Rasmussen: Data Centers Overdone

NEW YORK -- Neil Rasmussen, founder and CTO of American Power Conversion Corp. (APC) (Nasdaq: APCC) challenged conventional wisdom on data center design during his keynote speech at Data Center Forum 2004, sponsored by NDCF, on Wednesday.

Rasmussen urged IT managers to rethink the traditional approach of building excess capacity into power and cooling systems as well as actual data centers: The conventional way of building data centers is changing -- it can’t work and it has to change,” he insisted.

With businesses looking to deploy high-density devices such as blade servers, users need to do some serious thinking about how they build out their data centers, he added. The traditional approach, or "over-sizing" as Rasmussen described it, can be a massive waste of money.

Instead, Rasmussen urged businesses to "right-size" -- adding technology and physical capacity only when it is needed. “The requirements are changing. Only a tiny number of customers can plan five, six, or ten years ahead.”

To illustrate his point, the exec used the example of a large financial services company that wasted $53 million by building excess data center capacity. Sadly, Rasmussen did not divulge the name of the company but he did confirm that the excess spending worked out to $11,000 per data center rack.A modular approach, similar to that already used when buying servers and storage, is the way forward. “You buy for the current need. You don’t buy servers planning 10 years ahead -- it’s the same for storage.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate predicts some serious savings if users follow a modular approach for the likes of power, cooling, and data center infrastructures. “For a typical data center this can cut the total cost of ownership by 50 percent."

But this also places an onus on vendors to produce modular products. To meet this challenge, Rasmussen pointed to a pre-manufactured data center that APC, coincidentally enough, began shipping recently. With features such as in-built cooling systems and universal power supply, the chamber can be assembled on customer sites. Additional chambers can then be rolled out as required, he added.

Simon Hill, analyst at large at Heavy Reading, sees Rasmussen’s words as “food for thought... A modular approach would give you more flexibility,” he says. “But it always takes guts to do something different.”

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum0