was produced in August 2007 folks have been asking embarrassing questions about IT efficiency. In many companies the CFO asked the CIO (or Data Center manager) how much energy their data centers were consuming every year, and in most cases the answer was a resounding “I don’t know – it’s the Facilities budget”. When Facilities was asked, and the question was answered (to shock and dismay), the follow-on question invariably was “and how are you going to improve that next year?”. To which the resounding reply was “it’s not a Facilities issue, it’s an IT issue”. The problem is, going forward, it’s both a Facilities and an IT issue – and needs to be solved jointly.
So what’s happened in the past year? I’ve seen a lot of arm waving and hand wringing, and in some cases even seen attempts to integrate some Facilities process and IT together, with minimal success. Those that attempt to merge the groups get mired down in politics, but those who have created a IT Resource Manager role focused as a liaison between the groups seem to be having better success.
But this is a stop gap solution and over time will not solve the underlying problem, which by the way is NOT a power and cooling issue, but an asset utilization issue, and the key to it all is the definition of an asset. IT folks look at assets as all those things they can kick – and the software that runs (or runs on) them, from servers to desktops to networks and storage. Facilities folks tend to look at assets more traditionally – anything contained in (and including) the building itself, and in the case of data centers, excluding the IT equipment. Forward thinking companies have realized that to truly run data centers efficiently, and to extend their life indefinitely, it is not logical to treat facilities and IT assets separately, because without one the other can’t survive. And if one is inefficient (e.g. inadequate cooling equipment on the raised floor) the other will suffer the consequences.
The first step along the path to solving this problem is to redefine IT in our own minds. Ask any IT person for the definition and you’ll hear Information Technology, because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? But if you take a birds eye view of your data center, and include all the assets needed to make it succeed (and to help you reach those SLA’s), you’ll realize that the IT we should all be focused on is Infrastructure Technology. Not until we start to focus on ALL the components that make up the ecosystem will we begin to make informed long range decisions. Not until we understand the cascade effects of one decision on all the other components will IT stop working in a vacuum. And until this happens it will not be possible to create truly efficient, scalable, high performance and low energy environments, because without the tight integration and cooperation between IT and Facilities it will never happen.
And long term think of the possibilities; we’ve all used asset life cycle techniques for years, on our subset of the environment. But what if I but the entire Infrastructure Technology for my data center on a continuous improvement life cycle? This would include all IT and Facilities equipment that supported IT. The end result would be a continuous modernization project that not only insured current technologies were available to support the business, but that the underlying infrastructure was always ready to support it. When this happens the life cycle for a data center can be extended from the current average of 20 years to 60 years or more. And think how that would change the analysis when trying to decide to build the next generation data center or not.
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Category: Data Centers Tags: Infrastructure Technology
