Reducing Data Center Costs and Energy Consumption

Industry News and Events

Over 85% of data centers or server rooms are kept in-house
Even in the most vibrant data centre outsourcing markets, over 85% of data centers or server rooms are kept in-house. Why is this? It is a mix of reasonable, less reasonable and completely unreasonable arguments.

Starting with the more reasonable arguments, there is the element of meeting specific requirements in terms of security, specification and performance. This had led to the view at many organizations that data centers, housing mission-critical data and essential to day-day requirements, must be kept in-house.

The less reasonable arguments include the notion that it must be cheaper, that only internal IT can ever meet their requirements and that third party facilities can never be secure.

The completely unreasonable arguments include the desire to be within ‘touching distance’ of the data centre or, as one data centre manager put it to me, "I like the glamour of a data centre in London". As Fujitsu-Siemens predict the emergence of the unmanned data centre by 2012, and security is hardly best served by having the server room under the main office, these arguments often hardly bare scrutiny.

A less obvious point is suddenly there is a lot more interest in the data centre. The data centre manager, historically, has not enjoyed the highest profile in his or her organization. Often it is unclear whether they report to IT or facilities management or property services. In the IT food chain, the physical infrastructure for the hardware tends to rank right at the bottom.

But now data centers have become that thing that makes senior management think – a pain point. Existing facilities are full (often in power before space terms), they are highly expensive, they are not exactly green and running costs are soaring (power costs can be 40-50% of annual data centre operating costs).