What is the "Smart" data center (SDC) It's a facility that is as much a part of your IT infrastructure as the Operating System (OS) is a part of a production server. In order for your server to boot up, it requires the bios. The bios in combination with the OS allows your server to act as a “System”. Now you might be asking "why is it important for my IT infrastructure to talk to the data center and vice versa?", because it will be the final piece that truly frees us from being slaves to our infrastructure, I’ll explain as you read on.

I believe there are several companies that have seen or are beginning to see this vision of the Smart data center, but as yet haven’t articulated it to the public. Those companies are Cisco, VMware & IBM/Eaton. Cisco recently bought (Richard Zeta a building management system company), in addition to having their Unified Computing System and EnergyWise, they must be thinking along the lines of my “Smart” data center theory. If Cisco isn’t working towards this goal then someone in product management should be fired. VMware has the ESX (vSphere now) platform with vMotion in combination with Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Dynamic Power Management (DPM). I believe VMware sees the opportunity for IT platform integration with the facility and then IBM who partnered with Eaton to integrate Tivoli with Foreseer must also be thinking along the same lines.

Why is an SDC, the "smart" thing to plan for?

Consider just a few of the comments made by Lori MacVittie, Jame Urguhart & Greg Ness in previous blogs about Cloud, Intercloud and Cloud Bursting around the following;

-          Distributed application use

-          The ability to provision across clouds

-          Portable environments

-          Etc., etc..

All of the above point to a very fluid and dynamic compute capacity that is no longer limited by physical or logical infrastructure that requires heavy and manual human intervention.

Now, put yourself four years into the future.

It’s summer 2013, I’m on my favorite beach in Hawaii, sun burnt again, but we’re not here in the future to talk about me, this is about you. You’ve successfully implemented a cloud for your organization and you’re reaping all the benefits of having efficient infrastructure, disaster avoidance, improved customer satisfaction and faster time to market among other things. However, with all the aforementioned gains, what are some of the major opportunities you’ve missed? 

Did you consider the differences between your future cloud infrastructure and your current infrastructure and how that might impact your data center build requirements? In today’s data centers there are several factors that continue to weigh down our ability to make real efficiency improvements in environment management and human resource requirements. These factors include vertical application or hardware architectures that require unique components and custom configuration. There’s also the fact that if you don’t want your data center staff to revolt, you can’t plan on shrinking the size of your data center too much or turning the heat up to high. In the 2013 data center, you won’t have these problems, if you’ve planned properly and vendor partners have delivered on the promise of a smart data center.

The SDC in combination with cloud computing equates to a truly manageable environment that is more about capacity, than it is about buildings and hardware architecture. The current environment in a data center requires that your temp be kept at a level that supports human occupation and that your space design is conducive to the comfort of staff and the movement of equipment. Now in the future enlightened environment instead of buying large data centers that you build into over the course of 3-7 years, you can buy a cube, container or some other modular structure that provides just the capacity you need, when you need it, in a very efficient pre-built environment. These compact and efficient building blocks can be placed in the location that best suits your business needs and or that offer the best options for tax, power, and lease. This new data center strategy will drive down your cost of energy, cost of capital improvements and human resource and improve time to market. Now that your data center and your compute infrastructure are just “capacity” and not unique buildings with unique infrastructure designed specifically for each new requirement, you are free to “turn the lights off”, meaning the only human intervention is when a piece(s) of hardware fails and a vendor resource enters the room to replace the faulty unit. We all know that reducing human intervention also reduces risk. The next piece is having your building infrastructure work with your Intelligent Infrastructure Platform (IIP) to ensure the highest possible uptime, and the lowest possible resource costs (and be greener!).

The SDC working with your IIP can now take over for human intervention.  Your BMS, Power Management & IIP now effectively are acting as a system. The data center should be treated as a system (see Data Center Stack), now as a Smart Data Center it can act like one.

The following are some of the potential benefits of the SDCS (Smart Data Center System):

-          Power failure (distribute VMs to another area of the data center or to an alternate location)

-          Demand Response request from your utility (shut down non essential capacity and release the power to the utility for a sizeable rebate check)

-          HVAC failure (reduce current load by shutting down non essential services or moving load to another facility)

-          Water leak (move to another location)

-          Intrusion (move to another location and lock down the environment)

All of the actions listed could potentially be performed without human intervention, saving valuable minutes or hours of response time and limiting the chance of an application failure even happening.

The above are just some of the options that having an SDC might be able to offer you. If you aren’t asking your partners for this capability, then you should start immediately. With this SDC in place, you can provision in locations that offer the best possible cost and performance benefits, without worrying as much about available labor or air temperature averages. Instead, you can focus on the type and quality of service that you need to provide to your customer base all while guaranteeing lower cost of ownership and higher availability. How smart will your future data center be?