Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business - Emerson ...

Creating an IT Infrastructure
that Adapts to Your Business
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Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business
For decades, data centers have been over-provisioned
two or even three times over in an attempt to “plan”
for growth. Businesses have spent excessively to build
facilities that might be able to handle potential IT
needs that may arise sometime in an uncertain future.
As recently as 10 years ago, before virtualization was
widely accepted, it was not unusual to see 4 watts of
UPS capacity installed for every 1 watt of IT load. To
be fair, 10 years ago that may have been the only
guaranteed way to ensure the investment in IT
resulted in the needed capacity increases – even if
that investment amounted to a massive overpay.
That isn’t the case today, although limitations to the
physical infrastructure – power, cooling and space –
remain. Now, instead of bumping up against imagined
walls like some overzealous mime, data center
managers and CIOs can measure their loads and
capacity accurately, and deploy techniques and technologies
to either maximize or add capacity without
the massive capital investment that comes with a new
data center – or be armed with enough data to go into
a new build confident it’s the right choice.
But with a whole spectrum of choices available – up
to and including biting the bullet and building a
shiny new data center – how do forward-thinking,
budget-conscious businesses make the right choice?
How do they build an IT infrastructure that can scale
in every direction in order to meet uncertain future
demands?
2018 or beyond (6+ years)
2017 (5 year)
2016 (4 year)
2015 (3 year)
2014 (2 year)
2013 (1 year)
2012
7.3%
0.0% 5.0% 10.0% 15.0% 20.0% 25.0%
Increasing power densities are going to stretch the power and cooling capacity of many existing data centers. This chart
shows when surveyed data center managers expect to be impacted by data center capacity constraints. (Source: Data
Center Users’ Group Fall 2012 Survey)
Know the Scouting Report
The formula for any decision in the data center is
well-established: balance capital and operational
expenses as efficiently as possible without
jeopardizing availability of critical applications.
Simply put, minimize capital investments unless
the investment will be recovered through a reduction
in operational expenses. Recovery could happen in
any number of ways. For example, it could happen
by increasing capacity and, in turn, business volume
and revenue. Or by increasing energy efficiency and
reducing operational costs related to power
consumption. Or by reduction or elimination of
ongoing maintenance and service. In each case,
it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.
10.4%
11.0%
12.2%
17.1%
20.1%
22.0%
A few questions can help establish a basic strategy
for managing organizational growth and increasing
IT demand. Those questions are:
Is the entire load critical to the business?
The kneejerk reaction is “yes.” And in some cases –
financial services institutions or ecommerce businesses,
for example – that may be true. But even in those
examples, a closer examination may reveal a different
answer. Ensuring availability of all transactional functions
is non-negotiable, but what about some internal IT
functions or support systems? If some applications
are less critical, could they be outsourced to a
co-location facility or hosted in the cloud? If so,
that frees up capacity within the owned data center.
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Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business
Even within the data center, some organizations are
beginning to assign non-critical applications to
separate pods with a less robust infrastructure and
adjusting the expectations for availability accordingly.
The savings generated in those non-critical pods can
be used elsewhere – including reinvestment in the
infrastructure in more critical areas supporting
high-value applications.
Is there available infrastructure capacity that
isn’t being used?
This seemingly simple question tends to confound
even the most IT-focused organizations. Data centers
grow and evolve over time, adding servers and the
power and cooling needed to support them – and
all of those additions consume valuable space. The
facility may or may not be virtualized – a practice
that can increase efficiency but can complicate the
capacity question. Eventually trying to figure out
exactly what the existing infrastructure can support
becomes more difficult than it should be.
Data Center
Availability
Infrastructure Tier Description Supported
I: Basic Data Center
II: Redundant
Components
III: Concurrently
Maintainable
IV: Fault Tolerant
Single path for power and cooling distribution without redundant
components. May or may not have a UPS, raised floor or generator.
Single path for power and cooling distribution with redundant
components. Will have a raised floor, UPS and generator, but the
capacity design is N+1 with a single-wired distribution path throughout.
Multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, but only one
path is active. Has redundant components and is concurrently
maintainable. Sufficient capacity and distribution must be present
to simultaneously carry the load on one path while performing
maintenance on the other path.
Provides infrastructure capacity and capability to permit any planned
activity without disruption to the critical load. Infrastructure design
can sustain at least one worst case, unplanned failure or event with
no critical load impact.
99.671%
99.741%
99.982%
99.995%
The Uptime Institute defines four tiers of data center infrastructure availability to help organizations determine the level of
investment in power required to achieve desired availability levels.
Data center infrastructure management (DCIM)
technologies give data center managers the ability to
understand what infrastructure systems are in their
facilities, where they are, and what applications those
systems support. That level of visibility – understanding
where applications of various levels of criticality
reside and how they’re being powered and cooled –
demystifies the physical fabric of the data center and
gives data center managers the power to unlock
hidden capacity within their existing facilities.
How much capacity is needed – and when?
Traditional approaches to data center scalability
could best be described as linear – the business is
growing, IT demands will grow with it, so the data
center is going to need to be able to support more
applications in the future than it does now. This is
how we end up with over-provisioned data centers.
They meet the availability requirement, but the initial
capital investment was higher than it should have
been for a facility that’s far less efficient than it could
be. The organization ends up paying more up front
and operationally – and that’s assuming the original
infrastructure technologies remain viable when the
business grows into all that extra space five or 10 years
later. If it sounds nuts, it is – but it was relatively
common practice as recently as 10 years ago.
