How to address power an cooling?
As we focus on virtualization security, performance and management issues it’s easy to lose sight of a more mundane challenge with great consequence—power and cooling. Nemertes research shows half of organizations with mid-sized data centers (5,000 – 50,000 sf) and one-third with large data centers (50,000 – 500,000 sf) will have insufficient power in 2011. At the same time nearly 60% of enterprise IT shops faces HVAC challenges.
How does virtualization play into this mix? Density. As IT shops replace ubiquitous pizza box 1U servers for blade servers, power (and cooling) density requirements skyrocket. A rack of 1U servers typically consumes 3-5 KW. And we find two-thirds of organizations support 3+ KW/rack. In comparison, a rack of blade servers consumes 12-16 KW. Only 17% of organizations support more than 11 KW/rack today.
Nearly one-quarter of organizations plan to build a new data center while the rest plan to re-engineer and replace existing infrastructure to address these issues. Another option is colocation. Typically, colocation facilities offer rack power/cooling density to support 8-16 KW. Finally, an option that doesn’t require rip-and-replace is mix and match servers and storage as power density requirements for primary storage drops. Just last week EMC announced new storage systems supporting drives consuming 60% less power than previous generation drives and EMC’s spin down technology further reduces power consumption of these drives by up to 65%. In the end, without proper power density planning virtualization projects may need to be scaled back or put on hold.
