Datacentre Redesign Challenges

There is a growing need to redesign the data centres to absorb future tech innovations as well as business growth

Most industry experts unanimously agree that managing data centres has become a more challenging task, given the fact that the businesses are getting more demanding and dependent. The reasons for this are attributed to the rapid expansion in the business, with the top management having set ambitious growth targets, both around organic and inorganic growth.

The data centre operations are expected to do more with less. A series of technological innovations causing commercial disruptions and businesses becoming more capital-intensive have triggered the need to re-architect or redesign the data centre framework to absorb future technological innovations and business growth.

Jayabalan Velayudhan, Director-Strategy and Business Development, IT Business India, APC by Schneider Electric, rightly points out, A series of major technological innovationscoupled with significant external legislative, economic and market disruptions will increasingly dictate that IT managers rethink the way they plan, design and operate data centres.

IT managers at large do comply with the need to go in for a data centre overhaul considering the expectations from various groups around the data centres performance and its kickbacks. Of course, the changes that could be brought within the framework would spread across a rapid increase in demand for data centre capacity and services, implementing virtualisation technology, a dynamic provisioning of applications, data storage, etc., and evolving a strategy around adopting the cloud computing model, and probably opt for modular and pre-configured data centres, those offered by the big technology vendors and perhaps a tighter integration of IT facilities within the data centre.

Going by the standard notion that companies need a disruption in the way data centres are architected, the modern data centre has undergone a series of changes to impact business operations. The advent of Service-oriented Architectures (SoA) called for an increase in the number of servers, and then the introduction of virtualisation to reduce the server density have forever changed traffic patterns within the data centre.

The data centre fine-tuning trend has been endorsed by various research groups who are of the opinion that in order to optimise the data centres performance, the traditional structure needs to be abandoned and the pattern of traffic flow needs to change. Research groups such as the IDC confirm that virtualisation as a technology forms a core component of the new design element for IT managers.

The IDC survey indicated that more than half of all virtual machines are being used in production environments, and 22 per cent of installed servers currently are running virtualisation software. In addition, 45 per cent of planned server deployments are being eyed for virtualisation projects.

Re-Architecting Guidelines
To re-architect a data centre, one needs to follow certain guidelines. Just as building a data centre cannot be done in a day or two, so does re-architecting, which is an equally cumbersome process and most likely to take approximately three months or even more to be properly structured. This means you may need to consult a data centre expert to formulate a standards-based design structure for your data centre according to your requirements.

Sridhar Reddy, CMD, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd., says, It is critical to review a business case for consolidating and rationalising the existing IT infrastructure framework before making a decision to outsource to a third party and alongside compare the cost proposition with the outsourcing partys proposal.

Citing an example, Reddy adds, Recently two companies in the BFSI sector had outsourced the complete data centre transformation task to us to chalk out a 10-year roadmap. The entire planning and framework to bring in the best technologies in place lowered the customers cost of ownership by 30 per cent with a well-devised 10-year technology roadmap.

As part of their re-architecting initiative, Ernst & Young felt the need to consolidate the data centre to reduce costs and enhance its performance. Virtualisation was the first step that Lalit Sharma, Head-IT, Ernst & Young India initiated to carry out server consolidation to reduce server footprints globally from 1,000 servers to 300. As a finance company, there was a need to regularly fine-tune the data centre deliverables to the business and finance. We had to segregate the data under varied categories and various applications were consolidated, says Sharma.

Real Estate Constraints Drive the Need
Established business houses such as the Tatas have old archival data related to the good old days of its founder, JN Tata. They are outsourcing their sensitive data to a third-party data centre shortly, primarily due to a lack of space. An increased information flow and the overload of data was getting to be unmanageable for Berjes Shroff, Senior IT Manager, Tata Services Ltd. The company consciously decided to outsource the management of the data centre to a third party as part of its strategy. We were very sceptical about using a third-party data centre, but after serious debate, we decided to host our data centre with CtrlS for more convenience, says Shroff.

But the reason why B. S. Baliga, ADM-IT&S, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., thought of re-doing the data centre or outsourcing the data centre management was because of his teams limited skilled resources with no expertise on data centre management.

Power & Cooling HurdlesReason for Overhaul
Power and cooling are the critical components of any data centre and if these are not managed well, it could result in a severe bottleneck.

According to Baliga, the power and cooling systems require a sufficiently well-thought-out and a well-planned strategy taking into account the future needs.

He says that it would not be wrong to have a generous estimate in terms of power solutions as the need is going to grow as the business expands. While working on a transformation strategy, I would recommend that IT managers opt for modular UPS solutions which have the capability to scale up and absorb future requirements.

Today, even modular data centre systems are available and that is a portable method of deploying data centre capacity. As an alternative to the traditional data centre, the modular data centre can be placed wherever data capacity is needed.

Nike Converse Shoes


Add new comment