Dell Defines Data Center Productivity

At a recent event in San Francisco, Albert Esser, VP of Dell's Data Center Infrastructure Group, and Rick Becker, VP of Software and Solutions in Dells Product Group, offered a presentation on data center productivity to reporters and analysts. The pair discussed numerous data center issues, including power and cooling, server performance, and virtualization, as well as methodologies for businesses to enhance facility and system productivity and improve their competitive advantage.

The challenge for Dell is to help businesses understand that no single strategy can fully capture all potential benefits. To date, many vendors have focused on relatively narrow strategies and solutions. In comparison, Dell believes that organizations are best served by thoroughly assessing the current state of their IT facilities and assets, then making systematic improvements across the data center ecosystem.

Esser began by addressing challenges in two areas: 1) facilities power and cooling; and 2) server utilization. Numerous data centers were built in the 1999-2000 timeframe (in response to the dotcom boom and/or to prepare for Y2K), virtually assuring their inadequacy for the shift toward scale-out computing that has occurred during the past decade. In addition, many companies have pursued a 50 percent compound annual growth rate in IT workloads, which is unsustainable, both economically and from the standpoint of energy provisioning.

Updating facilities power and cooling represents a natural first step for most companies, particularly since data centers typically require about 1 kilowatt of electricity to run the data center for every 1 kW needed to power IT assets. There are also a number of immediate improvements companies can make to save energy. For example, data centers are typically maintained at 65 degrees to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature required to safely operate many traditional enterprise server platforms and to address hot spot problems. In fact, server fans are usually set to engage automatically if temperatures rise above 78 degrees.

But Dell's research found that the company's current-generation servers can safely run at considerably higher temperatures. Further, the company estimates that setting air conditioning to a warmer temperature can result in as much as a 15 percent to 18 percent improvement in facilities' energy usage, delivering significant savings (since an average data center uses about 1,100 kW of electricity annually). That said, while any improvement can be positive, enhancing facilities efficiency offers companies a one-time benefit -- once achieved, there is really nowhere else to go.By comparison, Dell believes that improving server utilization offers customers profound, continuing benefits. Such efforts also address critical issues related to IT and data center costs. The company found that since 2002, average x86/64 server utilization has declined from 12 percent to 5 percent, in large part due to the inefficient use business applications make of new, multi-core processor technologies. In addition, during data center assessments, Dell finds that up to 20 percent of clients' servers are essentially idle.

Dell advocates the aggressive use of virtualization to improve server utilization, drive down energy usage, and capture immediate and ongoing savings. Additionally, along with curing current problems, the company sees virtualization as a key to helping companies address next-generation issues. Even as organizations have had to deal with scale-out server "sprawl," Dell expects the next big IT challenge facing businesses will be volume storage sprawl. Accordingly, the company is developing a number of solutions, including virtualization-enhanced storage technologies.

Overall, Dell believes that in highly virtualized environments owners can recoup acquisition expenses in as little as three years. That can help companies keep spiraling IT budgets in check, and, over time, it could also drive more aggressive equipment refresh schedules. This should ensure that organizations capture the benefits of continually evolving hardware performance, but it is also likely to change acquisition, maintenance, and support models.

Esser and Becker concluded by discussing the importance of virtualization in Dell's current products and in its ongoing strategy. The company offers both rack and blade servers optimized for virtualization (with twice the memory and more robust I/O than standard servers) and supports virtualization technologies from vendors, including VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix. In addition, Dell's EqualLogic storage systems have been optimized for VMware environments. Finally, the company provides numerous consulting services related to virtualization and considers the technology essential to future offerings.

Improving data center efficiency and performance are issues embraced by virtually every IT vendor and qualify as critical goals for "green" IT and related solutions. But close examination of those offerings reveals a common dichotomy -- that vendors tend to objectively define terms like "green" and "efficiency" according to their subjective individual strengths. No surprise there, though it is akin to someone defining beauty by gazing into a mirror. More importantly, such practices tend to confuse customers and, over time, devalue the technologies and practices they intend to promote.How does this relate to Dell's data center productivity presentation? Esser and Becker made every effort to clearly define the problems facing data center owners and to objectively explain the solutions they proposed. Did they reveal anything dramatically new or game-changing in the process? Not particularly, since many of the examples and statistics cited were publicly available. But by proceeding in so systematic and detailed a manner, the pair offered a three-dimensional view of data center productivity that was exceptional in its clarity. By doing so, Dell provided a service to its audience that, by extension, should translate to significant, attainable benefits for data center owners of every stripe.

— Charles King, President and Principal Analyst for research firm Pund-IT Inc. , focuses on business technology evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on vendors, their customers, and the greater IT marketplace.