going digital: whereisourdata? - newstatesman.com1).pdf · substation the national grid operates at...

AN INTRODUCTION TO DATA CENTRES

GOING DIGITAL: WHERE IS OUR DATA?

In collaboration with Sponsored by

Part one

of two reports

DATA Cover:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 16:02

2 | NEW STATESMAN | 30 AUGUST - 5 SEPTEMBER 2013

ROUND TABLE PARTICIPANTS

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Emma FryerAssociate director, Intellect

Jon BernsteinFreelance editor and writer (chair)

Gabriel HarrisDirector,CBRE Data Centres

Bernard GeogheganManaging director EMEA,Digital Realty

Dennis KehoeChief executive,AIMES Grid Services

Ed CookePartner, Bird & Bird

Andrew Miller MPChairman, science andtechnology select committee

Rob CouplandManaging director UK,TelecityGroup

Simon Campbell-WhyteExecutive director, Data Centre Alliance

James DodsworthPartner,White & Case

Dennis LaytonPartner,McKinsey

Huw OwenChief executive, Ark Continuity

02 participants:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:28

30 AUGUST - 5 SEPTEMBER 2013 | NEW STATESMAN | 3

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Commercial DirectorPeter Coombs020 7936 6753Account DirectorEleanor Ng020 7936 6417

Partnerships andEvents ManagerRosalind Goates020 7936 6456

Where is our data?

Facts & figures P8

4 How a data centre worksA bluffer’s guide to the complex world of data hosting, from power stations to blade servers

6 Put digital first, ministerWhere’s the support and strategic thinking, asks Simon Campbell-Whyte

8 Facts & figuresThe UK data centre market by numbers

9 Why it’s time for boot campFormal training is required to fill the looming skills gap, writes Hassan Abdalla

12 Factories of the digital revolutionHighlights from the New Statesman / DCA/TelecityGroup round table

16 The power paradoxThe way we look at carbon productivity is perverse, writes Emma Fryer

17 All human endeavourThe more resource efficient data storage becomes the greater the demand, by David Snelling

18 SnapshotThe unexpected data centre

22 Tales from the frontlineDomino’s, Morrisons and Foxtons talk data centres, by Jon Bernstein

28 NS Interview: Steven Norris“Government has a rather confused idea about us,” says the former Tory minister

30 Jargon busterDefinitions from CDN (content delivery network) to white space

The paper in this magazineoriginates from timber that issourced from sustainableforests, responsibly managedto strict environmental, socialand economic standards. The manufacturing mills haveboth FSC and PEFCcertification and also ISO9001and ISO14001 accreditation.

We live in a digital world. Eighty three per centof the UK population is online and the demandfor virtual services is growing at an ever-quickening pace. So when the question“Where is our data?” was posed at a NewStatesman-hosted round table earlier in thesummer, there was both a simple answer to thequestion and some complexities to untangle.

The simple answer is that most of our data ishoused in data centres. To proponents,including former cabinet minister StevenNorris (see interview on page 28), data centresare the factories of the digital age. Thissupplement acts in part as a beginner’s guide:

the schematic overleaf, explains how theywork while the jargon buster on page 30provides some essential definitions.

The complexity surrounds security, privacy,energy supply, power consumption and alooming skills shortage – and these themes areaddressed across the following pages.

Despite the centrality of data centres tomuch of the nation’s cultural, social andeconomic activity, awareness remains limited.Government remains confused, says Norris. This supplement is a contribution to thedemystification process. l

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First published as a supplement to the New Statesman30 August - 5 September 2013.© New Statesman Ltd. All rightsreserved. Registered as anewspaper in the UK and USA.

This supplement, and other policy reports, can be downloaded from the NS website at newstatesman.com/page/supplements

Round table P12

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

Case studies P22

03 contents:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:31


EXPLAINER

1. Power generating station Could be coal, gas, nuclear or renewable. Amedium-sized data centre requires 10megawatts (MW) of power; larger onesneed 100MW or more. That’s theequivalent of one tenth the output of agenerating station like Sizewell B.

