CRN sat down recently with a number of the industry’s leading experts on data centre building and management for an intelligent and enlightening discussion about the IT challenges and opportunities facing organisations today and what we can expect to see in the data centre tomorrow.
Panellists
Jacques Tesson, CEO, DPSA
Jason Rylands, data centre architect, DPSA
Paul Tyrer, managing director, Schneider IT Business (APC)
Andrew Sylvester, data centre software sales manager, Schneider IT Business (APC)
Trevor Voss, chief technology officer, Linktech
Greg Boorer, managing director, Canberra Data Centres
Marcus Stock, managing director, Innov8
CRN Jacques, you said you’ve seen a lot of change in the data centre or computer centre over the past few years. Talk us through some of those changes and what you see happening in the next couple of years, and the business opportunities.
Jacques For the reseller the challenge is to identify new opportunities and incremental business. For the past three years there’s been a dramatic increase of data processing due to the advanced communications we have.
Now users want to know where the data is, and locate it very fast. For this you need very advanced storage, server and networking solutions. And for it to be very efficient and work to its optimum position, you have to have a proper hosting.
We got hit by the dot com crash in 2001, so the data centre became managed by either the CFO, people with the money, the IT manager disappeared, and the financial people were left with a legacy of inefficient data centres. Now we’re hit by another crisis. We’ve got the 2010-2012 crisis, and demand is basically making the existing system efficient – use what you’ve got.
If you’ve got a 50 square metre room and you want 20 more servers, what are you going to do? You look at efficiencies, you remove all this UPS image track, you find 40 RU (rack unit) space and you make it efficient, so you increase the density vertically rather than horizontally and then you can pack more and more IT in there.
I’ve seen a dramatic evolution of the computer room. The cost of electricity and energy has gone up, the cost of employees, the risk brought by employees is up, because you’ve got solutions which have to be managed, and if you don’t monitor you can’t manage, and if you can’t manage, you can’t reform.
CRN Marcus, are you finding a similar level of conservatism in the market and what are you doing to counter that with your customers?
Marcus I think the two challenges which people haven’t addressed are the lack of qualified people and available resources. So if you think about the data centre life cycle, it’s the old analogy of ‘piss poor planning gets poor results’.
The one thing you can guarantee is that power is going to cost more and more. If you haven’t got the right resources to make designs, planning and the preparation to be efficient, not on day one operations, but by 10 years down the track, you’re guaranteed to fail.
A data centre was basically a comms room. If you actually look at the top 50 organisations, say, in Australia, how many of those have IT as part of the corporate mission statement?
A classic example is Commbank [The Commonwealth Bank]. Their IT is a differentiator in the market.
You will see that all the way through business. People are seeing now in the evolution of data centres that you’ve got to put the metrics there.
If you haven’t understood how you’re going to run your data centre, how are you going to run your business, and you haven’t defined it back at that preparation phase, you will never measure it properly.
CRN It sounds like a no brainer, but as you’ve discovered Andrew, there are probably a lot of companies that don’t really appreciate that fact.
Andrew There are a lot of companies collecting lots and lots of data, and very few companies turning that data into useable information. How they operate their data centre and how they drive performance improvements are often optimised around the data centre. If we can help customers understand the knowledge journey and how they can take the data that they’re collecting, turn it into information and then take that and turn it into business knowledge, I think that’s a benefit of integrated data centre infrastructure management.
What’s interesting is all the data that’s collected and all the information that we create out of that data is all retrospective. It’s all about how well are we doing, what have we achieved retrospectively, historically. Once you get up into more of the knowledge management area, you can start to forecast out with much greater accuracy – so you can do things like capacity planning more effectively.
Taking that data and turning it into useable information and turning it into business knowledge is a critical driver we need to foster, and educate our clients and help our partners identify opportunities in that space as well.
Marcus We are not reinventing the wheel. These processes are taking business information, analytics, metrics, and converting them into reporting. It’s been set up by the guys who did SAP and Oracle and all of the ERP systems. That whole life cycle of how you build the software platform, how you build your metrics and how you do your reporting, has been done in a financial world. Now, instead of a sales ledger and a purchase ledger, you’re using your power consumption and your output and processor site. It’s still the same order of magnitude of data.
Andrew It’s how you take that data and align it better to the business metrics. So how is the business measuring its core business function? How is it measuring performance? And how does the information it’s collecting from the IT space and the data server space align to support those more business-oriented metrics?
Trevor In the mid 2000s a lot of the analytics was actually provided by finance to help IT change, because it was very easy around virtualisation to say ‘I’ve got 50 servers, I can get away with four’; that’s a financial decision they really had to make, or someone made for them. Now it’s about IT standing up and making decisions in their own right, and I don’t think a lot of them have the skills to do it. They certainly have the capability in terms of their tools, whether it be standard delivered tools from some of the server manufacturers or whatever, yet they still don’t analyse it.
Ask a lot of them about their disaster recovery, and they don’t even know if the sites are up. They’ve got a DR plan that’s been signed off by the board and feeds into the business continuity plan. They’ve got a DR site but they can’t tell you if it’s hot or cold and they don’t know the integrity of the data, because they don’t test it. CIOs and IT managers are now expected to drive change, and a lot of them don’t know what power they’re consuming at the moment. It’s not even in their budget. So why should they have a focus to try to reduce it?
Paul This is a massive opportunity for the reseller integrated community. There are a lot of people out there with data centres that are really struggling. We’re seeing these power densities, these cooling densities, increase, and these organisations are not equipped to address it. If we look at the projections here in Australia, we’re seeing a fanning out of hardware spend. In Australia there’s supposedly 90,000-plus data centres in the market. The average data centre typically would run for 15 to 18 years. For the average data centre today it’s around about eight years.
