Consolidating data centers not always the right move

Disaster-recovery options, real estate prices can make distribution worthwhile

Data center consolidation is all the rage — enterprises are taking geographically distributed data centers and collapsing them into one or two centrally managed locations that are less expensive and easier to operate.

But data center consolidation isn’t for everyone. Analysts say there are numerous reasons to maintain a distributed model. Bucking the trend to combine locations, some companies are building new data centers or adding to their existing footprint by renting more space in co-location facilities.

Disaster recovery is one of the most common reasons that enterprise stick with multiple data centers, says analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group.

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Data center consolidation is all the rage — enterprises are taking geographically distributed data centers and collapsing them into one or two centrally managed locations that are less expensive and easier to operate.

But data center consolidation isn’t for everyone. Analysts say there are numerous reasons to maintain a distributed model. Bucking the trend to combine locations, some companies are building new data centers or adding to their existing footprint by renting more space in co-location facilities.

Disaster recovery is one of the most common reasons that enterprise stick with multiple data centers, says analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group.

“When you have multiple data centers they can act as disaster recovery sites for each other, and therein lies the value,” Taneja says. “Having one data center is never going to be enough. I’m going to have to have a disaster-recovery site whether it’s my own, or I borrow from somebody.”

Real estate prices sometimes make building another data center the right option. Say a company in a large metropolitan area such as Manhattan has run out of data center space and capacity for power and cooling. Expanding into another floor in a Manhattan high-rise is prohibitively expensive, so it’s considerably less expensive to build an extra data center in New Jersey, says Tom Atwood, systems group marketing manager for Sun Microsystems. 

Concern about latency is another reason for sticking with geographically distributed data centers. Vendors such as Citrix say they enable data center consolidation with speedy application delivery systems, but in general it’s better when data is used near where it is created, Taneja says.

Even companies that are consolidating should consider whether they have systems that must remain distributed, says Forrester analyst James Staten. “You may have certain services or applications that require rich interfaces with a client, which is not all that easy to do over a wire from a headquarters data center,” he says. “In that case, it makes sense to have geographically dispersed data centers.”

Banks and telecom companies have extremely rigid latency requirements that usually necessitate a distributed model, Staten says. Global financial services institutions may also need data to stay in specific geographies to comply with government regulations, he adds.

Addition, not subtraction

Apps Associates, a business in Westford, Mass., that helps customers implement Oracle software, used to have one data center in Hyderabad, India, where most of its work was being done. Then it opened a data center in Westford this year and is preparing to go live with a third data center inside a nearby co-location facility.

Employee growth in the United States fueled the expansion, but the company also was concerned about disaster recovery and didn’t want to install new programs to take care of latency issues that would have arisen had the company stayed with a single data center, says Drew Farris, Apps Associates CIO and member of the Society for Information Management’s Boston chapter. 

“It was better to segment where the materials lived depending on the project,” he says. “We didn’t want to have to put in Citrix and a bunch of terminal servers and all those pieces that help to mitigate latency. That’s an investment we didn’t feel made sense.”

Disaster recovery will be handled with data replication across the co-location site and the Westford headquarters.

For its production applications and customer-facing systems, Apps Associates wanted redundancy in power, air conditioning and fire suppression systems, but it would have been costly to maintain that support infrastructure at its own data center, Farris says. So the customer-facing systems went to the co-located facility, where Farris says they can place a 1-teraybte rack at a reasonable price.

The distributed data center model has its challenges, says Farris, who led a consolidation project when he was CIO at the Iron Age shoe company before taking the Apps Associates job in January 2007. With just one data center, it’s easier to prevent cases of “stealth IT projects,” involving applications IT isn’t aware of.

“Depending on what the company is doing, I’m a proponent of different models. There is no clear answer [for everyone],” Farris says.

Geo Engineers, an environmental consulting firm in Redmond, Wash., decided it needed a second data center because of the company’s growth, but also wanted more security due to a major storm a year ago that knocked power out for three days.

“Business continuity [is important],” says IT manager Courtenay Bernier. “We want to make sure we’re up all the time. If the power went out here in Redmond, that would be it, the company would be drawn to a halt. No e-mail would go out, nothing would happen.”

Geo Engineers recently rented space in a co-location center operated by AT&T. The company’s client-facing applications are housed at the outside facility, but Geo Engineers continues to use its Redmond data center for staging and pre-production.

Against the grain

Consolidation is clearly being considered by most IT executives. Forty-seven percent of U.S. companies have consolidated data centers to save money, along with 32% of non-U.S. companies, according to the Symantec State of the Data Center Report.

Another study by the vendor BT INS found that 39% of IT organizations have completed a data center consolidation project in the last three years, and nearly half are either considering such a project or planning one. Just 14% have no plans to consolidate.

The most obvious examples of companies bucking the consolidation trend are probably Google and Microsoft, Staten says. “That’s simply because they’re getting into the situation where they’re owning more and more of the cloud,” he says. “The cloud, of course, is globally dispersed.”

Very large Web sites often rely on highly distributed data centers to maintain quick responsiveness, says Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.

The biggest challenge in operating distributed data centers is staff inefficiency, Staten says. Multiple data centers require extra staff, extensive traveling or additional costs for outsourcing, he says.