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CA Technologies: Space and Cooling Capacity Emerging As Barriers to Datacenter Innovation
December 2012 by CA Technologies
Nearly 85 percent of organizations say that issues with datacenter power, space and cooling capacity—as well as asset and uptime issues—resulted in delayed or aborted application rollouts, reduced ability to support customers, and unplanned reallocation of OpEx and CapEx budget away from strategic goals during the past year.
According to an IDC study, these issues reduce IT’s ability to support business innovation and get maximum business value from IT hardware and software investments.
More than 500 IT and facilities professionals at midsized and large organizations in North America, Western Europe and Latin America participated in the study entitled “The Datacenter’s Role in Delivering Business Innovation,”* which was sponsored by CA Technologies.
“Organizations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the infrastructure deployed in their datacenters, and even more on power and cooling plus IT and Facilities support staff to ensure that current and new applications are highly available,” said Richard Villars, vice president of Datacenter and Cloud at IDC and author of the study. “They must ensure this investment is being spent efficiently and effectively, and supporting the business’ overall goals of delivering innovative new products and services.”
Unfortunately, as the study reveals, datacenter infrastructure issues are significantly undermining the business value returned by these investments. Specific issues cited by the 84 percent of respondents whose datacenter infrastructure is under-performing include power (27 percent), space (27 percent) and cooling (25 percent)—as well as imbalances in capacity across multiple sites.
The study revealed the most common reasons things go awry in the datacenter. These include:
• Outdated datacenters - 57 percent of respondents admit that their datacenters are either “inefficient” or only “moderately efficient.”
• Fragmented datacenter operations - Because IT and facilities staff manage different aspects of datacenter operations, organizations are not able to implement coherent processes, policies or metrics.
• Inconsistent datacenter information - Without clear visibility into key datacenter infrastructure metrics, decision-makers can’t accurately plan capacity, pro-actively discover potential problems, or optimize allocation of resources such as power, cooling, network connectivity, rack and floor space.
The study highlights the fact that datacenter management tools are often manual and fragmented. It suggests that a more unified approach to Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) can empower organizations to get more value from their existing datacenter investments and better support IT-based business innovation.
“IT and Facilities must work together to deliver the innovation that their C-level management is demanding,” said Villars. “To help achieve this, organizations should look to implement a DCIM solution that takes a unified approach to management across all aspects of the datacenter.”
More than half of the datacenter managers surveyed said there would be value in having an integrated DCIM solution. Respondents’ priorities for a DCIM solution included:
• Real-time monitoring of power, temperature and other variables;
• Alerts and alarms for power and cooling;
• Inventory and asset management; and
• Capacity analysis and planning.
“Data centers present major challenges for organizations today, and these can have impacts on the business”, said Terrence Clark, general manager, Energy and Sustainability solutions, CA Technologies. “Conventional approaches often make it difficult to monitor and manage data center space, power, cooling and assets effectively. DCIM addresses these challenges and helps organizations to leverage data center infrastructure for higher efficiency, reduced risk and the increased agility needed to address expanding business demands.”
IDC’s Villars, CA Technologies VP of DCIM business strategy Peter Gilbert, and Datacenter Dynamics CTO Stephen Worn will present the findings in a webinar entitled “The Datacenter Dilemma: Optimize Capacity, Reduce Risk, Get Rapid Value.
*IDC White Paper Sponsored by CA Technologies, “The Datacenter’s Role in Delivering Business Innovation: Using DCIM to Provide a Common Management Approach,” Doc # 237737, November 2012.