Data centres have seen massive changes in their IT environment over the past seven or eight years. They’re going to see massive change over the next 10 years, and they’re going to struggle. Integrators have a big opportunity in that space.
Jason Yes, there’s a huge opportunity for those resellers looking to increment their revenue and get into this data centre space. When we go on site with resellers and we talk to IT managers we start to ask some questions around the server and the data centre, and they really don’t know how much power they draw. The budget generally for power has been lumped into their lease or the building. They’re not actually sure how much it is costing them to run their data centre. A lot of money has gone into IT but there’s been no measurement and metrics.
If we don’t have those figures, of how much it’s actually costing, we can’t do any sort of comparison of what it’s going to cost us. So for the channel, it’s a huge opportunity to go in there and work with their customers and then get things in place to do the measurement.
Metering is a massive opportunity. Metering at the rack level; knowing exactly how much it’s costing you to run your equipment. That allows you to do your budgets and make those comparisons, because without that information, the resellers can’t help their clients.
Andrew A lot of the things we’ve been talking about refer to what I call baselining. A reseller could assist by baselining power. That’s everything from what they are being charged by their electricity or power provider, through how are they contribute to power within the data centre and corroding that power baseline, so they can start to measure their power usage within the data centre, looking at where they can make savings.
Then you create a whole data centre baseline or data centre model from where they can improve.
For a lot of resellers and clients I talk to it’s about ‘we don’t even know what we’ve got today, can you help me create a baseline?’, ‘can you put a stake in the ground for me and then work with me to improve where I want to go?’
It could be something as simple as mapping out their power supply train or using a tool, like a DCM [data centre management] tool to do that for them. So I think there are opportunities for resellers to use DCM tools to help their own business, and also provide those tools to resellers, to clients, as well.
Paul This is critical. A typical megawatt data centre over its lifespan would typically consume $20 million worth of electricity. That is about 50 percent of the running costs of that data centre over its lifespan. So if you can’t measure it, manage or optimise it, you are really going to be struggling to operate the data centre as efficiently as possible. The IT manager should be renamed the ‘IT and energy manager’ because the IT has such a significant bearing on the total actual spend of an organisation.
Jacques What we’re discovering now is your facility manager and IT manager are networking, whereas they used to debate at board level meeting to discuss who’s going to pay for what. So the IT guy says ‘you provide me with UPS power and you pay for it’, and the network guy says ‘I’m just providing connection to the user’ and the IT guy says ‘well the client is going to have to pay for that’.
There used to be this debate. But when you look in a building, the computing power of that building would account for between 40 and even 60 percent of the whole building power. So then the facility manager needs to report every 12 months to the board how much power is being consumed, but he doesn’t know. So who does he turn to? The IT manager.
There is a difference between being effective and being efficient. Effective is doing the right thing, and being efficient is doing the right thing in the right manner. So you have to look at best practice and Greg Boorer from CDC has got the best example.
Greg Yes, we’ve taken a bucket of energy that the government has conservatively estimated between 27 and 36 megawatts to support as little as 9 or 10 megawatts of IT load, and we’ve reduced that down to 12 megawatts for the same load. It’s significant. But that’s just the monetary side. It’s not all about the carbon tax – that will only make up about 50 percent of the increases in our power cost.
Generally, the more efficient you can be the better, and that’s driving a lot of people to ask questions about whether it’s more efficient to place their equipment into purpose-built facilities, rather than doing it in-house. With all the monitoring and metering tools, people know more about equipment and how much energy it’s using and how secure it is, and who’s had access to it in purpose-built facilities than they do sometimes in their own basements.
Trevor The opportunity for resellers is finding the person inside any organisation that actually takes up the mantle and wants to make a difference. A lot of them [in these organisations] are used to doing bill-of-materials – and we’re not a biller material, this is a business sale – and we need to ask if there’s someone else to try to convince inside the organisation about reducing energy spend and making decisions on whether it’s in the cloud, assisting in that decision.
Because that discovery, we call it discovery, but pre-planning, actually understanding what you’ve got and making plans around it – I have not met one customer who knows what they’ve got. When you go in there and paint it out for them, so they can make decisions, then you’re in a different league with that customer and your engagement tends to be a lot longer, and you’re under a less competitive threat.
We do say that the decision, you talk about 50 percent, and we say your decision on your server and the infrastructure you’re running is only a third of the decision you have to make, because that decision will actually drive two thirds extra cost. Whether it be the complexity of managing your environment or the energy it consumes, you’ve got to be aware of all those, and you just can’t make decisions in isolation.
Marcus If you want to create a new business or you wanted to change a business within the data centre space or within the reseller space, I think there’s probably two areas that I would focus on. One would be to create intellectual property around what you do and talking on the subject of power management and analytics, it’s a great respect to the vendor’s slant here which is selling more power management devices.
What you actually want to be able to do is to compare yourself to other people. If you look at how financial reporting is done in public companies, it’s all done the same way, so you can do comparisons. If you want to go and set up a new business, set up business doing analytics around how efficient you are to the number of users, the number of processors etc, and now you’ve actually got a benchmark.
That’s a huge opportunity in itself to be the adviser. To put yourself in that role, you need to collect and create intellectual property and you need to create a benchmark.
Look at SIA Global, look at all the companies which are services based and provide IP around something that’s different, the audit trail, once you’ve got that raw data and those metrics, you can say ‘okay what’s your current state?’ People are going through this journey of ‘do I insource, do I outsource, do I go to cloud, do I do co-location?’ – unless you’ve got the base metrics of your current state, you’re pissing in the wind, because you’re going to make decisions around an uninformed starting point.
