Andrew Rigby (right) of Brodies, Scotland's own czar of data centres addressed the Economic impact. Nutshelling his view, he sees the drivers to be encouraging the view that Data Centres should be part of government economic policy and public sector push. That a government-led strategy would help grow domestic businesses and a strategic approach by government would drive inward investment from international providers.

Scotland, he urges, should be actively promoted so it appears independently on global IT sourcing lists, such as A T Kearney; KPMG, Gartner etc. 

He wants to  develop a clear message on data centres - with a Scottish “elevator pitch,” as well as to  measure the value and numbers of businesses providing data centre services or who outsource their data centres across all industry sectors in Scotland.

Leaving aside his acknowledgment of Scotlands skilled IT, its 14 universities and international reputation for quality and innovation, available locations, sympathetic planning and government financial support, not to mention cost saving of 20-30% compared with the UK South East, among his key messages were the need for Scotland to have resilient and robust electricity supplies (beware the grid 'pinch') and vitally a mature and well established track record in Scotland (which was not emerging!)

Moore & Nielsen considered
Tony Day, Global director for Datacentre Projects & Services for APC by Schneider Electric,  has a wonderful and fascinating technology grasp of data centres. He  opened with both Moore and less realised Nielson laws.

"Processing power increases on the CPU due to Moore’s Law but without the ability to get it off the CPU fast enough due to pipe limitations (ISA bus late 90’s). Clock speeds were increased but without great gain in data throughput, multi-cores were introduced to help overcome wire delay and increase data throughput.

Moore’s Law is that computers double in capabilities every 18 months or about 60% annual growth, a factor of
100x every 10 years. Nielsen’s Law relating to the speed of bandwidth has a 50% annual growth, a factor of only 57x over the same timeframe."

"A datacentre," he points out, " can occupy one room of a building, one or more floors, or an entire building.  2/3rds of US servers are housed in datacentres smaller than 5,000ft2 (450m2) and with less than 1MW of critical power.

 Most large DC’s are built to host servers from multiple companies (colocation DC’s) and can support a critical load of 10-20MW. Very few DC’s today exceed 30MW of critical power.

Use of empty warehouses as shell stock has resulted in typical large DC halls of 10,000ft2 to 15,000ft2 (929m2 to 1394m2) which is a property development metric related to the economic span of a portal frame (27m to 30m) and has nothing to do with IT requirements. Trends are to break down DC halls into smaller modules eg 2,000ft2.

Scotland, concurrs Day, already ticked the boxes when it came to  abundant diverse sources of renewable power, favourable ambient climate, available reasonably priced land, a skilled workforce and favourable political climate

Connectivity, engagement & architectures
But he urged as important  "the need to  acquire connectivity direct to mainland Europe and US without having to route through London; more engagement with industry, and the real need to meet client needs with green, energy efficient, responsive, agile and adaptive DC architectures.

His presentation closed with a view below of Echelfecchan, the site where  Schneider is teamed with Internet Villages International (IVI) on the ALBA1 Data Centre project, the first phase of which facility comprises of some 125 acres of datacentre development in campus form that will be owned and operated by several different organisations.


Data Centre opportunities
Microsoft technical advisor Scotland Peter Ferry focused on Data centres opportunity for Scotland. A Scottish medium-sized company with up to £100K IT power costs, typically had servers <15% utilised. World electricity use of servers was 0.8% of global sales in 2005 and oerhaps would as high as 2% in 2009. Trends, he said, were CPU performance, performance/watt, the power density/cooling challenge and in the US Data Centre growth of 15% pa, with the Environmental Protection Agency predict 100 GWh by 2012

Touching on fourth generation goal and ambitions, smart growth he said would come from an Internet population and Internet peering/networks, and important factors would be mobile users, power pricing, environmental, construction costs the tax climate, skills availability and corporate citizenship.

