Data Center Transformation

The datacenter continues to face mounting pressure from new technology introductions and a lack of standards in design. IDC’s Michelle Bailey explains what the datacenter of the future might look like.

According to recent research, the datacenter is undergoing a complete transformation at the moment. "The rulebook that we've been operating under for the last 20 years or so is really being thrown out the window," says Michelle Bailey, VP of Research for Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends at IDC. "As a result, we're seeing many different approaches to building, designing and operating a datacenter take place."

And while a lot of attention is being focused on so-called Web 2.0 datacenters - mega datacenters with very high power densities being constructed from the ground up as a single, tightly integrated system by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Amazon in order to run the cloud - Bailey maintains that it's really the enterprise datacenter that continues to drive the market. "The real driver is the datacenters that companies have ownership of and operate," she says. "I think if this recession hadn't come along then we would have seen more activity around hosted, outsourced or Web 2.0 models, but the recession has really forced many companies to think about not just the reinvention of their own datacenters, but also how they source for those."

IDC believes there have been three key drivers in transforming the datacenter. "Far and away the number one change that we've seen has been site consolidation," says Bailey. "The level at which this consolidation's been taking place is something that we haven't seen before; it used to be an organization would be happy if they could go from 40 sites down to maybe 10 or even 20 sites. Now we're seeing customers wanting to go from 60 sites down to five or six, a really dramatic level of consolidation."

Before the recession hit, says Bailey, most companies were addressing this trend by building new datacenters; however, that activity has all but stopped in light of the capital constraints. "There's very few companies today that are building brand new datacenters from the ground up relative to where we were just before the recession hit, and it's basically because no one has $100 million to build a new datacenter," she explains. "What this means is that we expect to see a lot more retrofit activity, as more CIOs look to extend the life of their existing datacenters versus building new ones."

This has also resulted in a complete redesign of the datacenter floor. "Modularity has become king as companies look to make the datacenter more predictable," says Bailey. "Companies don't necessarily want datacenters based on a one-off custom design. They want something that's predefined and predictable over time, and has a measurable power density footprint to it."

But the fundamental game changer has been server virtualization. "We had reached a tipping point around the economics of the datacenter where we couldn't really do much more, and virtualization has been a way to help drive consolidation, bring down the footprint and help customers get another year or two out of their datacenters simply by lowering the physical size of the infrastructure," explains Bailey. "It's been very disruptive, but we're really just at the beginning of server virtualization and its impacts on the datacenter. What's coming next is a real change in the way we manage systems. Back in 1996, there were about five million physical servers installed worldwide whereas today there's about 30 million. But what's been interesting over that timeframe is that spend on servers has actually remained flat. The server market tends to hover around $50-60 billion annually, and it doesn't change too much from that. What has changed has been the cost of administration of all of those 30 million servers, which has grown right along with the installed base. What's also grown is the cost to be able to power those servers, turn them on and then cool them. It's become a very significant cost on the electricity side, and also a very significant business cost."

Thanks to virtualization, however - along with the downturn in the economy - the server market for 2008-2012 has flattened out for the first time. "We've never seen this before," says Bailey. "We've seen downturns during the dotcom implosion, but it was a very short-term implosion; what we're seeing now is fewer systems going into the market, and we continue to believe that for the next five years that's really how the physical infrastructure will look."

What will continue to grow though, says Bailey, is the number of virtual machines. "You're getting 10-20 virtual machines per physical server, and what we're seeing is virtual machine sprawl, where the number of virtual machines is growing in the same way that we saw the physical infrastructure grow previously. We're looking at somewhere around 120 million virtual machines installed on a worldwide basis, and we've never seen growth like that in the server market ever before."

But with every virtual machine needing to be patched and managed and upgraded just like a physical server, Bailey believes this could present a huge management problem if customers don't start changing the way they manage their server infrastructure. "Server virtualization is helpful in terms of being able to deploy systems more quickly. It definitely helps in being able to lower hardware maintenance. But what it hasn't helped address is the bulk of system administration - taking care of the OS, doing all the patching, the upgrades, etc. That continues to be a problem, and in fact, if we believe our own numbers, that management actually gets worse with the broad adoption of virtualization.

"Customers have to start thinking differently about the management of virtual machines, because we can't continue to allow virtual machines to grow unchecked," she continues. "There are very few policies being put in around the lifecycle management of a virtual machine - only 20 percent of customers are even thinking about lifecycle management around virtual machines - and the types of tools that we think we'll need to see in the market are the type of tools that allow you to move virtual machines around, allow you to add resources on the fly, allow you to create what we call the dynamic IT datacenter: a datacenter that can ebb and flow with changes in the business."

Bailey says the core to that dynamism is mobility - being able to move virtual machines from one physical server to another - and cites the adoption of VMware's Vmotion tool as a good example. "We know that there's good adoption of VMotion today. About 80 percent of customers are using it, but they're not using it in the way you might think. They're still using it manually, and what they're not doing is using policy-based automation tools to allow the mobility of virtual machines around the datacenter. There's a lot more to explore in this area - for instance, if you can move a virtual machine from one physical server to another around the datacenter, that's high availability like we've never seen before in the X86 marketplace."

In fact, Bailey feels we're only just starting to see what the impact of server virtualization will be. "Every day I'm learning something new about what the advantages are, as well as what some of the hurdles are going to be on an ongoing basis," she says. "And it's causing datacenter operators to think completely differently about many adjacent technologies, too. We see them having to rethink hardware that they're buying; there's much more importance attached to shared storage; network planning and capability is also receiving a lot of attention. And in terms of management, I think it's going to create more of a crisis than it's solving on the hardware and consolidation side."
However, there's no doubt the benefits will far outweigh any potential challenges. "For example, moving virtual machines from one datacenter to another gives you the ability to do site recovery with virtualization," she enthuses. "It really does change the way that customers can think about doing that at a price point like we've never seen before. Disaster recovery is a little way off. You still need a dedicated network and we see most customers still using traditional replication tools to make that happen, but you can bet that over the next several years that's going to be something that gets baked into virtualization technology, and so it's a real game changer."