Efficient data center design can lead to 300% capacity growth in 60% less space: Gartner

Emerging trends in data center design mean that new data centers will be able to provide a 300% growth in capacity in 60% less space than existing data centers, according to Gartner.

“There is a growing desire to increase productivity in data centers,” said Dave Cappuccio, chief of infrastructure research at Gartner. “Organizations are starting to take a serious look at consumption ratios of compute power to energy consumed and then compare them against estimated productivity of applications and the equipment to deliver that application. Couple this with the realization that most IT assets are underutilized — for example, x86 servers are running at 12% utilization, racks are populated to 50 to 60% capacity, floor space is ‘spread out’ to disperse the heat load, it becomes clear that an efficiently designed and implemented data center can yield significant improvements,” he added.

Traditionally, organizations would mitigate the power and cooling issues in data centers by spreading out the physical infrastructure across a larger floor space, but this trend is coming to an end as more servers are needed and floor space is becoming a premium. This is forcing organizations to more densely populate existing server racks, and as a result driving an increase in localized power and cooling demand.

Cappuccio said the trend toward higher-density cabinets and racks will continue through 2012, increasing both the density of compute resources on the data center floor, and the density of both power and cooling required to support them. IT managers for the past few years have focused solely on solving the power and cooling issue with hot and cold isles, distributed equipment placement, specialty cooling and self-contained environments.

Gartner said in the future the issue will move up the corporate food chain as executives realize that the substantial energy costs for IT today are but a fraction of what future costs will be at current growth rates. At current pricing the operating expense (that is energy) to support an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server within three years. Given current trends it's likely that operating costs of servers could easily equal their capital costs within the first few years, putting severe strains on IT organizations to fully utilize equipment they have, while only using equipment absolutely necessary. “At current energy rates a 40kW rack could cost upward of $5,400 per server, per year,” Cappuccio said.

“Think small, think dense – the objective is the highest compute performance per kilowatt,” he added.

• Implementing row- and rack-based cooling for higher-density equipment can reduce energy consumption by up to 15 % while making the data center more scalable.
• Rightsizing the new data center by building and provisioning only what is needed — and then expanding only when needed — can reduce the long-term operating expenses by 10 to 30 %.
• Using air economizers in certain geographies is a simple step with sizable rewards. Gartner said that many data centers actually have air handlers with economizer modes on existing equipment but have it disabled from the early years when energy was not the issue.
• Paying particular attention to floor layouts, not only with respect to hot or cold aisle factors, but with regard to overall air movement (distance) to reduce workloads on your air handling equipment.
• Virtualize as much as possible — especially on x86 equipment. The average x86 server has very low utilization levels but requires a high degree of its maximum power to run. Push these systems to higher utilization levels to reduce overall energy consumption, reduce floor space and see more-efficient use of your IT assets.