If you don’t speak to the CEO and the CFO of the business and say ‘what are you planning for the business, is it steady state, is it merger and acquisition, is it growth?’ and understand where the business is going, the IT leader is going to always be on the backfoot, because six months down the line, they think ‘oh we’re going to buy our competitor, we’re going to double the amount of computer resource and users we’ve got, and yes we’re going to get operation efficiency as we merge the businesses, but that will be three years before we see that benefit’ – suddenly the consumer is going to be kicked in the side of the head.
You can turn it around the other way and use IT as an advantage and say ‘we compared ourselves to our peers, we’re 20 percent more efficient on our power, and 40 percent more efficient on our processors, than the competitor, we can actually drive $100 million of saving when you buy that business’.
The CFO would never even have considered that as part of his metrics of the decision making of buying a competitor or merging. If you look at some of the decisions, especially overseas, there have been a couple of acquisitions which have been completely IT-led, because they’re a pure services and transaction house. They’re a processing organisation. resources.
So capturing the day-to-day is part of the journey, that current state.
Andrew That relies on a certain level of operational maturity within the data centre, and a good majority of the data centres we see are at what I call an immature level of management – they’re doing reactive monitoring, collecting data and they’re producing some reports – but they’re not really driving a maturity growth that’s going to return a much higher level of value back to the business.
So there’s a journey resellers could help clients go on, which is about ‘how do I improve the maturity of what I’m doing about the way I manage the data centre?’ And it’s everything, not just software, tools and technology, it’s about the people, what competencies and skill sets within the data centre, within the organisation, and by extension within the partner organisation that I’m about to transfer my IT computing over to and use their data centre.
CRN How big would you say the skills and education challenge is? Is there sufficient awareness within the end seller community and end user business community?
Andrew All of the above. There’s a gap and I think because you’ve got traditional facilities management skills and capabilities and experience, and you’ve got IT skills happening with that experience and they’re coming together, so you’re going to see a merging of operational roles around the data centre. Also data centre operators and managers need to have much more visibility of what’s happening, around the business side of it, and by extension their customers as well. So you’ve got to look two levels out from your data centre and say ‘what are my customers demanding of my business, my core services?’ and ‘how can I support that business growth?’ So there is a gap.
Marcus We need to create the fuel standard. Instead of X litres per 100kms as a fuel economy benchmark, it should be the cost per transaction. So if you’re in a bank and finance environment and you’re running an EFTPOS network, you should be able to sit there and go ‘my EFTPOS network cost me 0.002 cents and my computers use 0.003. I am 33 percent more efficient in my data centre transactional processes’. To sit there and say ‘I’m doing 1.2 megawatts and he’s doing 1.4’ is useless, because unless you measure it against something else, which is the cost per transaction or the cost per employee, it’s meaningless. You need to be able to have that baseline. As vendor you need to start working with the channel to drive a common set of metrics.
CRN Meaningless in your context?
Greg Yes, we’ve got to create a repeatable, measurable and sustainable way of measuring the efficiency in this context, which is basically providing the infrastructure. Everyone’s got these acronyms, like infrastructure as a service. We’re talking physical infrastructure, network, power, cooling, cabling and the pathways, in a way you can measure against other people, but also bring some value back. We talk about the merger of facilities – I have a different opinion, I think IT is going to become accountable for the power usage and it won’t be facility managers.
The merger of facilities and IT management will be in the outsourcers, the Fujitsus, the HPs, the CDCs, where you have to be a facility manager and an IT manager and it’s operational excellence. In the average business, they’ve either outsourced it, or they’re too small to outsource and they’re saying, ‘I’ve got an operational problem here, it’s in the too-hard basket, I’ll flick it on to Amazon, I’ll flick it on to the cloud’. Again, it’s meaningless. How do you measure that?
You said about 30,000 comms room and servers – there’s probably around 2000 we need to address, and we need to baseline them against each other and start bringing in some intellectual property rather than just being the reseller of a partner. Because that’s what you go on Google for, you can order your APC switch, or your Cisco switch, and you will be beaten by an online person, because they’ve got no overheads and they’ve got no sales costs. So what you need to be able to do is to create something that you can’t buy online –knowledge.
Trevor On the gap between where the market is and the capability of the resellers, there definitely is a gap because no customers are looking for what you’re talking about at the moment.
I don’t think there’s an enormous gap in terms of salesmanship, you just need to deal with a couple of different customers inside organisations that you haven’t dealt with and bridge your gap and build your knowledge so you can articulate a message to a different group of clients. Rely on people like DPSA or APC to support you in a sales endeavour. Just ask the question and then learn from those people.
A lot of resellers don’t actually feel they can ask for help to improve the way they sell and engage, whereas I think the smart resellers who want to build a consulting practice behind what they do ask from those that have the IP and absorb that and rearticulate it into a value proposition that’s unique for them and reinvent themselves definitely.
Even if someone has gone and selectively outsourced and got into a co-location – there’s still an opportunity to sell the monitoring of that environment and reporting back because as soon as it’s in someone else’s hands, it doesn’t absolve you from the responsibility and your governance requirement, to actually make sure they’re doing what they say they will do and monitoring the power that’s being consumed.
The ones that we’ve started looking at, they’re at least being charged 25 or 30 percent more in the power than what they’re actually consuming, once you get down to PDU.
PART 2
Marcus Take the same approach you do with your mobile phone bill. There’s two or three specialist organisations out there who will actually run your bill through a piece of software and tell you (a) have you met the contract, have you been over or under charged, and (b) comparing that with Telstra and with Optus or Virgin or whatever. You should be able to do the same thing with your data centre. Find out what’s my cost per transaction? What’s my cost per megawatt? What’s my cost per square metre, or per hour or year?
