INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
Expert discusses
high-performance
data centres in depth
Ian Bitterlin of Critical Facilities Consulting – a DCA
Corporate Partner – provides his view on ‘high-
performance’ data centres. He examines ICT load in
data centres and discusses the performance of
servers, along with their power consumption.
T
he idea that we can talk about a
‘high-performance’ data centre in
relation to others raises many more
questions than suitable answers, so where
do we start?
The most logical place is with the ICT
load – or what the data centre is intended
‘for’ and this can be distilled down to the
three basic definitions of a data centre
load: compute; storage; and connectivity.
For example, a site for social networking
based on users’ photo uploads and minor
text comments with a few buttons to click
such as ‘like’, ‘report as abusive’ or ‘share’
which will need yards of bandwidth, acres
of storage but very little computation.
Or an onsite data centre for a particle
accelerator that creates a petabyte of
data a minute and then expends vast
computation capacity producing massive
datasets but hardly speaks to the outside
world. And every combination of the three
loads in between. Each in their own way
could be classed as ‘high-performance’
and perhaps we could add ‘security’ as
another performance attribute?
However, to date, most data centres
are not built or fitted out for specific
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
applications and they purchase
commercially available integrated servers
to run multi-app enterprises, multi-
user colocation or ‘clouds’ with flexible
configurations set by the user. Some
parts of each could be classed as high-
performance but how could we rank them
into low/medium/high?
The problem is that it is a constantly
movable feast with the release date of the
server setting the bar; the more modern,
faster, with the ability to crunch numbers
in ever-more operations per second and
at ever-less Watts per operation with a
minimal increase in real cost compared
to the technology capacity curve. There
is also a trend for ever-lower idle power if
the user does not utilise their hardware as
they should.
This server improvement trajectory is
mostly ignored by people trying to criticise
the rising energy demand of data centres
– imagine what the energy growth would
be like if the ICT hardware were not also
on an exponential improvement curve: in
round terms, data traffic has been growing
at 60% CAGR for the past 15 years and
the hardware capacity at 50% CAGR,
such that data centre loads have grown
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