Today’s technologies enable a more nuanced
approach to growth and scalability, allowing businesses
to invest more prudently and manage the need for
more capacity – or less – as it emerges.
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Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business
Develop a Gameplan
A deep understanding of the IT load, its criticality and available
capacity can help businesses develop a strategy for building
a scalable IT infrastructure. Understanding that cloud or
co-location services can be a viable complement to in-house
IT services, there are three key strategies for creating a more
scalable infrastructure:
Use advanced technology or software to unlock
existing capacity and scale up or down
Technology now enables infrastructure scalability from hour
to hour. Applications that see peak usage during business
hours but more or less shut down overnight do not require
the same level of power and cooling support around the
clock. Intelligent infrastructures can scale up and down as
needed – idling a UPS, for example, when it isn’t needed and
then reactivating it during peak hours. Advanced cooling
solutions react in real time to changes in temperature, again
scaling up or down based on activity.
Taking that control to the next level, those off-cycle
infrastructure systems can be used to support other
applications that might be ramping up at the same time.
Understanding these patterns and optimizing utilization rates
dramatically improve facility-wide energy efficiency and
helps avoid bloated data centers. Facilities experiencing
regular load fluctuations but modest growth could build
an efficient power and cooling infrastructure using these
advanced controls.
Scale up with building blocks
The introduction of self-contained, integrated and modular
power and cooling systems has had as significant an impact
on the data center over the last 10 years as any server
advancement. These smaller, agile technologies – including
everything from row-based UPS and cooling systems to large
containers with complete infrastructures – make incremental
investment in infrastructure capacity possible. Growing
businesses can add a row of racks along with the power and
cooling to support them with little or no disruption of the
existing infrastructure, or add the equivalent of a separate,
small data center with a containerized solution. The only
restrictions are space and budget.
Of course, those restrictions are real. In the long term, the
capital expense involved in these purchases, the sacrifice in
terms of operational expense – multiple systems aren’t as
efficient as a single large system, and require more service –
and eventually the space they consume present some real
tradeoffs for incremental gains.
Technologies and Tactics
to Unlock Capacity
• Cooling
- Cold-aisle containment
- Intelligent cooling controls
- Variable speed drives
- EC plug fans
- Economization
• Power
- Double conversion UPS
- Intelligent paralleling of
UPS modules
- High-efficiency transformers
- Eco-mode
- Software scalability
- Alternative high-availability
architectures
Conventional Integrated Cost Savings % Savings
Room Costs:
Contractor, installation, engineering services $60,000 $43,000 $17,000 28%
Infrastructure Equipment:
UPS, distribution, cooling, racks, fire suppression $105,000 $109,000 -$4,000 -3%
Total CAPEX $165,000 $152,000 $13,000 8%
Annual Energy Consumption:
Power & Cooling equipment energy use $8,800 $6,400 $2,400 27%
5 Year OPEX $44,000 $32,000 $12,000 27%
5 Year TCO $209,000 $184,000 $25,000 12%
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Cost analysis for conventional versus an integrated solution in an 18 kW IT deployment.

Creating an IT Infrastructure that Adapts to Your Business
Conventional Integrated Cost Savings % Savings
Room Costs:
Contractor, engineering services $579,000 $0 $579,000 100%
Infrastructure Equipment:
UPS, distribution, cooling, racks, fire suppression, install $315,000 $816,000 -$501,000 -159%
Total CAPEX $894,000 $816,000 -$78,000 8%
Annual Energy Consumption:
Power & Cooling equipment energy use $31,800 $22,000 $9,000 29%
5 Year OPEX $155,000 $110,000 $45,000 29%
Just do it
Sometimes all the short-term and in-between fixes simply
delay the inevitable. If a data center has: a) reached the limits
of its existing capacity, and b) exhausted its options for
unlocking more, and c) run out of physical space to grow, and
d) eliminated outsourcing as an option, then the time has
come to build a new facility. The good news? That new data
center can be built with scalability in mind, and with access to
infrastructure technologies that enable intelligent, efficient IT
growth that meets current and future business needs.
5 Year TCO $1,049,000 $926,000 $123,000 11%
Cost analysis for conventional versus integrated solution in a 75 kW IT deployment.
Conventional Integrated Cost Savings % Savings
Room Costs:
Contractor, engineering services, installation $515,000 $459,000 $56,000 1%
Study the game film
Whatever path is chosen, it’s important to measure the
results to inform future decisions and investments.
Infrastructure Equipment:
UPS, distribution, cooling, racks, fire suppression $415,000 $391,000 $24,000 -6%
Total CAPEX $930,000 $850,000 $80,000 9%
Annual Energy Consumption:
Power & Cooling equipment energy use $63,600 $46,600 $17,000 27%
5 Year OPEX $318,000 $233,000 $85,000 27%
5 Year TCO $1,248,000 $1,083,000 $165,000 13%
Cost analysis for conventional versus integrated configuration in a 160 kW IT deployment.
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About Emerson Network Power
Emerson Network Power provides efficient, reliable critical infrastructure
solutions for data centers, communications networks, healthcare and
industrial facilities around the world. With proven innovations in power,
thermal management, IT solutions and a global network of service experts
covering more than 150 countries, we make the future of communications
and information technology possible.
We understand how data center infrastructure is becoming more complex
at almost every level, and more essential to the success of the business than
ever before. Get the insight and resources you need to lead your organization
into the future at EmersonNetworkPower.com/CIOtopics.
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