The bizarre thing as a reseller is if you take that consulting level approach, the vendors actually start coming to you as a destination. They’ll go ‘I’ve got a really complex sale, I’m working for someone who can act as a consultant, to help me close this transaction or sale’. And it could be the Schneider guys are sitting there trying to do X megawatts of power, but if they need that advisory services bit to close the deal, they are going to go to the reseller who has those advisory services.
They’re not going to go to the reseller and go ‘yeah, it’s part No. APC 123’…. Because anyone can do the transactional sale, and to actually sit there and do the added value and bring in the software component, bring in the analyst estimate but actually have the government’s role as you transition from service A to service B, whether that’s insource or outsource or multi source is irrelevant, you are going back to the metrics, but create yourself as a reseller, create yourself as a destination to clients, and for the vendors.
A classic example is the wireless industry, wi-fi. Everyone’s got it at home, you chuck it up and you get an intermittent service, it’s not reliable. If you put it in an enterprise context, there’s two or three specialist advisory companies who are the enterprise great whites, and the vendors go to them and outsource their advisory services to those guys. We should be looking at the same situation where the vendors are saying ‘here’s a specialist organisation, they’ve got the IP, the analytics, the business processing and consulting skills to help me close this deal’ and you’ll get business coming to you.
Trevor We worked through a fairly large university recently that had struggled for two years with its DR process, because in the end when they were swapping failing across to DR, and the facility was outsourced, their facility couldn’t cope with the power requirements and probably they went on and took down other production servers and took down other DR sites purely because of the workload.
So that advisory capacity that Marcus is talking about, I really think a lot of sales people take the easy road and say ‘yes’ all the time to customers, whereas when you stand back and ask them to articulate why they’re formulating their strategies, and then you can convince them to broaden their scope, there’s two things that happen. A lot of people don’t like to give away free advice, because they think they’ll then act on it, but for me if it’s a government agency or a large corporate, the reality is they’re going to hunt around for three competitive quotes or two competitive quotes.
That’s articulating up the tree to the CFO and to the CEO and being more aware of what the total costs of running their business are and making the line to generate more income to through the cost of operation. You set yourself aside from all the others that are doing materially, your sales cycle has probably taken a little bit longer, but once you’ve secured that business relationship then all the other sales cycles you have will be a longer relationship with your client and they will probably more likely ask for advice in other areas, and advice is way more margin, they’ll pay for more for your IP than they’ll pay for product.
Greg From my experience, a lot of those sales people in that area do a wonderful job in turning a $2 million sale into a $200,000 sale, because they don’t actually see the problem at hand, they just see what the person’s asking for.
The most wonderful thing you can always ask is why – and we always ask why, what is the drive behind things. At the end of the day, all the data centre stuff and all the IT, it has to become closer, but it’s a solution for a particular problem.
But if you don’t understand the problem you won’t be able to match a solution and that’s why the high sophistication and the high level of skills that haven’t, you know business has been very, very easy for many years for a lot of people, but now people have to differentiate. What Trevor and Marcus have said is spot on, you have to get a little bit more sophisticated and understand the end-to-end from where the power enters the building to where the computing power is delivered, all the way through and if you understand all that, and the business requirements of the client, then you’ll have a unique insight. But you can only do that if you invest the time in getting to know the client and understanding their problems. You know the famous solution sales line, is ‘what keeps them up at night?’ and that’s what you need to know.
Jacques We are talking about that data centre life cycle and we are talking about your plan and you analyse what the need is, and usually it starts with application. Someone wants an application to be running, so we’ve got an example now that because people don’t plan, analyse and actually monitor what they’ve got into their data centre, they don’t know how much server power they’ve got.
You’ve got rack number one going at 2 kilowatts and suddenly there’s a cyclone in Darwin and that rack number one goes up to 8 kilowatt density and you can’t do that if you haven’t planned for this. We found a few weeks ago a client using their DR centre to run an application the board wanted, so the DR is not the DR any more, it’s a data centre. And because the original data centre hasn’t been well planned and the people who design it didn’t really forecast for that data centre life cycle.
We saw in a study tour people at the IBM Innovation Centre telling us that their server is going from 65 degrees Celsius coming out of the server. Someone asked ‘how do you plan to cool that?’ and a guy said ‘I’ve got to bring liquid cooling straight into the server’. Now if you’re centre hasn’t been planned what do you do? You move your application to your recovery centre, and that’s all, that’s what we do. We tell people to plan ahead and then stop to think and then think about the future.
Trevor has a challenge like this, and Marcus also has challenge and Jason has frustration where you can see all that space and the problem can be solved just by doing best practice. Everyone needs to stop and think and find that space, that’s what we want to tell to the resellers – they might be missing the opportunity to sell a server just like Greg said – turn a $2 million sale into $200,000 sale - because they don’t do the full life cycle.
Paul Who knows what a data centre’s going to look like in 15 years’ time. IT is changing rapidly and very frequently, but I think the job is to give clients a fighting chance to be as efficient as possible, to be able to react to these changes.
And the only way to do that is through building a modular type deployment of a data centre where you can reconfigure, you can redeploy, you can scale up or scale down and then you will avoid having data centres where the DR site has become a data centre or some I see as I go around, nice big spaces and they look empty and you’ve got racks with individual servers in and loads and loads of space, and they can’t put any more in the data centre, because they can’t get enough power and they can’t get enough cooling into that space, and it’s about monitoring measurement, enabling one to be nimble for the future.
CRN You mentioned scalability and how important it is these days. Are more and more businesses demanding scalability in the data centre, particularly as more business is done online and you’ve obviously particular verticals, for instance hospitality or events management, where they have a need to burst and that sort of thing, have you seen that?