2. Power distribution network Power is transmitted from the generatingstation – usually on a distant coast or riverfar from the data centre – typically locatedin London, Manchester or other majorcities around the UK, close to wheretelecommunications fibre cables providesconnectivity to the internet. Up to 6 percent of the generated power is lost over thelong distances involved.

3. SubstationThe National Grid operates at 400,000volts. Big substations bring the voltagedown before connecting to the datacentre’s own substation where it isconverted into the 440 volts and 240 voltsneeded to operate the equipment insidethe data centre.

4. Data centre Often the size of many football pitchesthese giant data factories live inanonymous industrial buildings hiddenaway on industrial estates or in ordinary-looking office blocks in cities.

5. Standby generatorOften rated at half a megawatt each, thegenerators keep the data centre alive if bothits primary power sources fail. Anothersystem (not shown) inside the data centrecalled UPS (uninterruptible powersupplies) can keep the facility running on

battery power for around ten minutes,long enough to get the generators runningsmoothly and ready to take over.

6. ChillersMost of the energy that goes into running a data centre ends up as heat. Massiveindustrial chillers, or refrigeration units,create very cold water which is pumpedinside the data centre to equally massiveCracs (computer room air conditioningunits) which flood the data centre withcold air to be sucked through the servers to keep the chips cool.

7. A 19in rackWhere the servers and other electronicequipment are located. The mountingwidth of all electronic equipment is astandard 19 inches and equipment height ismeasured in terms of its “U” height. One“U” is about 1.75 inches and is the height ofa pizza box server.

8. Pizza box server The data centre workhorse – an industrialversion of a desktop computer but built to amuch higher specification. Containsprocessor(s), hard disks, two power supplies(so that one can fail) and lots of RAM.

9. Blade server The new darlings of the data centreindustry, these are far smaller than thepizza box server. The size reduction isachieved by stripping out elements like thepower supplies and mounting them in achassis or shelf into which 16 or so smallerserver cards or blades are plugged. Bladeservers squash so much processing powerinto a small space that one chassis canconsume 16 kilowatts. l

How a datacentre works

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9. Blade server

A bluffer’s guide to the complex world of datahosting − from power stations to blade servers

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04-05 Schematic- Data Center:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:32


2. Power distribution network

3. Substation

8. Pizza box server

6. Chillers

5. Standby generator

4. Data centre

7. A 19in rack

04-05 Schematic- Data Center:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:33


It is less than 20 years since the very firstecommerce websites came into beingyet today we rely on data centres to op-erate and control just about every as-pect of our lives – from tweets and Face-

book updates to emails, airline bookingsystems, online shopping, iTunes, on-de-mand video and catch-up TV, the healthservice and even the sequencing of trafficlights to reduce gridlock.

The UK is today one of the world’s maindata centre hubs, alongside the UnitedStates, Netherlands and Germany, but it isin danger of losing that status. Why? Be-cause the UK government that depends onthese massive data factories to make real its“digital by default” strategy is stranglingthe data centre industry when it should behelping it to develop and prosper.

Meanwhile, governments around theworld are choosing to embrace data centresas the massive economic opportunity andfuture that they represent. The MiddleEast, Far East and South American are allenergetically building new data centres andrecruiting skilled staff, many of whom arebeing brain-drained from the UK.

Here, however, data centres don’t fallneatly into the remit of any UK governmentdepartment. Consequently no departmentsupports them and there is no strategic ap-proach to what is probably the UK’s mostvaluable industry.

The Data Centre Alliance (DCA) wasformed two years ago with the mission torepresent the entire industry around theworld – data centre operators, suppliers, ac-

ademics and individual data centre profes-sionals – to drive up standards and sharebest practice knowledge. One aim is to re-duce the possibilities of data centre outageswhich all too regularly bring companies,mobile networks and public services to agrinding halt. Another is to provide a muchneeded level playing field for data centrecustomers and users by producing regu-lated benchmarks.

