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As any chemist will tell you, an exothermic reaction is one that releases more energy than it consumes. If we apply that notion to finance, an exothermic investment is one that releases more resources than it consumes. Now go a step further -- into the "exothermic data center" -- where investments in IT result in a far greater return to the company than originally expected.
In this month's CIO Habitat, we examined how far data center management has come as well as where it's heading. We surveyed 126 IT thought leaders and practitioners about the prevailing trends and strategic questions surrounding today's data center direction.
There is tremendous optimism about this new "glass house" in the wake of technology advances that have improved reliability, remote monitoring and virtualization while lowering costs and reducing company footprint. Fully 74% rate the state of the data center as improving (see Figure 1).
The CIO at a financial services conglomerate notes that improving reliability, price to performance, process controls and monitoring has transformed the data center. Companies today, he adds, have "greater understanding of end-to-end performance, better control of PCs and servers [with automated software updates] and an overall better end-user experience."
Through a Glass House Lightly?
One does not need a Ph.D. in research methods to recognize that management thinking about data centers has evolved substantially since the first computer rooms housed truck-sized behemoths. Data centers were once perceived as the center of the computational universe as well as a source of endless mystery. "Data centers were dark glass houses," a senior IT executive at a transportation company jokes, where "only the shadow" knew what went on behind those doors. Then, during the go-go days of client/server computing, data centers receded as expanding bandwidth enabled more distributed modes of deployment.
But now, as organizations wrestle with regulatory compliance, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, the data center has moved front and center once again. The CIO at a health insurer notes that his data center build-out "is the only capital project I have this year with an ROI." Another CIO from a multimodal transportation company contrasts the huge physical plants required for pre-1990s data centers with today's "severely compressed footprints." But while physical space has shrunk, physical cooling and centralized power locations have significantly increased in complexity, he adds.
"Old uptime expectations of 99% are out of date. Now it's 100%, 24/7, which means data centers have to provide multiple layers of failover redundancy and excess capacity," he observes. "The Internet environment assumes you can get to anything, anytime and with immediate response."
CIOs appreciate how the cost of computing hardware has continually decreased per unit and that mainframe software vendors are more willing to negotiate because of the competitive pressures created by open systems. Shifts to Linux servers from Unix, blade servers and network-attached storage connectivity have all helped control computing costs. Fewer people are required to work and manage data centers.
"Ten years ago, we had two data centers and more than 20 personnel dedicated to data center printing and tape operations," the transportation company CIO notes. "Today we have a total of five personnel dedicated to those same two functions covering both open-systems and mainframe operations."
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