Paul Yes, absolutely. It’s something we noticed a while ago when we introduced our technologies to the market with our containment modular systems, and you know people were fed up with deploying at huge cost data centres that they expect to last for 15 years with massive upfront cost, utilising very little of that capacity from day one, highly inefficient from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective, and then we also saw peaks in demand, the market going up and down and the companies were left with some massive expense on their books, so that ability to scale up and redeploy is something we’re seeing customers pushing for.
Greg It’s all pervasive now. There’s government tenders out now that say ‘describe to us how you will support 3 or 5 kilowatts per rack today and how will you, in the same footprint, support up to 25 kilowatt racks in the future’. But they only want to pay for the 3 or 5 kilowatts today.
Now, unlike IBM with mainframes and the golden screwdriver, you know turning on more capacity, or being able to burst through a broadband type of arrangement as your internet requirements increase from time to time, it’s very, very difficult to align that type of burst capability, or that type of growth, integrate that into a data centre where power and cooling is a lot more concrete or set in stone than those other forms of IT.
But it’s all coming together and getting more and more demanding in that way. So if people can’t predict what IT they’re going to have in a year’s time or in three years’ time, then the best thing that I like to say to scare the pants off customers when they’re kicking tyres around data centres is if the IBM and the HP rep in your city today can’t tell you the engineering specifications of next year’s device, well how can you do a data centre that’s going to fit the purpose in three years, five years, ten years, let alone fifteen or twenty years, when you need a data centre to be around for fifteen years to get a return on investment?
Because it’s a real estate investment. That’s been a huge differentiator for us, because we have that flexibility built into our design, but it’s the business model that matters and the infrastructure underneath that facilitates the business model.
It’s all about how future proof can you be and how modular? Can you adopt changing technology over time in the data centre? Clients are becoming more savvy, but they also need to understand that they need to be efficient over the full life cycle of the facility and normally facilities have been incredibly poor for the first 10 years while you fill them up and then they’re horrendous for the last 10 years, because it’s all old infrastructure and there’s nowhere to grow.
So there has to be better ways and there are better ways of doing it, and so it’s a good differentiator certainly for us.
Marcus There’s changes in the market that resellers and consultants have to take into account. The use of the word ‘cloud’ you can summarise as virtualisation. Virtualisation technologies have been around for quite a few years right? The interesting thing now is where you’re putting multiple computer power in, multiple operating systems on the same computer.
The predictability of the load now is actually getting less and less tangible. Take for example ‘The Voice’ on Channel 9. You have peak loads, predictably on a Monday night. But suddenly they do a Sunday show. They dropped in there outside of schedule, and where you’ve been planning this once-a-week cycle, it’s now a twice-a-week cycle, and you can do the same thing around any of the things that have an event. Take tax returns for the ATO.
All these different agencies will have different life cycles of the use of their applications. Also if you go inside the stock broking arena, where they’re actually looking at high frequency trading, their life cycle is actually around the process of power, and they’ll change processor and therefore computer platform when the next one comes out, such as the latest release of Ivy Bridge.
They can chuck in a processor and stick in a data centre, they’ll do it, because the volume of transactions that they’re doing is directly dependent on the computer results. So if you’re running your own environment, you can be a little bit more predictable, because you can understand your business and therefore understand ‘what’s my technology refresh?’
The challenge is when you go to an outsourcer. If they’ve not taken into account that their market at one end could be traffic light system, right, which has got a very slow life-cycle, and the computer resource is predictable, through to the opposite end which is an entertainment business that might only need your resources for an hour a week, where they’re doing an on demand say a TV show.
If you can actually create a business that shows those different types of metrics and how you’re going to do the lifecycle, and I’m emphasising what Greg was saying, if you have an architect to put this unified architecture together to allow you to upgrade your systems during the normal lifecycle.
If you actually look at creating your pathways in your architecture, so you’ve got pathway A and B, and you’re planning for A1 and B1, so you can actually do these in-service upgrades, whether it’s computer, cabling, battery capacity, storage capacity, physical rack space – if you can create that approach that gives you modularity based around what the predicted lifecycle is, you’re actually on a winning strategy, because you’re now flexible.
If you’re constrained by your physical environment that you’ve got all this stuff in there and you suddenly have got to go from CAT 5 to 6A to CAT 7 and you’re going from 1 gig to 40 gig and you have to shoot the place down to re-cable it, you are out of business before you even make the announcement, because people won’t allow you to shut down the computer platform – whether that’s an internal business unit or if you’re an outsourcer, if you haven’t got that prediction and agility or flexibility there, go and do something else, go and sell vegetables down the road.
Trevor Resellers aren’t actually getting the customers to go back in time and show the value they’ve delivered. So, for instance, if you go in there and convince them to change their platform to enable them to scale up over time, you’ve constantly got to go back and remind them about the strategy that they’ve got, because they tend to lose their way. Why I say that is if there are big savings to be made, and they do need to make a small investment to scale out, you’ve got to remind them the savings they’ve had to really free up budget to make a decision to move forward. When they go to a selected outsourcer, maybe a CSC whatever, they’re factoring all those upgrades in the background,, whereas internally they still have to justify it.
One of the things resellers tend to constantly keep on selling the benefits that they deliver to the business and enable them to move to the future. So they will want to have sales people with mobility, that’s all great, but how are they going to access it and where’s it going to run? It’s going to run a data centre. Start planning for upgrading the data centre now and the computer power as well as the power manager, because it’s going to put much more load back into the data centre. They paid for that and it’s savings, so it’s not increased budgeting.
Andrew That’s a good point. For me, it’s about getting resellers to know how they can help their customer transform their business. It could be something as simple as identifying stranded power capacity in their data centre, so that they don‘t have to go out and spend lots of money on refreshing the data centre infrastructure technology. They can just help them identify and that makes them become more agile, so that they can react to changes in their business, in this environment.
