Is Your Data Center in a State of Quiet Desperation?
May 30, 2007

As I troll the Web, checking out the blogs of IT movers and shakers across the country, one thing becomes clear: many data centers exist in a state of quiet desperation. 

Even though they may be delivering their services reliably enough to the business groups that depend on them, these data centers contain hoards of servers running at more or less 10 percent of capacity and whose applications are jerry-rigged in wildly inefficient, if ingenious, ways.

I’m not talking only about those visually arresting installations whose tangled knots of wiring look like the entrails of some space creature from an Alien sequel.  No, even some of the most pristine IT centers, with multiple rows of gleaming racked servers—each running perhaps a single application-- amid the tidiest of bundled cable, are consuming power with the appetite of an air-conditioned city in a tropical heat wave.

Here, on the Scale Out Advantage website, we focus on the efficiencies gained from moving to industry-standard servers, consolidating systems, and implementing virtualization. 

As energy costs continue to skyrocket, the pressure on enterprises will grow to streamline and consolidate their data centers.  More affordable and capable virtualization technology has already opened the door for smaller businesses to do more with fewer servers.

But remember that these practices and technologies are just tools to help you reach a goal. Before you can expect to achieve the full benefits of scaling out, you need to have a well-conceived plan to consolidate systems. 

To get started, check out our article on making data centers efficient and the white papers on power management with virtualization and improving energy efficiency in the data center. Leading hardware vendors, such as Dell, offer specialized services in virtualization, server consolidation, storage consolidation, and managing data center power usage.

Simply deploying newer, more energy efficient servers won’t buy you much in terms of space or even power-savings if you still load only one application on each of them. Taking action to cut power usage and simplify operations is necessary and good, but be sure to create a comprehensive roadmap before you hit the highway.

Previous Blog Posts
11.07.07 - Scaling Out Strategically
08.28.07 - How to Cut Costs and Save the World
07.17.07 - Planting the Seeds for Datacenter Greenery
06.26.07 - Scale Out Zen — Do More with Less
06.14.07 - iSCSI...About to Go Mainstream?
05.30.07 - Is Your Data Center in a State of Quiet Desperation?
05.17.07 - EPA Data Center Guidelines: IT Power Use Is in the Spotlight
05.09.07 - Virtualized Data Needs Protection, Too
04.19.07 - Disaster Recovery on the Back Burner? Careful, It May Catch on Fire
04.10.07 - Professional Help for the Data Center
03.27.07 - Survey Shows Virtualization Taking Off
03.14.07 - Tackling Data Protection Alphabet Soup
03.07.07 - The Cost of Not Protecting Data
02.28.07 - Going Green to Conserve Energy in the Data Center
01.30.07 - Global Warming in the Data Center
12.02.06 - Open Standards Is for Systems Management Too
11.22.06 - Virtually Ready for Primetime
11.14.06 - Technology No Substitute for Communication
10.16.06 - Running a Data Center? What's Your Problem?