Facilities
not verifying backups (or worse, not
doing them at all), theft of data and
increasing costs of maintaining
multiple servers at multiple locations
were starting to become a burden and
a business risk. Time to rein in the
information!
Enter the data centre. Unlike a
computer room, a data centre is a
climate controlled, central repository
of information on a much larger scale.
Whether the operating system is
OS400, Unix, Linux, Microsoft or some
combination/variation, our machines
began growing in numbers. Access to
the data became possible from many
locations via wide area links, phone
lines, satellite communications, etc. application failing, we had to assess demands. However it may be easier
The servers in our data centres moved the business risk of the entire facility to cool one blade based box than
to Ethernet almost ubiquitously, with going down. We began implementing multiple single RU boxes.
the exception of storage applications. bigger UPS systems and installing
As we reined in our data, we found generators. Time, after all, is money. Communications moved to faster
better means to store and Downtime is not a vacation, but rather fibre, optimized for higher speeds
communicate with our storage. an expensive disaster for a business in (laser optimized OM3), and back to
both tangible and intangible terms. shielded cabling to support Infiband,
Storage moved outside of our servers So our data centres decentralized CX4, and 10GBASE-T. Wide area
and networked storage was born in again through mirrored redundant sites communications have increased with
large part due to the cost of storage and disaster recovery sites. fibre to the premise applications and
and the ever increasing costs to faster links optimized for applications.
businesses when the data was NOT Bandwidth needs increased yet again In fact, wide area communications are
available. Data centres became the both for local area and wide area fast enough that it is no longer
central hub for businesses and needs. The business advantage to be necessary for a data centre to even be
applications. With the costs of “connected” to this data increased, located in the same city, much less
computing going down, it became and means to access it has become the same building as a company’s
possible to have separate servers for more and more portable. offices. This opens entirely new
each application, assuring a nice possibilities for the location of our
dedicated environment for them to Companies again began supporting data - almost as many as accessing
run, protected from other applications. two sites. In many instances, one or the data!
The need for these applications to talk more of these sites used outsourced
to storage and the increasing space and only the most critical For a last cyclical bit of fun, the
bandwidth demands to backup the applications were mirrored to another original computers had water running
storage caused an increase in network location. But all of this through them to cool the processors.
demands. But the requirements of the decentralization costs money. Power Today, we are moving towards water
data centre did not decrease. In fact and cooling take centre stage as cooling inside the data centre again!
power and cooling and the costs of companies start to look for ways to All of these systems need to be
running the data centre increased. reduce data centre costs. monitored, again increasing the need
Real estate for data centres became a Virtualization (remember the for networking speeds. No wonder
prime concern. mainframe) was introduced as a way IEEE is working on 100G and 40G!
to allow multiple applications to utilize So, where will your data reside
Our dependence on data also caused one piece of server hardware. tomorrow? Or the bigger question, in
a vulnerability. What if the data centre Processing power increased, and so how many places will you have data
goes down? Unlike a single did network demands and cooling centres?
54 | DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS | www.datacentresols.com September 2008
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