Data centres are highly complex inte-grated facilities – often the size of five or tenfootball pitches – and covered by up to 26different (and often conflicting) standards,guidelines and metrics. But the vast major-ity of these are voluntary and, before the

DCA launched its recent certificationscheme, 99 per cent of data centres were self assessed meaning they could makemore or less any claim they wished with no regulation.

Great progress has been made on thisfront with over two hundred DCA mem-bers agreeing to the DCA-regulated certifi-cation scheme. This scheme will enablecustomers to judge these highly complexfacilities accurately, one against another.This will take out much of the guessworkcurrently involved in buying data centreand cloud services.

Put digital first, minister

Data centres processtransactions worth billions

of pounds every second

by Simon Campbell-Whyte

While governments around the world are choosing to embrace and invest in their data centre industries, here athome there is no support and little strategic thinking

OPINION

It’s amazing that an industry whichprocesses billions of pounds worth oftransactions every second and has a carbonfootprint the same as the airline industryhas never had a penny of UK ResearchCouncil funded research to help improve it.Thankfully, although the UK won’t funddata centre research, the Data Centre Al-liance has had more success with the EUCommission. The EU has recently funded aDCA/University-led consortium of aca-demics, industrialists and local authoritiesfrom the EU’s data centre hotspots – Lon-don, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

These will work with the universities ofEast London, Leeds, Delft and Frankfurt toidentify for the first time the training, edu-cation and research needs of the industry.This knowledge will be disseminated viathe DCA throughout the European Unionto help improve data centres through newmethods and technologies.

Knowledge transfer activities are sorelyneeded. Most of the people who keep datacentres working are aged fifty-somethingand did not learn their trade at university.The DCA is already actively engaged inhelping its members deal with the problem.Earlier this summer we piloted the first ofmany special training “boot camps” at theUniversity of East London in Docklands inconjunction with data centre operatorsTelehouse and Telecity, plus training firmCNet (see page 9 for more on this project).

At the boot camp, graduates from acrossthe London area endured two weeks of in-tensive training designed to instil the criti-cal thinking required to work in a missioncritical data centre .

The efficient use of energy in data centresis a daily agenda item and the UK govern-ment has already identified emerging mar-kets, lack of trusted information, the under-valuing of energy and misaligned financialincentives as the main barriers the countrymust overcome if it is to have any hope ofachieving energy efficiency targets. It is en-couraging that, as a result of a recent meet-ing with energy minister Greg Barker, thedata centre industry is, at last, recognised assuffering from all four.

Now we can begin a programme to worktogether to find world leading solutions andbuild on the expertise established here athome. We are, after all, world leaders in in-formation technology.

Let’s embrace it, not penalise it. lSimon Campbell-Whyte is executivedirector of the Data Centre Alliance

06 voice from the industry:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:35 Page 4

The best things in life really are freeThe spiralling cost of energy consumption to organisations and the

planet is one of the greatest challenges facing business leaders.

By 2020, it is estimated that the IT sector will be theworld’s most energy consuming industry. Data traffic isset to grow 30 times over the next ten years and energy costs continue to rise year on year. Add the introduction of Government legislation such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme (CRC), anddata centre managers have a lot to consider.

“Data centres use vast amounts of energy and gener-ate massive heat loads that must be controlled to makesure IT systems work efficiently and reliably,” commentsPaul Griffiths, Technical Director of Weatherite Group.“The problem is that some cooling systems can accountfor over 40% of a data centre’s total energy costs. Thedilemma for data centre professionals is how to reduceoverall energy consumption and PUE, while maintaining effective, safe climate control.It seems surprising then, that there is an alternative solution which many data centre professionals have yetto recognise and capitalise on. Even more remarkable is the fact that, as a resource,this solution is ‘free’.

