AFCOM - Power, Cooling Are Top Data Center Issues

By Jeff Burt
eWEEK

What's going to be happening in your data center over the next five to 10 years or so? According to AFCOM, a lot.

The association of data center managers -- and its Data Center Institute -- earlier this year surveyed its 3,000 members to find out what the trends are out there. Some 200 responded, and the result was the institute's "Five Bold Predictions" for the data center. Not surprisingly, power played a key role in a number of those predictions.

AFCOM President Jill Eckhaus said in an interview that power -- and its close cousin, cooling -- "is probably the No. 1 issue in the data center right now." This echoes what vendors are hearing from many of their customers -- that the increased power and density in the data center, combined with rising cost of energy, are conspiring to drive up the costs of powering and cooling the data centers.

According to the AFCOM survey, by 2010, more than half of all data centers will have to relocate to new facilities or outsource some applications. Among the key drivers for this are incremental growth in the costs of cooling and powering the data centers. When asked what the biggest problems in the data center were, insufficient power and excessive heat were the top two named, receiving 29 percent of the vote each, followed by insufficient raised floor area. In its report, the group urged data center administrators to be proactive in dealing with the issue, through such avenues as being as energy-efficient as possible, monitoring systems and developing "what if" scenarios to ensure that plans are made.

Another prediction was that over the next five years, 90 percent of businesses will see their data center operations halted by power failures or limits on power availability. The survey found that 81.5 percent of AFCOM members had a failure in the data center over the last five years, and that of those failures, 82.5 percent were caused by power outages. In addition, 53.6 percent of AFCOM members had to add power capacity over the last two years.

The other three predictions cover everything from personnel to disaster recovery: By 2015, the talent pool of top technical and managerial data center talent will shrink by 45 percent; by 2010, almost 70 percent of all data centers will use some form of grid computing or virtualization; and within the next five years, a quarter of all data centers will go through a disruption serious enough to impact the company's ability to go about their business.

The message behind these predictions, according to AFCOM, is that data center administrators need to be prepared, for the growing power needs, for the shrinking talent pool and for disasters that are on the horizon.