Jacques A few years ago I was involved with a reseller working with SBS the Tour de France. SBS told me they were planning to create some live broadcasts and last night I’m watching the Tour de France on my iPhone. My wife’s sleeping and she wakes up and says ‘what are you doing?’ watching the Tour de France, and I’m just saying that because SBS had a challenge three years ago to design a facility that could allow them to do this broadcasting of the World Cup and the Tour de France on smartphones. In the end it’s what you can see on your apps and how you communicate.
Jason That’s an excellent point Jacques, and people often ask what is actually driving the data centre business and there’s a couple of things. One of the main things is smart devices. So the amount of smart devices that have permeated the market like your iPhone, your androids, your tablets, that type of stuff. It was the advent if you like of the smart type devices which has driven that data centre demand, because that information has to be created, transmitted and stored somewhere. IDC reported that by 2015, 91 percent of internet data would be video.
So how do we deal with that? That again is in the data centre site. So there’s three things that I like to talk about when we talk about the data centre market and what’s driving it. I call it the three Cs. It’s consumption, which is the smart devices, compliance and cloud.
Now on the compliance side, you’ve got quite a few things coming in. We’ve talked about CFOs and CTOs and their roles and so on, but one of the things that is happening around Australia is obviously the price of energy is increasing, carbon tax and so on, but one of the things that people don’t realise is that power is actually at its cheapest on a wholesale rate than it’s ever been. So the only way for power now is up.
What’s high at the moment is the network infrastructure charges, because the providers had to put in the infrastructure for peak demand. Now with the introduction of carbon tax the price of energy is going to increase exponentially.
One of the other things we’ve seen, and resellers have got to get their heads around this, is that there’s a rating system that has come out of NSW called NABERS (National Australian Built Environmental Ratings Scheme). It uses a green star energy style rating system and is now being rolled out around Australia.
One of the things they’ve found out is that they’ve rated a building using NABERS, but as clients have brought in their computer rooms or data centres, it’s actually thrown everything out.
It’s impacted on that owner of the building being able to lease more space, because their NABERS rating has been reduced. That’s happened so dramatically that NABERS has had to bring out a rating tool for data centres.
Energy efficiency is now being assessed at data centres around the country to get the baselines we’ve been talking about.
We talked earlier about skill sets, in particular the skill sets resellers need.
So generally when we talked about racks, we talked about cabling, we talked about power – it’s not the traditional IT reseller’s market. I remember being in reseller land years ago and selling servers and networks and stuff like that.
When it came to the racks and cabling and that sort of stuff, we would go out to a cabling contractor, or we’d go out to some other place. So now that IT needs to be selling more of this traditional mechanical or facilities type product there is a skills gap and they need to educate themselves on in order to achieve best practise.
They need to educate themselves on what the actual compliance is and what the standards are around data centres. There’s a lot of standards around but if you look at the data centre code of conduct, it’s actually brought all of those standards together into a fairly easy to read common sense document.
So in fact it’s become the norm in Europe. They’ve looked at in Japan and the US Department of Energy have looked at it and now NABERS in Australia is looking at it.
So one of the tips I give to resellers is to familiarise themselves with that code of conduct and best practice, because quite often when we go out and talk to customers they ask us what best practise means.
People really didn’t have anything to refer to. For example ASHREY (American society of heating refrigeration air conditioning engineers): they’ve had a rating for cooling for around 22 degrees, 50 percent humidity around data centres, and mainframe rooms for many years.
They’ve actually expanded that system out now so that you’ve got higher thresholds for temperatures and humidity that you can actually run equipment in to become energy efficient.
Marcus Let’s come back to what’s driving the change in use. If you started with your typical comms room, you’d have say in a medium sized office in the city – a lot of people are saying ‘I want to reduce the total power that IT has’.
In a typical data centre or a typical comms room, the computer resources may be 1.2 kilowatts a square metre if that. With the move to BYOD for instance you’re now moving potentially to about 3 kilowatts a square metre inside that local comms room inside that office space – because there isn’t the bandwidth to do virtual desktop (in Australia) all the way back into a centralised data centre. It will happen in certain instances, but typically they’re going to consolidate 30, maybe 40 PCs per RU in a local comms room – and you’re now going to suddenly jump into a power environment.
You are going to reduce the overall power that the building’s going to take for IT, but what you’ve done is you’ve consolidated it into one point. So if you think about computer resources which are centralised and then distributed – what you’re doing now is the same thing with power, from centralised on the old main frames to distributed onto a desktop.
You’re now bringing the power back. With BYOD, it’s going to draw somewhere between 15 and 30 watts.
Marcus You have now centralised your power requirement, concentrated your power requirement in the one point. There’s some improvement, but you’ve reached that bell curve of physics, of how much energy does it take to do one computer site.
You’re not going to see this two or threefold increase that we’ve had of efficiency. It’s now talking single digit increase on each level of processor, and like Jacques said earlier on, there’s an IBM blade server coming out that’s going to take 65 degree Celsius on the output and they’ve got to cool it.
Now where do you dump that heat? You need to have an efficient way of taking that heat and transferring it back and getting rid of it.
The rate of change you can do on your software now is actually increased because you’ve got these central SOAs and now it’s just a client. It’s not hardware dependent and the flipside is creating these local hotspots that the comms room is designed to put a PBX in, print server, and possibly file storage, maximum 50 kilowatts, and potentially now in some of the office environments 500, 600 kilowatts to run a thousand virtual desktops out of, and then when you actually take that back into the core data centre, the growth in data and that mega type data environment now, one of the biggest power tools isn’t the servers any more, it’s the storage arrangements. And that ain’t getting any smaller.
You can only have so much of this efficiency per centimetre of disk space, as you grow and grow that storage environment, data never decreases right.
Everyone wants that legacy data and the mining of that data now creates more and more – so you’ve got these layers of applications.