Substantial SavingsThe Weatherite Group has been cooling IT critical environments using direct, free outside air systems forover 20 years. These systems are an energy efficient,low carbon and environmentally sensitive solution thatcan deliver significant energy cost savings without compromising operational performance in any way.Until relatively recently, the cooling of many data cen-tres has been achieved using Computer Room AirConditioning systems (CRAC systems) which maintainclose tolerances in temperature and relative humidity –yet demand vast amounts of energy. However, this is changing.

“Today’s IT equipment is far more tolerant to widerranges of temperature and humidity and the latestservers are rated for much higher operating conditions

- enabling the use of more energy efficient cooling tech-nologies, such as free outside air cooling,” says Paul Grif-fiths.

EffectiveThe Green Grid, a highly respected, not for profit organisation, whose aims are to improve energy efficiency within data centres, released updated freecooling maps in March 2012 showing that free coolingcan be used year round in over 75 percent of NorthAmerica and over 97 percent of Europe. ASHRAE, theEU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and majorserver manufacturers all back the widening of operatingtemperature and humidity parameters in data centres.

Facebook, ebay and Google have also switched to outside air cooling to regulate the temperature of someof their data centres. Ebay is operating its data centre inPhoenix, Arizona with free cooling year round - evenon days when air temperatures reach 46oC. In the UK,this process can be effective for well over 90% of theyear, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

Free outside air cooling is excellent news for both theenvironment and business as mechanical cooling - andtherefore energy costs, are significantly reduced. Thelifetime of cooling equipment is increased substantially,service intervals are extended, on-going maintenancecosts are reduced, and the savings made deliver a sig-nificant improvement to the businesses bottom line!

Free-Cooling PackagesWeatherite manufactures packaged direct free datacooling systems for data centre customers such as O2,EE and Virgin Media.

Free cooling is usually suitable for the vast majority of ITmission critical applications, from a replacement coolingsystem for a small comms room, additional cooling forthe expansion of a data hall or the building of a large,high density data centre housing rows of server racks. Weatherite offers free site surveys, with highly experi-enced technical staff who can provide advice on achiev-ing the optimum cooling solution for customers.

With over 40 years experience of cooling technology,Weatherite is one of the UK’s leaders in the develop-ment of high efficiency, energy saving data centre cool-ing solutions. From our state-of-the-art UKmanufacturing facility in the heart of the Midlands, wedesign, manufacture, test and pre-commission all our‘Free Cooling’ solutions - combining maximum servercooling efficiency with low operational costs.

For further information, please contact Paul Griffiths, Technical Director of Weatherite Group at [email protected], call 0121 665 2266or visit www.datacentre-cooling.com

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FACTS & FIGURES


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Data centre facilities are the building blocksof the economy, they are vital to the integrity of public services and the compet-itiveness of businesses. The industry provides employment for over 15,000 people in the UK and provides livelihoodfor millions more. All sectors from bankingto professional services and retail are greatlydependent on data centres to run their busi-ness. Our national security and economicwellbeing depend on them.

But here’s the problem. So far, the expertise and skills required to support thisvital industry have largely been developedfrom specific technical areas and throughyears of on-the-job experience.

There has been little or no interface orskills transference to, or from, academic institutions. In addition, due to its diversenature, the data centre straddles and drawsfrom a wide range of scientific and vocational disciplines such as computer science and informatics, mechanical, electronic, mechatronics, building design,thermo fluids and heat transfer, building management, telecommunications, infor-mation sciences, security, and project management.

Many engineers in those areas have become, over time, highly specialised. As aresult, areas of expertise are not aligned tothe broader data centre environment. Thisin turn has created silos of expertise. It hasalso meant complex management of skillsand business requirements.

In short, the data centre industry is suf-fering from skills shortages and the situa-tion will become exacerbated as more expe-rienced professionals reach retirement age.

There is no structured system in place toeducate their successors. There is urgentneed for professionals who can design andoperate energy efficient sites that are reliable, secure and cost effective.

