Data centres and IT management blogs

Your employees. Yup, no matter how good your IT security is in keeping out the outside world, chances are a member of staff will, whether unwittingly or maliciously, manage to compromise these excellent defences...and yet everyone is clamouring for more and more freedom when it comes to how and from where they can access their data.

Okay, so the chances of turning the IT consumerisation tide are virtually zero, but it just might be worth having a word with your CIO, or MD, and explaining that, without the problem of iPads and smart phones, the company's employees already did a pretty good job of messing up IT security - losing laptops and USB sticks, writing down passwords etc.

And what about the Cloud? Previously distributed IT resources are being gathered together into one neat bundle - what a lovely, simple target for hackers.

With the Infosecurity show just around the corner, enjoy the shopping, but might be worth having a little think before you go - why is it that I need all this security software? Could be cheaper, and more successful, to educate your co-workers before you start investing in yet more security measures...

The recent announcement of LSI's Nytro - 'a comprehensive family of solutions that combines PCIe^® flash technology with intelligent caching and management software to achieve accelerated application performance in datacenters and cloud environments' - is, if it were needed, conclusive evidence that Solid State Disks have arrived.

There are plenty of great SSD products out there (from long term players such as Texas Memory Systems, to start-ups such as Violin Memory) but the introduction of the Nytro 'family' shows that the SSD market has now entered the mainstream. SSDs are no longer the preserve of the wealthy and/or transaction-intensive end users - there's an SSD out there for everyone!

No doubt other vendors will follow LSI's lead - and that can only be good news for end users as they are given more and more choice of products and prices to pay.

The point of this blog? Not to promote LSI's technology, rather to highlight the fact that, if you thought SSDs were not for you, now is a good time to re-visit the technology - you may well be pleasantly surprised.

A single pane of glass - being able to view every aspect (facilities/hardware/software) of the data centre in real time is the holy grail for data centre managers. However, the reality is somewhat different, with most managers using everything from customised spreadsheets right up to the very latest version of some server monitoring software, for example - vast amounts of distributed software applications, making it very difficult to get a coherent narrative as to what's going on in the data centre, how and why.

In the hardware space, there's been a whole new tranche of start-ups bringing clever new technology to the data centre, forcing the enterprise IT department to completely re-think, and re-budget, the IT infrastructure that hasn't changed much for eons.

On the software side, there has been some comparable innovation (virtualisation, Big Data etc.) , but, by and large, when it comes to IT and data centre management, there's still a lot of legacy applications that are merely being tweaked and bundled to try and provide this single pane of glass. DCIM could still turn out to be the saviour, but, thus far, it's a little too facilities-centric.

Maybe, like the holy grail, the concept of one piece of management software is unattainable, but let's hope there are some smart companies out there willing to give it a try. Otherwise, data centre managers are likely to disappear under a deluge of management and monitoring applications - all good in themselves, but not offering the breadth and depth of data required.

Talking to various exhibitors at last week's Data Centre World event, the usual suspects, in terms of hot topics, were very much in evidence - Cloud, more Cloud, managed services, Cloud, energy efficiency, Cloud, DCIM, and Cloud. However, there was one significant and, to me at least, new trend to appear. In talking to a variety of exhibitors, the idea of meaningful intelligence within the data centre appears to be gaining significant momentum. OPEX seems to have taken over from CAPEX as the major concern of the CFO, hence any operational savings created by the use of intelligence in the data centre are particularly welcome.

And these optimum operational savings can only be obtained by the acquisition of meaningful operational data. Most bits of IT hardware provide some basic information as to how they are performing. Add some meaningful monitoring - sensors and software - and you're on the road to operational efficiency. Note, however, the emphasis on MEANINGFUL monitoring.

Intelligent Building Management Systems have been around for quite a while, but it seems that, only now, is this intelligence fidning its way into the data centre space. Take lighting as a simple example. Yes, most data centres have some kind of light/movement sensors, but these are fairly 'clunky' - someone enters a room, light goes on. Person stays for five minutes, leaves, but light stays on for, say, half an hour. What about a lighting system that is much more finely tuned? Enter IP Lighting (at least, I think so, from what was explained to me at the show!).