So yes really efficient enterprise data centres are important, but everyone’s forgetting it’s middle range, which is how do we actually create that efficiency.
Again bring it back to metrics and compare against the industry. When you’re doing your planning look at someone who’s done a virtual desktop for one thousand PCs in that office environment.
Trevor We go into a lot of data centres at the moment where everyone’s got all the bells and whistles, they’ve bought the most up to date. But they haven’t trained their people on how to actually configure them.
So you might have the capacity to go down and cap the amount of power consumption in a server, but the reality is that most customers take things out of a box, and they kind of realise there has got to be power cables to plug it in.
They’ll rack it, there’s an internet cable, they’ll put it in, and then they’ll put it in and say oh suddenly someone recognises there’s something wrong.
So there are some good opportunities for resellers to go into existing environments and try and make them a lot more efficient to optimise them, and it is a consulting engagement. It doesn’t include selling hardware often, although it could include selling appliances – like with APC in terms of some of the management of the environment. But really a lot of customers don’t do themselves justice. They buy these servers and then don’t use all the tools.
Greg That’s very interesting. It’s almost like a diminishing scale. When you think about the smaller organisations that have a number of racks, like six racks, something like that, maybe more – it actually costs a lot of money to actually employ all the whiz bang technologies, and it costs a lot of money to have the skills on hand to make full use of the technology.
Sometimes it’s easy just to use a dumb approach that is what you’ve done in the past. Whereas as you go up the major computing organisations, banks and financial institutions, all the metrics that Marcus mentioned around costs, all the big banks and things like that, they’re smashing all those things and they’re competing, and you know Commbank has got a significant jump in customer satisfaction through investment in IT which has enhanced the customer experience. So they are competing on the IT front.
But the smaller you are, the more challenging that is, relative to the big end of town.
Greg Exactly, and that’s where there’s opportunities for resellers.
CRN How long do you think it will take for the costs to come down sufficiently so that the resellers that are servicing medium to small businesses could be offering that sort of granularity that we’ve been discussing?
Greg It will never come down because there will always be another wave of technology and new type of technology and new approach, because that’s what technology is, and that’s the whole problem with facilities and technology, because technology continues to at an exponential rate. It’s like Formula One. Eventually their key improvements come down to the everyday car, and then that’s what happens over time and that’s where you know that playing field, there will always be opportunity for resellers to provide watts.
CRN Surely we are close to a ceiling in terms of monitoring power though, you talk about what banks are able to do in terms of……
Greg Monitoring power?
CRN Monitoring how many kilowatts are consumed in a transaction. Andrew you gave the example the other day, or Jacques, we were talking about a carrier for instance figuring out how many kilowatts are actually consumed by activating a SIM card. Now surely that’s a ceiling, are we getting much beyond that, or can we?
Greg Absolutely. We’re competing on processing and there’s always going to be something that produces more server outcome, more processing outcomes for a certain amount of wattage in. Storage is the same. There’s improvements in storage that are coming through, which could actually dramatically change the data centres in the world in terms of solid state solutions and different things.
It’s very expensive and not so enterprise grade today, so it’s only a matter of time, but that’s what I mean, there will always be software and hardware solutions which we put together for a complete package that will continue to improve an advantage, and our largest clients, they’ve got computing platforms side by side, and they’re actually measuring the compute outcomes in benchmarking, using our monitoring infrastructure, to see what bang for their buck in terms of compute outcome, versus power in do you get.
We have the 145th fastest super computer in our data centre, which was four racks, 30 kilowatts in each rack, and it was the 11th greenest super computer in the world, in terms of watts in and watts out, based on metrics that all the top 500 people who want to compete to be the best super computer, have to actually adhere to. So that’s always evolving.
Andrew Most ‘futurists’ don’t agree but it won’t stop until you challenge it.
Until the technology reaches the point where you’re pushing those laws of physics, you’re still going to develop and it’s not going to cost any less, because as Greg said there’s always that next version of technology, with the development of chips, with the development of integrated circuits and so on.
Greg It was once thought that the whole world would only ever need a handful of computers.
And then you had people saying, I think it was in France that once computers came along, everyone would only have to work thirty hours a week. But the reality is that we all now work twice as hard.
We’re all competitive and interested in how much productivity we can squeeze out of every area of an organisation. That’s what it’s all about and that’s why it’s so exciting being in technology, because it’s not a staid thing and there will always be opportunity.
Marcus You can’t produce a big stick and go ‘that solves the whole computer problem’ with data centres, because you’ve got different types of industry, different types of applications, different types of user environments, depending on where you are. You need to bring that level of granularity one level below, which is understanding who your customer is, what’s the vertical, what is their propensity for change and what’s their growth.
So you’re now taking that consultant led approach which is understanding where they are today, doing that discovery phase and, as Trevor said, you need to understand what the profile of your customer’s use is today and need to understand what their propensity for change is, and what their risk appetite is. Someone might sit there and say ‘I’m happy to take a risk that my business is going to grow two or threefold, but my computer resources make it four or fivefold, because I’m actually going to move from a personal transaction base to automation, which has always been the computer driver, and everyone goes ‘that will never happen’.
A client I’m working with at the moment is in the logistics business. They are moving from manual handling of goods, to being completely automated with cranes going around. So the level of computer resource is twenty-fold moving materials from location A to location B. If you can understand that and predict that and also now the mission criticality of that business, you are going to say what was just an email server, and if it was a three or four second delay for your email coming, no-one would even notice.
Most people don’t even notice when it’s two minutes late. But if you are now actually say driving a forklift truck or a crane around, you put a two or three second delay on that, it’s either going to drive off the edge of the train track or the wharf, or it’s going to kill someone. So you’re now talking of moving from seconds to milliseconds. If you’re now talking bank and finance, you’re now actually talking microseconds, and they actually build capacity advantage say in the high frequency trading arena, they’re now talking about the length of fibre back to the actual matching of the exchange being a capacity advantage. They want the shortest length of fibre.