Professionals with a broader range ofskills such as data centre architecture anddesign, power management, servers, security software, crisis management andstorage management are required. So too isexperience in overseeing mergers and acquisition, and administering manage-ment applications. The industry needs aglobal professional accreditation, such as apostgraduate specialisation, authenticatedby universities.

Recent studies including those comingout of the 2012 Data Centre Alliance (DCA)summit recommended a set of strategicsteps. It was recognition that resource efficient data centres require new design,construction, operational methods andtechnology. These cannot be implementedwithout acquiring new skills and tech-niques. Hence the development of a co-ordinated strategy developed by acade-mia and the data centre industry.

Telecity, Telehouse and training com-pany CNet funded their own pilot plan: atwo week “boot camp” was organised ear-lier this summer by the DCA and the Uni-versity of East London. It featured bespoke

Why it’s time for boot camp

This is the first Europeanproject focused solely onthe data centre industry

by Hassan Abdalla

If the industry is to prosper it needs formal training and

qualifications to fill the looming skills gap

OPINION

training and it was free to attend. The port-folio of training courses covered essentialskills such as critical thinking, physical infrastructure, how to work with multi-disciplinary teams and effective opera-tional processes. Among the specific topicsaddressed were data centre standards andmeasurements, power, cooling, security,access, regulations, cabling, energy efficiency and disaster recovery.

The list serves to illustrate the breadth oftraining on offer but also the need for such acourse. In addition, the DCA and UEL areleading the way in building a strategy for securing research and development fund-ing. The result has been a €1.7m budgetfrom the European Union to fund an 18-month project. The UK-led initiative in-volves four universities drawn from datacentre hotspot areas in UK, Netherlandsand Germany.

This is the first European project focusedsolely on the data centre industry. But more is needed to even begin to match theR&D budgets of other industries of similarsize and importance. Take the aerospace industry for instance which has budgetsworth $500bn.

Why do we need more investment forprojects like these? Because if we reallywant to maintain competitive advantageover fast developing overseas markets andto leverage world-leading UK expertise andskills built within the data centre industry,we have no other option. lHassan Abdalla is the dean of the School ofArchitecture, Computing and Engineeringat the University of East London. For more data-central.org/?page=bootcamp

09 Abdullah:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:38 Page 4

Operating a data centre is a big commitment. Getting the very best outof such vast mechanical and electrical infrastructure should be a businesspriority. But are you looking closely enough and asking the right ques-tions?

EfficiencyEnergy efficiency is not just a cost saving exercise but an environmentalresponsibility. However, maximising energy efficiency can save you moneyon your annual power bills as well as improving your capacity to deliverexcellent customer service.

The need for data centre services is growing. Constantly changing busi-ness requirements and technology innovation means customers now de-mand value for money and prioritise efficiency when it comes to datacentre services. Improving your efficiency and reducing your costs allowsyou to be more competitive and position your data centre to handle fu-ture business changes.

ExpertiseColt own and operate 20 data centres across Europe. With 15 years ofindustry experience and managing 30,000sqm of data centre facility, ourData Centre Services division have the expertise to make the kind ofstrategic improvements required in order to ensure maximum energy ef-ficiency.

While we provide some of the most efficient data centres on the mar-ket for either Colt-owned sites or customer sites, we understand that not

everyone is in a position to move to new facilities. Before you make that move, you need to ensure that you are maximis-

ing the efficiency of your legacy data. Based on our learnings from anextensive energy efficiency programme across all of our data centres overthe last 3 years, we have created some straightforward measures thatyou can start to implement today.

1 MeasureStarting to measure, record and track power use on a regular basis is thefirst step to a more efficient data centre. Put yourself in a position tobenchmark your existing energy usage against a comparable timeframe.Continue to measure energy usage consistently and regularly – but avoidsnap judgements based on short term results.