"Scotland naturally cool"  was the approach of Graeme Gordon, operations director of Internet for Business. It seemed to tick all the required boxes on power, choice of networks and operators; infrastructure; the Cisco, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Sun presence;  a suitable environment; no dry air issues (few hurricanes); stability; credibility offered by Brightsolid, IFB, iomart, Lumison, Onyx Group and Scolocate. But, Gordon did also note Scotland needed  added international connectivity, and his electricity generation mix slide shows an ominously heavy reliance on currently expensive gas by 2020

Some of the challenges
Finishing off with the presentations with current Data Centre challenges, Scott Bradley of Morse noted from IDC that “Data centre power demands have doubled in last five years and 76% growth is predicted by 2010” and “70% of Global 1000 will need to significantly change their data centres in the next five years to meet current and future energy needs” from Gartner.

Data centre use was still the first strategy in alleviating capacity issues
offering virtuali-sation, high density/low power equipment, consolidation platforms.

He warns against Green Washing as misleading marketing about the environ-mental benefits of a product be it software, outsourcing, financing, or data centres and beware local planning for self-generation is NOT up to speed. The benefits of centres should be identifiable, quantifiable and achievable, and "sweating assets isn't always the best option

Refresh, decommission and arrest
Doing nothing, he says, is not an option, and his council to data centres was to work through  refresh (providing short term headroom) decommission which provides significant capacity saving but is likely to require future investment in new facilities; arrest, which requires process, technological and organisation change and realises significant savings in energy costs: avoid high investment cost in new facilities and demonstrates good corporate responsibility with reduced IT carbon footprint.

Automate your operations, he urges to drive down the cost of provisioning and management, enable next generation data centre use and augment your infrastructure with cloud computing.

The workshops contribution: skills & metric shortage
Of the comments coming from the workshops studying the presentations, it was pointed out that the issue was never space, but power, capacity and connectivity that raised the headaches as well as the security issues.
Users felt that more aggressive decommissioning was a partial solution to capacity, and using charge-back helped to push this, while redesign of applications was felt an interesting approach. The issue of network capacity needed to be thought through carefully too.

Another group raised the interesting issue of metrics. Power Utilisation & Energy (PUE) feedback was damned with faint praise as a too simplistic metric and not very useful. While it was meant to show the efficiency of the data centre, it was only an indication of self measurement improvements and not necessarily any reflection competitive best of class. Business cases, it was also noted that are quoted do not take in the issues of power and floor space.

Looks like there's a very real market for tools to help Data Centres get a handle on facts and hidden costs. The groups also raise the issue of large organisations having separate equipment to facility budgets, which meant a need to engage with both the facility engineers as well as the IT people for any upgrade structure to be successful.  It was urged that what was needed were a set of tools for measuring the infrastructure.

Customers who moved from legacy to share application systems saved money, but virtualisation, punted as  the be all to end all, reveals that the management effort is enormous. From 100 physical machines to 200 virtual machines, could mean management costs more significant than power costs.

With the issue of fourth generation data centres, some regret the loss of the tiers, but it was felt that data centre resiliance levels were more important now than tiers.  For some the issue when looking for a data centre is what is available, what fits your need, rather than whether it has a Scottish location.

Missing links
A major issue is the lack of available 'Data Centre' specialist skills in Scotland and a lack of genuinely impartial advise that does not come from vendors or suppliers.

It looks as if the data centre special interest group might need an impartial adoptive University computer centre to push, shove and promote the tools, advice and people skills concept into touch. 

A quick look at theData Centre special interest group finds Brightsolid, Cisco, EQSN, IFB, Morse, Onyx Group, SUN, Xtraordinary Hosting, Analysys Mason, Atos Origin, IBM, Lumison, Scolocate, iomart and Xcalibre, but no University players, no major or even SME users.

If Scotland is to nurture a new breed of Data Centres that succeed globally, perhaps a 'Which' type combination of Skills, Advice & Metrics Centre is needed.   

Gail Purvis