Turning the Corner on Data Centers

Recently I covered the ‘green shift’ of servers where each new server generation is not only driving major improvements in compute power but is also requires about the same or even less environmentals (power, cooling, space) as the previous generation. Thus, compute efficiency, or compute performance per watt, is improving exponentially. And this trend in servers, which started in 2005 or so, is also being repeated in storage. We have seen a similar improvement in power per terabyte  for the past 3 generations (since 2007). Current storage product pipeline suggests this efficiency trend will continue for the next several years. Below is a chart showing representative improvements in storage efficiency (power per terabyte) across storage product generations from a leading vendor.

Power (VA) per Terabyte
Power (VA) per Terabyte

With current technology advances, a terabyte of storage on today’s devices requires approximately 1/5 of the amount of power as a device from 5 years ago. And these power requirements could drop even more precipitously with the advent of flash technology. By some estimates, there is a drop of 70% or more in power and space requirements with the switch to flash products. In addition to being far more power efficient, flash will offer huge performance advantages for applications with corresponding time reductions in completing workload. So expect flash storage to quickly convert the market once mainstream product introductions occur. IBM sees this as just around the corner, while other vendors see the flash conversion as 3 or more years out. In either scenario, there are continued major improvements in storage efficiency in the pipeline that deliver far lower power demands even with increasing storage requirements.

Ultimately, with the combined efficiency improvements of both storage and server environments over the next 3 to 5 years, most firms will see a net reduction in data center requirements. The typical corporate data center power requirements are approximately one half server, one third storage, and the rest being network and other devices. With the two biggest components experiencing ongoing dramatic power efficiency trends, the net power and space demand should decline in the coming years for all but the fastest growing firms. Add in the effects of virtualization, engineered stacks and SaaS and the data centers in place today should suffice for most firms if they maintain a healthy replacement pace of older technology and embrace virtualization.

Despite such improvements in efficiency, we still could see a major addition in total data center space because cloud and consumer firms like Facebook are investing major sums in new data centers. This resulting consumer data center boom also shows the effects of growing consumerization in the technology market place. Consumerization, which started with PCs and PC software, and then moved to smart phones, has impacted the underlying technologies dramatically. The most advanced compute chips are now those developed for smart phones and video games. Storage technology demand and advances are driven heavily by smart phones and products like the MacBook Air which already leverage only flash storage. The biggest and best data centers? No longer the domain of corporate demand, instead, consumer demand (e.g. Gmail, FaceBook, etc) drives bigger and more advanced centers. The proportion of data center space dedicated to direct consumer compute needs (a la GMail or Facebook) versus enterprise compute needs (even for companies that provide directly consumer services) will see a major shift from enterprise to consumer over the next decade. This will follow the shifts in chips and storage that at one time were driven by the enterprise space (and previously, the government) and are now driven by the consumer segment. And it is highly likely that there will be a surplus of enterprise class data centers (50K – 200K raised floor space) in the next 5 years. These centers are too small and inefficient for a consumer data center (500K – 2M or larger), and with declining demand and consolidation effects, plenty of enterprise data center space will be on the market.

As an IT leader, you should ensure your firm is riding the effects of the compute and storage efficiency trends. Further multiply these demand reduction effects by leveraging virtualization, engineered stacks and SaaS (where appropriate). If you have a healthy buffer of data center space now, you could avoid major investments and costs in data centers in the next 5 to 10 years by taking these measures. Those monies can instead be spent on functional investments that drive more direct business value or drop to the bottom line of your firm. If you have excess data centers, I recommend consolidating quickly and disposing of the space as soon as possible. These assets will be worth far less in the coming years with the likely oversupply. Perhaps you can partner with a cloud firm looking for data center space if your asset is strategic enough for them. Conversely, if you have minimal buffer and see continued higher business growth, it may be possible to acquire good data center assets for far less unit cost than in the past.

For 40 years, technology has ridden Moore’s Law to yield ever-more-powerful processors at lower cost. Its compounding effects have been astounding — and we are now seeing nearly 10 years of similar compounding on the power efficiency side of the equation (below is a chart for processor compute power advances and compute power efficiency advances).

Trend Change for Power Efficiency

The chart above shows how the compute efficiency (performance per watt — green line) has shifted dramatically from its historical trend (blue lines). And it’s improving about as fast as compute performance is improving (red lines), perhaps even faster.

These server and storage advances have resulted in fundamental changes in data centers and their demand trends for corporations. Top IT leaders will be take advantage of these trends and be able to direct more IT investment into business functionality and less into the supporting base utility costs of the data center, while still growing compute and storage capacities to meet business needs.

What trends are you seeing in your data center environment? Can you turn the corner on data center demand ? Are you able to meet your current and future business needs and growth within your current data center footprint and avoid adding data center capacity?

Best, Jim Ditmore

Using Organizational Best Practices to Handle Cloud and New Technologies

I have extended and updated this post which was first published in InformationWeek in March, 2013. I think it is a very salient and pragmatic organizational method for IT success. I look forward to your feedback! Best, Jim

IT organizations are challenged to keep up with the latest wave of cloud, mobile and big data technologies, which are outside the traditional areas of staff expertise. Some industry pundits recommend bringing on more technology “generalists,” since cloud services in particular can call on multiple areas of expertise (storage, server, networking). Or they recommend employing IT “service managers” to bundle up infrastructure components and provide service offerings.