In fact in a couple of stock exchanges, they are actually asking vendors to guarantee that all the fibres be the same length. Project Speedway that was called.
So it’s understanding and bringing that level of knowledge, and if you actually take a strategic approach to being a reseller or data centre provider or even a vendor, you start at the bottom end which is your temporary technical advantage, right.
Whether it’s Microsoft or Apple, APC or Siemens, at the end of the day you’re talking temporary technical advantage as you release a product. You don’t talk about projects, and typically people try to sell to meet a project. What they’re missing is the layers above that.
If you can go into someone and say ‘I can save you save you 20 percent of your power bill and 30 percent on your computer bill by introducing BYOD or virtual desktop, and then back that up with real analytics, then you’re actually now driving an outcome. What you want to tie that to is your customer’s goals and objectives. He wants to be in a building that’s a NABERS (national Australian built environment rating system) rating of 5 stars, he wants to have a situation where he can say ‘my cost per SIM card is x’.
Most people might not be worried about that, but if you say ‘my cost per credit card transaction is actually reduced by 20 percent’ then instead of charging my retailer a 1.5 percent transaction fee, I can now charge him 1.2 percent, so Amex has an advantage, or Visa has an advantage over Mastercard, or Amex over Diner’s Club. Right?
The last bit though is the political agenda. If at the end of the day the CIO is sitting around wanting to become the next CEO and I’ve only seen one actually in my time, right, well you might have a situation with an IT manager who wants to take on the facility’s role, because more and more devices and more and more buildings are IP enabled.
I actually went into a facility the other day, even the clocks, which the face of it is actually an analogue clock, it actually has an IP interface in the back to keep the clock on time. It’s actually a hospital environment but it wants to have that old world analogue interface. But what you’re getting now are things that you’d never imagine now able to run over IP.
Greg I think there will be more CIOs making the leap to CEOs in the future.
It’s already happening; you can see the old guard of people who run government and major organisations things like that, they are actually getting in many instances, younger and more technically savvy, and so I think it’s good advice.
Marcus To me if you look across the life cycle of the data centre environment from preparation, planning, design to implementation – is that people forget about optimisation – current environments, you don’t have to replace it per se.
An example of that is that people never capture the output temperatures from the bloody devices. For true optimisation, you need knowledge, you need information.
But there’s a resources problem. I’m not talking about coal, gas, diamonds etc, but technically qualified, competent consultant-level resources in your organisation. If you haven’t got them, admit it, and go and find some subject matter expertise, and if you’ve got subject matter expertise, sell it into people who haven’t got it. Most people try and sell a product rather than actually selling expertise.
Also, you need a unified approach to the architecture from pouring the concrete slab, to providing compute and storage resources. This still has to evolve.
They’re still treated as separate components, and if you haven’t planned that this is going to work as one entity, and your power, your cooling, your network cabling, your fibre, your pathways, your compute resource your storage, if you haven’t planned that as one unified product, guess what it’s being sold as one product….. ‘oh don’t worry about the hardware and software, we’re putting it in the cloud’ and that’s great, but the people who are providing that cloud service, and even if it’s internally virtualised, all that stuff has got to work together.
So from your building management system if you need to have a shutdown because there’s a fire, does the building management system when there’s fire tell the servers to shut down? Not today. So unified architecture across infrastructures is probably the way to go.
Paul We live in exciting times. IT is a massive and key differentiator for businesses. Companies out there are struggling with legacy data centre design to be able to house the exiting innovations that they can really use to drive the business forward. So to me there’s great opportunities for resellers, integrators who want to raise their game, want to act as a consultant and really move into the services space.
Greg We’ve all talked about the baseline if you make any business decision. You don’t do it without a financial report and financial plans. So the baseline of any organisation is important, and what we say is if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. So baseline is important. The next area where there is opportunity is around agility. There is obviously a competitive advantage if you can achieve it.
When I look at modern data centres being built today, they’re not fitting the purpose. They’re shining examples of 1980s data centre architecture. So how will they be to fit the purpose in 15 or 20 years is a big question. The smart operators will adopt a holistic approach.
You have to have that skills base which understands the business outcome and then how that all fits together with the big pillars of compute which are storage, servers, networking and your data centre. The data centre is actually now with electricity prices, the most costly of those. So therefore that person should be more important than they’ve traditionally been and if resellers want to look at the opportunities, just look at the industries that have had the poorest productivity and focus on those.
Look at the mining industry and the public sector. That’s where they are very, very inefficient, and that’s where computing and the whole adage of doing more or less will come to the fore, because all of those areas are under pressure to squeeze out a bit more productivity from those industries.
Trevor There’s a common theme of discovery. Make your customer aware of exactly what they’ve got. You can’t make a decision if you don’t know what your current costs are. If you’re unsure about how to use energy as a weapon to aid your sales endeavour, then reach out to the subject matter experts for help.
You will find that once you’ve got that, you’ve got IP that’s transferable to other customers to keep competitive advantage for yourself, and the person who wins is definitely yourself, but your customers will win as well, because hopefully you’re talking to a CIO that thinks like a CEO and arming him with some financial measures that will enable him to run his business. So you’re doing some skills transfer as well.
Greg The key message from all of this is don’t give your consulting away for free. Charge for it. Don’t sit there and say ‘guys here’s my advice on how you can do power’. Instead say ‘we are going to do a discovery phase, the outputs in this will help you make a business decision’.
The number of resellers who give consulting away for free is a concern. Then suddenly they’ve got no buy-in for the customer.
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