2 Regulate air flow - prevent hot and cold mixingA data centre is essentially a structure that manages the flow of cold airin, and extracts hot air. If the airflow process is not managed correctly,mixing will occur. Controlling airflow and limiting mixing is always a pri-ority.

3 Align hot and cold aislesTake steps to ensure all servers within the racks and rows are facing thesame direction. Then separate the rows into hot and cold aisles with thefront of the servers facing one way and the back the other-this ensurescolder air is directed to the front of the servers and hotter air flows from

12 Steps to a more energy efficient Data Centre

by Ian Dixon, VP Operations, Data Centre Services, Colt

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the back. Creating clear airflow makes the data centre much easier tocontrol and plan.

4 Reduce airflow leaks: blanking platesInstall blanking plates to fill the gaps where no equipment is present.These can stop air escaping between equipment within racks.

5 Check flooringCheck your flooring for gaps allowing air to escape; behind and beneathair cooling units or through revising the position of air vents in floor tiles.The goal is to direct the cold air in one direction, through the racks andout the other side. Mixing of hot and cold air within the data centre is in-efficient.

6 Introduce aisle containmentAisle containment can be introduced to further separate hot and cold airand improve the direction of airflow. Introducing roofs and in particulardoors to the end of aisles can result in a major improvement.

7 Control air temperatureThe average data centre runs at 21 degrees, but with extended ASHRAEstandards, server manufacturers are happy with DC temperatures from18 – 27 degrees. Steps to regulate air temperature such as turning offcooling units, where excess redundancy exists, or increasing the supply airtemperature to the room can lead to further savings.

8 Regulate humidityMaintaining humidity within a data hall within tight bands is like perma-nently boiling a kettle.. Server manufacturers are willing to accept widerhumidity bands as per ASHRAE. By operating to a wider banding; be-tween 20 – 80%, air is able to drift a little more and vapour productioncan be significantly decreased– reducing energy consumption.

9 Check transformer voltageRegularly check the voltage of your electricity transformers to ensure theymatch exactly the supply voltage requirement for your equipment. Ahigher voltage than required means an unnecessary use of power, in-creasing costs.

10 Remove isolation transformersIsolation transformers were a design preference from the 1990s. A legalrequirement in some countries at the time, these can drain on your re-sources but are usually no longer required.

11 Turn off redundant equipmentSwitching off or changing redundant equipment is a simple, yet an oftenoverlooked step to significant energy savings. A single new server cannow do the job of multiple older servers, saving energy and loweringyour system cooler requirements – a compelling reason to change/up-grade your serves. Take the long term view when considering whether toupgrade sooner rather than later.

12 Measure againRegular meter readings will help you understand trends and eliminateany seasonal spikes or oddities to introduce energy saving measures im-mediately. At the end of a 12-month period you should have enoughdata to benchmark against and get a clearer picture of your overall effi-ciency.

SummaryWhether your priority is power saving, reducing costs or internal envi-ronmental objectives, data centre efficiency is a valuable priority to focuson. It drives efficiency on a broader business level and can be a source ofcompetitive advantage.

Our energy efficiency programme incorporating many of the steps out-lined above has resulted in significant savings across our data centres-18% reduction in energy use over the last three years – equating to animpressive saving of €4 million to date.

Our efforts in this area have also been recognised within the industry as Colt became the first data centre operator in Europe to beawarded the M&O Stamp of Approval for operational excellence, andalso claimed the Energy Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability awardat the 2013 International Data Centre& Cloud Awards.Our key findings can be a useful starting point for any organisation look-ing to do the same and we would welcome the opportunity to offer anyinterested parties a tour of our facilities and delve further into how tomake your data centre more efficient.

Simply contact us at +44 (0)800 358 8401 or [email protected]

About ColtWe bring together expert people, tailored solutions and world-class net-work and data centre assets to make it easy for our customers to buy andmanage the communication and technology solutions they need. With a22-country, 43,000km network and 20 Colt data centres across Europe,everything we do is driven towards making things simple, making thingsseamless and making things work for our customers.