But such organizational changes can reduce your team’s expertise and accountability and make it more difficult to deliver services. So how do you grow your organization’s expertise to handle new technologies? At the same time, how do you organize to deliver business demands for more product innovation and faster delivery yet still ensure efficiency, high quality and security?

Rather than acquire generalists and add another layer of cost and decision making to your infrastructure team, consider the following:

Cloud computing. Assign architects or lead engineers to focus on software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service, ensuring that you have robust estimating and costing models and solid implementation and operational templates. Establish a cloud roadmap that leverages SaaS and IaaS, ensuring that you don’t overreach and end up balkanizing your data center.

For appliances and private cloud, given their multiple component technologies, let your best component engineers learn adjacent fields. Build multi-disciplinary teams to design and implement these offerings. Above all, though, don’t water down the engineering capacity of your team by selecting generalists who lack depth in a component field. For decades, IT has built complex systems with multiple components by leveraging multi-faceted teams of experts, and cloud is no different.

Where to use ‘service managers’. A frequent flaw in organizations is to employ ‘service managers’ who group multiple infrastructure components (e.g. storage, servers, data centers, etc) into a ‘product’ (e.g. ‘hosting service’) and provide direction and interface for this product. This is an entirely artificial layer that then removes accountability from the component teams and often makes poor ‘product’ decision because of limited knowledge and depth. In the end IT does not deliver ‘hosting services’; IT delivers systems that meet business functions (e.g., for banking, teller or branch functions, ATMs; or for insurance, claims reporting or policy quote or issue). These business functions are the true IT services and are where you should apply a service manager role. Here, a service manager can ensure end-to-end integration and quality, drive better overall transaction performance and reliability, and provide deep expertise on system connections and SLAs and business needs back across the application and infrastructure component teams. And because it is directly attached to the business functions to be done, it will yield high value. These service managers will be invaluable for both new development and enhancement work as well as assisting during production issues.

Mobile. If mobile isn’t already the most critical interface for your company, it will be in three to five years. So don’t treat mobile as an afterthought, to be adapted from traditional interfaces. And don’t outsource this capability, as mobile will be pervasive in everything you build.

Build a mobile competency center that includes development, user experience and standards expertise. Then fan out that expertise to all of your development teams, while maintaining the core mobile group to assist with the most difficult efforts. And of course, continue with a central architecture and control of the overall user experience. A consistent mobile look, feel and flow is essentially your company’s brand, invaluable in interacting with customers.

Big data. There are two key aspects of this technology wave: the data (and traditional analytic uses) and real-time data “decisioning,” similar to IBM’s Watson. You can handle the data analytics as an extension of your traditional data warehousing (though on steroids). However, real-time decisioning has the potential to dramatically alter how your organization specifies and encodes business rules.

Consider the possibility that 30% to 50% of all business logic traditionally encoded in 3 or 4 generation programming languages instead becomes decisioned in real time. This capability will require new development and business analyst skills. For now, cultivate a central team with these skills. As you pilot and determine how to more broadly leverage real-time data decisioning, decide how to seed your broader development teams with these capabilities. In the longer run, I believe it will be critical to have these skills as an inherent portion of each development team.

Competing Demands. Overall, IT organizations must meet several competing demands: Work with business partners to deliver competitive advantage; do so quickly in order to respond to (and anticipate) market demands; and provide efficient, consistent quality while protecting the company’s intellectual property, data and customers. In essence, there are business and market drivers that value speed, business knowledge and closeness at a reasonable cost and risk drivers that value efficiency, quality, security and consistency.

Therefore, we must design an IT organization and systems approach that meets both sets of drivers and accommodates business organizational change. As opposed to organizing around one set of drivers or the other, the best solution is to organize IT as a hybrid organization to deliver both sets of capabilities.

Typically, the functions that should be consolidated and organized centrally to deliver scale, efficiency and quality are infrastructure (especially networks, data centers, servers and storage), IT operations, information security, service desks and anything else that should be run as a utility for the company. The functions to be aligned and organized along business lines to promote agility and innovation are application development (including Web and mature mobile development), data marts and business intelligence.

Some functions, such as database, middleware, testing and project management, can be organized in either mode. But if they aren’t centralized, they’ll require a council to ensure consistent processes, tools, measures and templates.

For services becoming a commodity, or where there’s a critical advantage to having one solution (e.g., one view of the customer for the entire company), it’s best to have a single team or utility that’s responsible (along with a corresponding single senior business sponsor). Where you’re looking to improve speed to market or market knowledge, organize into smaller IT teams closer to the business. The diagram below gives a graphical view of the hybrid organization.

The IT Hybrid Model diagram
With this approach, your IT shop will be able to deliver the best of both worlds. And you can then weave in the new skills and teams required to deliver the latest technologies such as cloud and mobile. You can read more about this hybrid model in our best practice reference page.

Which IT organizational approaches or variations have you seen work best? How are you accommodating new technologies and skills within your teams? Please weigh in with a comment below.

Best, Jim Ditmore