by Shane Henson — February 15, 2012—Clemens Pfeiffer, chief technology officer (CTO) for Power Assure, an innovator of data center infrastructure and energy management software for large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers, predicts that several major trends will occur over the next three to five years that will most critically impact how companies utilize, manage and analyze energy in the data center.
According to the 25-year veteran of the software industry, these trends will be a result of large enterprises, government agencies and managed service providers that are currently struggling to deal with increased power demand, constrained capacity, and data center inefficiencies.
Most data centers, says Pfeiffer, have historically been built with an eye towards top performance and availability, with little attention paid to how efficiently the data center delivers on those promises. This is a costly operating model where all assets, including servers, lighting, and cooling are turned all the way on all the time.
Trends Pfeiffer says to expect and prepare for include:
- Companies will have their own private clouds and utilize public cloud services that will serve as spill-over capacity for rare peak capacity requirements.
- Companies will have multiple data centers around the globe to support a 15-20% compound annual growth rate of data center application capacity.
- The electric grid will become increasingly unstable and as a result, energy prices will increase dramatically, and fluctuate with grid conditions.
- Organizations will further combine and integrate IT (information technology) and facility functions.
- Most data center operators will have a virtualized and load-balanced infrastructure to allow applications to run in any of their data centers at any time.
- Applications will be able to run in any data center at any time, with applications grouped by service level priorities.
- The idle power consumption of IT equipment will be reduced further making the spread between idle and loaded power consumption much wider, causing unexpected power spikes for data centers.
- All aspects of monitoring and management will be pervasive across IT and facilities.
- Measuring power, temperature and utilization in real-time will be the norm.
- Because equipment energy consumption tracks more closely with utilization, idle and peak power consumption reference data will be required to maximize the capacity of a data center.
- Companies will have chief sustainability officers (CSOs) and require CO2 reporting to meet regulations and provide competitive advantage.
- Some companies will leverage application redundancy in favor of building tier 3 and 4 data centers.
- Companies will ask their data centers to participate in demand response and ancillary services to stabilize the utility grid and generate revenues from market participation, effectively funding the transition to private cloud services.
- Companies will have multiple data centers around the globe to support a 15-20% compound annual growth rate of data center application capacity.