This is what makes Colt the Information Delivery Platform.

Visit www.colt.net/dcs

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For those on the outside the datacentre industry is little under-stood, rarely occupying theirthoughts despite the fact it under-writes many of the activities of

everyday life from banking to tax returns,from email and Facebook to tap dancingdogs (more of the dogs later). For those onthe inside there’s a feeling that theirs is anindustry largely misunderstood – some-times wilfully so – and that policy makersare among those who have little grasp ofits impact.

For an industry that invests £15bn a year,where the UK ranks third in the world andwhere issues such as security, privacy, en-ergy supply, power consumption and skillsshortages hit directly against the policyconcerns of multiple government depart-ments, this is a curious state of affairs.

In an effort to shed a little light on the sec-tor and debate a number of these topics, theNew Statesman convened a roundtable ear-lier this summer. Among the invited werethose who run or represent data centres,lawyers, analysts and assorted industrywatchers. The principal guest was AndrewMiller, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port andNeston, and chair of the House of Com-mons science and technology committee.

In a wide-ranging opening, Miller re-flected on the inexorable growth of data(“do people ever throw out their rubbishanymore?”) and the effort to move all gov-ernment processes online, or to use thestrategy parlance, “to go digital by default”.“It’s a great idea, there is no party politics, itmakes an awful lot of sense but there aresome challengers,” Miller observed.

ConfidenceAmong the challenges of going digital bydefault, Miller said, is the need to pre-serve people’s privacy (his committeewon’t, for example, switch over to theiCloud when conducting business usingApple iPads because “it is under the juris-diction of Patriot Acts”) and the need toprovide certainty when transacting in thedigital space. “How do we engender pub-lic confidence?” he asked.

James Dodsworth, head of the globaldata centre practice at law firm White &Case said the answer lay in educating thepublic, making people aware that datacentres were “already an integral part ofbusiness infrastructure in this country”.

While acknowledging that there is a le-gitimate “issue around transparency”,Dodsworth said it was understandable

Factories of the digitalrevolution

Earlier this summer the New Statesman brought together key figures from the data centre industry to talk security, the skills gap,

power consumption, regulation and (naturally) tap dancing dogs

ROUND TABLE

that “people don’t want the data centreswhereabouts to be known, [or] how thesystem works.”

Dennis Kehoe, chief executive ofAIMES Grid Services, said the best way toengender confidence is to learn from theairline industry. “One of the things thathas transformed the perception and ac-ceptance of air travel, and the confidenceof its consumers and regulators, has beenbrands like Rolls Royce,” said Kehoe.“Now where did that brand come from?Partly from a great deal of policy supportover many years because we understoodthe structural, political and economic im-pact of the aerospace industry. I thinkwe’ve got to wake up to that … Politiciansin my view don’t really understand theinfrastructure industry, and they cer-tainly don’t understand the internet.”

Dennis Layton, partner at McKinsey,agreed. “If you included data centres inyour definition of national infrastructure,critical national infrastructure, and hadpolicies around that, [then it creates] confidence in security but also confidence in the value proposition forinvesting in the UK. I think that argumentis being undersold.”

While Miller said the there was a better

12-15 roundtable write-up-edited:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:39


ROUND TABLE

In conversation (clockwise from left): Bernard Geoghegan, Andrew Miller, Jon Bernstein, Rob Coupland, Simon Campbel-Whyte and Emma Fryer

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understanding of the issues in the Cabi-net Office than before, he acknowledgedthat it “doesn’t percolate right throughthe system”. Asked to identify where ithadn’t, Miller said the benefits side of theDepartment of Work and Pensions was“probably the weakest link”, where mul-tiple agencies were failing to share dataeffectively.

