Overview:

The Issue:

Major tectonic shifts in the way enterprises work with and provision their
core applications are forcing changes in the way the enterprise has to think about
securing them.

One shift is the continuing opening of the enterprise, with the gradual
federation and interpenetration of IT systems between an enterprise and its
partners, customers, and suppliers. The figurative walls of the data center are
being filled with doors, windows, and access ducts, and now serve more as a
framework for structuring the flow of information than as a barrier to it.
Another shift is the rise of service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Enterprises are looking to SOA to provide an integration method for their
applications, a development methodology and framework, and an overall
architecture and philosophy for deploying new functionality. As enterprise
applications gain services interfaces, and sometimes are actually atomized and
turned into constellations of loosely-coupled services, each service creates on the
network a new set of access points; perhaps tens or hundreds of times as many as
there were before. Things that used to happen within an application, on a single
server, become network traffic among servers and even among data centers.
Some formerly internal functions even become invocations across the Internet of
software-as-a-service (SaaS) packages, or services in partner or supplier data
centers. Moreover, components in a SOA can scale independently of each other:
new instances of an application running on a Java application server might be
created to handle peak loads, and then destroyed as the load subsides.

Read this Issue Paper:

Clients:New Suit of Armor: Securing the Data Center

The Issue:

The shift to a data-center centric model for enterprise computing
continues to increase the importance of the reliability, scalability and
management of the underlying network infrastructure. Consolidation of sites
and resources demands major changes in WAN architecture and backup
strategies. New technologies such as virtualization, storage virtualization, Web
services and clustering will dramatically affect information processing and so also
network requirements, leading not only to increasing demands for bandwidth,
but also to fundamental changes in the way data flows across enterprise
networks. New end-user applications such as voice and video create contention
issues for available bandwidth. Enterprise organizations must plan for these
changes, and must concentrate on obtaining and delivering network services
capable of meeting these changing requirements.

Organizations are, at the same time, focusing on data-center management
and operations, attempting to cut costs, improving efficiency, automating
repetitive tasks, and better aligning IT spending with business needs and demand
for services. More than three-quarters of enterprise IT executives interviewed for
Nemertes’ “New Data Center” benchmark take a holistic view of the data center
as part of a broader shift in IT culture to “IT as a service.” This translates to data
centers as business-service delivery centers, with critical requirements for
performance and availability.

Read this Issue Paper:

Clients: Network Services and the New Data Center 

Liquid cooling systems

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/16/07

The upcoming final volume of Nemertes' data center research looks at the facilities challenges in the data center. Power and cooling were clearly the “hot” (pun intended) topics for this year.

We’ve discussed strategies for both power savings and cooling in this newsletter. One question we are often asked by our clients is, “Are servers going to keep getting hotter?”

Considerations for locating a data center

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/2/07

Real estate mavens will endlessly repeat the three criteria for a property: location, location, location. Data centers are real estate, too, so what are the three most important criteria for the data center?

Location is the most important consideration for a new data center, as with any piece of real estate. But, what makes a good location for a home does not make a good location for a data center.

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, SVP and Founding Partner, Nemertes Research Inc.
Aug. 4, 2006

During the heat wave of the last several weeks, many energy suppliers found it very difficult to meet the demand for energy, with brownouts and temporary blackouts in Queens, N.Y., and some towns in New Jersey. This highlights the fact that energy efficiency, heat output, and the availability and reliability of local energy supplies have become increasingly critical design considerations for data centers.

IT departments are struggling with the increased heat output of densely packed data centers and of dense computing platforms such as blade servers. But what happens when you combine denser, hotter data centers with a global heatwave and possibly even a global energy crisis? When the power supply is stretched, as occurred on many of the hottest days recently, brownouts and power cuts are the result. In a modern data center, with the enormous heat dissipation needs of dense blade servers, a power cut means relying on generators to power not just the servers, but cooling systems, too. If cooling fails, the servers will overheat and shut down in a matter of minutes.

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By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 06/27/06

When companies budget for new applications, do they have a line item for “cooling the servers”? Not often, to say the least.

Even in the recent past, we could live with a clear separation between facilities management and IT. If IT had a requirement, facilities could most often deliver. That is no longer the case, necessarily.

Today’s IT growth places extreme demands on the physical infrastructure - the data center facilities. A simple capacity projection based on floor space is no longer enough, or even possible: facilities managers must take into consideration power density, circuit availability, cooling requirements, and yes, floor space (and what about availability?). When computing reaches extreme densities we find companies applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to model the airflow and temperature gradients in the data center.

By Melanie Turek, Senior Vice President, Nemertes Research Inc.

May 19, 2006

News that Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), is opening new data centers in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas, building a new data center in the Chicago area, and expanding in the New York area, supports a growing trend: IT executives are struggling to support their own data center needs thanks to increased power and cooling demands, and are often faced with the need to build entirely new, costly centers as a result. Equinix plans to invest about $165 million to build out the first phase of the new Chicago center—an indication of just how much money can be involved in creating a modern-day data center, and of the growing appeal of co-location.

When we asked participants in Nemertes’ latest benchmark, “The New Data Center,” to list their top data center challenges, they highlighted power capacity (64%), server and storage growth (57%), and cooling (57%). All three relate to growth, and the corresponding capacity constraints that challenge IT executives. Facing a strategic choice between “sprawl” (the “white box” model in which companies deploy more and more commodity servers) and “dense” (in which companies deploy dense blade servers or dense 1U servers), most companies are choosing “dense.”

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Data centers have been around—well, essentially forever, or at least since the dawn of computing. But just because they’ve been around forever doesn’t
mean they’ve endured unchanged. In fact, we’re smack in the middle of a radical shift in data‐center architecture, design and operations.

Moore’s Law has been the driving force behind computing for decades. Every time pundits heralded the end to Moore’s Law, scientists have crested each performance “hill” to find more performance capacity just beyond. This has brought us today to extreme computing density and heat output.