It might be coincidence, but the fact that several data centres, in the UK at least, are being built by commercial property developers, more familiar with office buildings and retail units, is bringing with it a fresh, and efficiency-conscious approach to the data centre design and construction phase.

Add-in the IT/hardware monitoring, and the era of the Intelligent Data Centre has arrived. Oh, yes, and it's also affordable.

Even allowing for the 'best case' examples that vendors are always going to put forward to promote their wares, the economic argument to deploy solid state disk in the data centre is all but irresistable. Power consumption of SSDs can be as low as 5 watts per terabyte, and the performance of SSDs mean that, it could just be possible to replace as many as 14 racks of 15k spindles, with just one rack of Flash memory - quite a footprint saving. And the like for like power draw favours SSDs by as much as an 80% reduction in power consumption when compared to spinning disks...

Yes, add a pinch of salt if you will, but one SSD vendor spoken to recently believes that, leaving aside any performance benefits, the argument for replacing spinning disks with SSDs could be won on OPEX alone.

This is not to suggest that employees’ nails and shirt collars need checking for dirt, rather the facility itself needs to be as clean as possible to ensure that the IT kit is working as efficiently as possible and not going to fail due to dust or other sources of contamination.

Much of the problem can be avoided, according to 8 Solutions CEO, Mark Plant, with proper care and attention, but the reality is that, sooner or later, any data centre will need some kind of a clean – whether it’s simply a surface clean, or a deep, clinical clean that goes under the raised floor, into the ceiling voids, under/over/into the cabinets themselves.

At the worst end of the scale, poorly trained subcontractors coming into a data centre environment can bring vast amounts of dust with them (the toolbox is a ‘favourite’ location), unpack new IT equipment in the data centre itself – and then leaving the packaging under the floor, where it joins a host of cable ties and bits of cable, discarded air filters and other rubbish.

Without a proper cleaning regime, contamination can end up blocking as much as 50 per cent of a servers air intake, for example – not, I suspect, something that is generally included in the average data centre power and cooling review.

And then there’s the cases where the person mopping the floor is none too careful, and water slops up the side of the cabinets, or the floor is polished to such an extent that it loses its anti-static property.

This blog is not intended to scaremonger, nor promote the services of 8 Solutions specifically, rather to raise the issue of data centre contamination, and to make sure that it’s on the data centre management list.

However, 8 Solutions is currently offering a free, 20 point Health Check, where it will come and look at everything from the sub-floor to the ceiling voids and write up a report. No doubt, other companies are also available to do likewise.

The point is, not so much who carries out the contamination assessment, but the fact that one is done at all. After all, your PUE might be approaching the sub zero level, and your ICT infrastructure the best that money can’t buy, but nobody yet found a way of magicking away dust…
 

Much of the problem can be avoided, according to 8 Solutions CEO, Mark Plant, with proper care and attention, but the reality is that, sooner or later, any data centre will need some kind of a clean – whether it’s simply a surface clean, or a deep, clinical clean that goes under the raised floor, into the ceiling voids, under/over/into the cabinets themselves.

At the worst end of the scale, poorly trained subcontractors coming into a data centre environment can bring vast amounts of dust with them (the toolbox is a ‘favourite’ location), unpack new IT equipment in the data centre itself – and then leaving the packaging under the floor, where it joins a host of cable ties and bits of cable, discarded air filters and other rubbish.

Without a proper cleaning regime, contamination can end up blocking as much as 50 per cent of a servers air intake, for example – not, I suspect, something that is generally included in the average data centre power and cooling review.

And then there’s the cases where the person mopping the floor is none too careful, and water slops up the side of the cabinets, or the floor is polished to such an extent that it loses its anti-static property.

This blog is not intended to scaremonger, nor promote the services of 8 Solutions specifically, rather to raise the issue of data centre contamination, and to make sure that it’s on the data centre management list.

However, 8 Solutions is currently offering a free, 20 point Health Check, where it will come and look at everything from the sub-floor to the ceiling voids and write up a report. No doubt, other companies are also available to do likewise.

The point is, not so much who carries out the contamination assessment, but the fact that one is done at all. After all, your PUE might be approaching the sub zero level, and your ICT infrastructure the best that money can’t buy, but nobody yet found a way of magicking away dust…