Power, Space, Cooling Capacity Major Barriers To DC Innovation

Nearly 85 percent of organisations say that issues with datacentre power, space and cooling capacity—as well as asset and uptime issues—resulted in delayed or aborted application rollouts, reduced ability to support customers, and unplanned reallocation of OPEX and CAPEX budget away from strategic goals during the past year.

According to an IDC study these issues reduce IT’s ability to support business innovation and get maximum business value from IT hardware and software investments.

More than 500 IT and facilities professionals at midsized and large organisations in North America, Western Europe, and Latin America participated in the study, entitled “The Datacenter’s Role in Delivering Business Innovation: Using DCIM to Provide a Common Management Approach,” which was sponsored by CA Technologies.

“Organisations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the infrastructure deployed in their datacentres, and even more on power and cooling plus IT and Facilities support staff to ensure that current and new applications are highly available,” said Richard Villars, Vice President of Datacentre and Cloud at IDC and author of the study. “They must ensure this investment is being spent efficiently and effectively, and supporting the business’ overall goals of delivering innovative new products and services.”

Unfortunately, as the study reveals, datacentre infrastructure issues are significantly undermining the business value returned by these investments. Specific issues cited by the 84 percent of respondents whose datacentre infrastructure is under-performing include power (27 percent), space (27 percent) and cooling (25 percent)—as well as imbalances in capacity across multiple sites.

The study revealed the most common reasons things go awry in the datacentre. These include:

• Outdated datacentres. 57 percent of respondents admit that their datacentres are either “inefficient” or only “moderately efficient.”

• Fragmented datacentre operations. Because IT and facilities staff manage different aspects of datacentre operations, organisations are not able to implement coherent processes, policies or metrics.

• Inconsistent datacentre information. Without clear visibility into key datacentre infrastructure metrics, decision-makers can’t accurately plan capacity, pro-actively discover potential problems, or optimise allocation of resources such as power, cooling, network connectivity, rack and floor space.

The study highlights the fact that datacentre management tools are often manual and fragmented. It suggests that a more unified approach to Datacentre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) can empower organisations to get more value from their existing datacentre investments and better support IT-based business innovation.

“IT and Facilities must work together to deliver the innovation that their C-level management is demanding,” said Villars. “To help achieve this, organisations should look to implement a DCIM solution that takes a unified approach to management across all aspects of the datacentre.”

More than half of the datacentre managers surveyed said there would be value in having an integrated DCIM solution. Respondents’ priorities for a DCIM solution included:

• Real-time monitoring of power, temperature and other variables;

• Alerts and alarms for power and cooling;

• Inventory and asset management; and

• Capacity analysis and planning.

“Datacentres present major challenges for organisations today, and these can have impacts on the business”, said Terrence Clark, general manager, Energy and Sustainability solutions, CA Technologies. “Conventional approaches often make it difficult to monitor and manage datacentre space, power, cooling and assets effectively. DCIM addresses these challenges and helps organisations to leverage datacentre infrastructure for higher efficiency, reduced risk and the increased agility needed to address expanding business demands.”