Dead servers, bad engineering and data centers

23.10.2006
The business benefits arising from Moore's Law, which says the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, is being turned on its head by the cost of providing power, cooling and other facility support for servers. Those costs now exceed the price of the computing hardware, according to Ken Brill, founder and executive director of The Uptime Institute Inc. In an interview, he talked about those escalating costs and outlined what IT managers can do to improve data center energy efficiency, including the elimination of dead servers and more efficient cooling.

What's the biggest threat facing data centers? The economic breakdown of Moore's Law

What do you mean by that? Historically, facilities costs have been 3 percent of IT's total budget, but the economic breakdown of Moore's Law means that facilities costs (including power consumption) are going to be climbing to 5 percent, 10 percent and higher. And that will change the economics of IT. The business question becomes: Will IT get more money so the increasing portion of the budget that facilities represents doesn't crowd out other IT initiatives? Or will the increasing facilities percentage result in curtailing other things that IT is doing? That's the economic truncation of Moore's law.

Can you illustrate that? A company [citing an unnamed client example] is going to implement a blade server application, for instance, that requires US$22 million of hardware. The business justification based on $22 million of hardware is that you expense over 3 years and there is a positive cash flow. What's missing from the justification is the $54 million in facility costs [over three years]. It was not a $22 million dollar decision it was a $76 million dollar decision. Infrastructure upgrades include data center build-out, cooling and electric capacity to support the hardware, network. It's an invisible price. Those expenses don't typically show up in IT. They show up indirectly or they show up after the fact. When the decision was made to implement the blade servers, the facility people were not at the table.

What's the business cost? The business cost is that the return on investment that people think they are going to get is not going to be there.

Is there a way to get business and facilities representatives involved in this? The application justification process needs to change so it includes all the cost. Typically, you are looking at just the IT cost of the hardware and the cost of running that hardware.