Data Center Strategies for the CIO
I see all types of computing environments in my work. The ones I would consider to be a data center were designed and constructed to actually support information technology. I've seen other rooms or environments that weren't originally designed to support information technology but have grown because someone threw a server into a closet or a small room. It's basically been Band-Aided and hodge-podged together, but it's not a data center. A real data center is designed and constructed with the intent to support information technology. How often do you see each?
I see more real data centers than I did five or seven years ago. The data centers I do see are old. There are plenty of levels, too. For example, last Thursday I was in a client data center that was originally designed and constructed as a mainframe environment, but it's 30 years old and having difficulty supporting a 21st century computing environment. I'm seeing fewer server rooms, out of necessity. What people want to put in server rooms requires more power and cooling than what you can typically find in a closet. What's the difference between an old data center and one built today?
A data center 25 years ago was built for an entirely different class of computing equipment. Mainframes did not require the same amount of power and cooling that today's server and storage environment today does. It likely had a water-cooled mainframe, and once you have water-cooled
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Margie Semilof, Editorial Director
equipment you don't need ambient cooling. In a lot of cases you had a lot of floor space with minimal power and cooling. Today there is less floor space but more power and cooling. Why was there more floor space back then? All of the old equipment was physically enormous compared to what we have today from an IT standpoint. So is it better to adapt an old data center for today or just build new?
There are cases where they can adapt, but if you're dealing with an existing data center, if it's still operating as an IT environment, it can be risky and costly to retrofit that environment too much. In a lot of cases you need to take outages, and you're going to have electricians and construction folks in the data center that represent a security risk. But if you build new you'll have to deal with an outage too, right?
You're still going to have to pick up equipment from the old data center and move it over to the new data center, but in many cases that's one outage. If you're retrofitting you might have to take multiple outages. Also, most buildings are designed with a maximum capacity of power and cooling. In a lot of cases you're stymied by situations that currently exist. The back infrastructure for the building may not be capable of handling upgrades from a power and cooling standpoint.
Retrofitting, when it becomes a major retrofit -- we're talking a 25-, 30-year-old data center -- will be more expensive, more time consuming and more risky. I just want to make sure that we categorize that as a major retrofit as compared to a five-year-old data center, which can handle minor upgrades. How old are the data centers that you're called to work on?
The average age of data centers that I'm seeing are 10-plus years old. It's a combination of age or, in some cases, younger data centers weren't designed as well as they had hoped. I do see some younger data centers that were just designed a little bit short. So how do you determine if your data center is outdated?
It's a balancing act between keeping up and doing general maintenance. I think you start to see a typical data center, you start to see age set in around 10 years old. That's when a lot of things you originally bought are going to need replacement, things like air-conditioners and UPS systems. Also, if you've outgrown power and cooling capabilities, you may see deficiencies. You may find that you don't have enough power and cooling to support your data center.
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