A recent Quocirca Insight report which was derived from 301 interviews with senior IT influencers and decision makers shows what we have already experiencing in most data centres: Crisis point as data centres runs into space and power constraints through years of uncontrolled growth, expansion and contraction.
Some salient points from the report:
- While the server sprawl continues, as much as 87% of IT budgets aren’t growing in real terms to alleviate the pressure.
- 28% of respondents does not know the exact number of servers they have, 22% said it could take up to a day to find a server that had gone down, another 20% will take longer than a day, and 11% of data centres will run out of space within a year, while 14% have already hit a power supply limit.
- Lack of communications and human factors contribute to the crisis, e.g. IT and facility managers aren’t talking enough.
- Power-saving approaches such as virtualization and automation, exists in abundance but they require up-front investment before the savings can be realised. Justification is challenging where data centres aren’t charging for their costs.
- Good asset planning tools can help data centre managers to manage the complex environments in their facility, but not all have access to such tools.
As we review the data points, we came across a few thermocouples out in the plant indicating measurements of 54′C to 60′C. Although it was a hot summer day, a reasonable reading for those tags should be in the range of 45′C to 50′C. It was an interesting anomaly…
