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Data center consolidation is all about effectively utilizing the data center resources to meet the growing business needs, without increasing its footprint. However, it is very difficult than said. Companies, especially large enterprises, keep expanding their data centers in order to meet new business challenges. They keep adding new hardware boxes to handle the load, which in turn increases the hardware and maintenance footprints, and thereby increases the overall opex.
The following steps will help in consolidation of your data center.
Identify the current capacity of the data center
Without a clear understanding of how much load the data center is handling currently and how much it can meet in the future, it is highly difficult to consolidate it. Therefore, first one must identify how much load the data center is handling and its actual capacity. This can be broken down and done in the device level. In most of the data centers, a greater percentage of devices are underutilized because of over provisioning or improper management.
VM sprawl is a classic example of over provisioning where the number of VMs in a data center increases rapidly because VMs can be created easily on the fly. Frequent auditing and effective utilization monitoring of VMs can avoid VM sprawl. Similarly auditing the assets and facilities can help one consolidate the data center.
Get a clear picture of the assets & facilities
A full inventory of all the assets is highly important before going in for a consolidation. An effective asset management with the entire relationship mapping helps in identifying the devices associated to a particular service. This provides a clear picture of the under and over utilized devices, and helps optimize them accordingly. Asset Management helps in understanding the life cycle of each and every device in the data center. The IT team then can proactively identify the devices that are nearing its end-of-life term, and replace them with new devices.
Similarly, knowing how much free space is available in a rack and data center floor for expansion is also necessary because business needs are dynamic. Adopt a 3D data center visual modeling solution over traditional documentation techniques for having better visibility into facilities. Having an integrated asset and facilities management solution would make the job much easier. These solutions provide a clear picture of the assets and facilities, and help in consolidating the data center accordingly.
Adopt new technologies like SDN and SDDC
Latest technologies such as virtualization, SDN, and SDDC play a major role in data center consolidation. These technologies decouple the compute, networking and/or storage from the underlying hardware and help in expanding services without adding any hardware.
In addition to these, hardware vendors such Cisco and IBM have introduced converged infrastructure devices, which can pack hundreds of VMs bundled with the required networking, and storage devices in a single rack. These devices are highly agile and compact and help in meeting business needs on the fly without any additional hardware. Though the capex of such devices are high, their ROI is good (177% as per Cisco). They reduce the opex and maintenance costs.
Optimize power consumption of devices
Data centers spend much on energy. Similar to the VM sprawl, the PDUs is in the data center are usually underutilized. The number of servers connected to a PDU depends upon the power unit mentioned in the server’s specs. However, in reality, servers consume lesser power than the one mentioned in their nameplate, and more number of severs can be connected to a PDU. Only with the help of a proper power monitoring solution, this can be known and PDUs can be utilized more efficiently.
In most of the data centers, 37% of the total power is supplied for the cooling devices such as CRAC, than the actual computing devices such as the server and router. By efficiently monitoring the hardware temperature of the devices and fixing the issues that cause the temperature to increase, one can decrease the power consumption of the cooling devices by more than 30%. This avoids having more cooling devices. On the flip side this also helps to stack more number of racks in a data center.
Benefits with data center consolidation
As you embrace the above techniques, you are likely to achieve an array of benefits including the following.
- Reduced data center operations cost
- Reduce data center footprint
- Reduced maintenance
- Improved energy efficiency
- Optimum use of devices
Additionally, a comprehensive DCIM solution is also necessary to consolidate your data center. DCIM provides IT operations management, asset & facilities management, and energy management. This will help the IT team have a bird eye view of the data center to consolidate it.
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