SecuritySecurity is a catch all term that can be ap-plied in at least three ways. First there isthe physical security where the role of thedata owner is to prevent the servers beingstolen or sabotaged. Second there is whatmight be defined as geo-political secu-rity: around resilience and guarantee ofsupply. Finally there is data security, thepossibility of hacking on an industrialand/or a state-sponsored scale.

It is the final category that tends to gen-erate the most headlines but, said Layton,it is the first that matters most to thosewho run technology departments withinUK plc. “Physical security is, to CIOs,much more important than cyber secu-rity because it is a bigger risk, a morelikely risk,” he said. It was a point echoedby Huw Owen, chief executive of Ark

Continuity. “If you think of bringingdown the nuclear programme in Iraq, itwas most likely someone interfering in aphysical sense with the hardware.”

And security had a further meaning,Owen said. “Resilience to me in a datacentre sense begins with tenure of land sohow do you hold that land? Is it freehold?Is it sold? Who else can control whatyou’re doing? ”

Power consumptionIn September 2012, the New York Timespublished a now notorious article byJames Glanz entitled “Power, Pollutionand the Internet”. In it Glanz accuses thedata centre industry of being “incongru-ously wasteful”. He wrote: “Online com-panies typically run their facilities atmaximum capacity around the clock,whatever the demand. As a result, datacenters can waste 90 percent or more ofthe electricity they pull off the grid.”

Rob Coupland, UK managing directorof TelecityGroup, mounted the case forthe defence. The purpose-built data cen-tre, he said, is far more efficient than thealternative: servers distributed “in indi-vidual offices and server rooms thatweren’t really designed for purpose".

The common measure of efficiencywithin a data centre is PUE (power usageefficiency). Specifically, this is theamount of energy that is used for compu-tation – the processing and storage of data– divided by the total amount of powerused by the data centre for cooling, back-up and so on. In modern data centres aPUE of 1.5 or below is not uncommon;twenty years ago it was far higher.

Coupland pointed to a paradox that hasaccompanied the rise of the state-of-the-art data centre. “You’ve taken what is anawful lot of distributed power, albeit infairly small chunks, that nobody sees andput it in one place, and that’s the chal-lenge. So actually driving the right behav-iour to optimise efficiency and minimisethe use of carbon makes it look like a bigugly consumer of power.”

Owen said there were examples ofwasteful energy use out there, suggestingthat some systems integrators and government departments were guilty ofnot thinking about consumption. “Gov-ernment department’s won’t be staring ata data centre’s inefficiencies” He con-trasted that “purpose-built, highly effi-cient” data centres. “Just taking a stick toall data centres, including ours and t



others round the table is stupid.”Dennis Kehoe said that regardless of

perceptions of an energy hungry industrythe imperative is to move those 80 percent of companies storing their data inef-ficiently – registering a far higher PUE – towhere the 20 per cent are today. In fact, hesaid, the NY T article was “exceptionallyuseful” in raising the issue.

Andrew Miller said that to contemplategoing back to the way we managed data inthe past is “utterly absurd” while EmmaFryer, associate director of climate changeprogrammes at industry body Intellect,said “even rubbish data centres use lesspower than something in-house.”

There’s more, however, from the NewYork Times, more criticism of the indus-try. The article refers to what it calls “co-matose servers”, those bits ofhardware that are effectivelyout of commission but no onedares turns them off (becauseno one unplugs a server, ever).According to Glanz, when theenergy output of these low, orzero, utilisation machines iscombined with the power re-quired to cool and back-up thedata centre “the energywasted is as much as 30 timesthe amount of electricity usedto carry out the basic purposeof the data center.”

Again the criticism was metwith defiance. Fryer queriedthe use of the word “wasted”.“Wasting 90 per cent of the energy is exactly the same as using a car, where 90per cent of the energy that the car uses isfor moving the car about not the person sitting in it. But he doesn’t go on aboutcars. He doesn’t go on about old lightbulbs which lose 92 per cent of the energyin heat.”

Bernard Geoghegan, managing direc-tor, EMEA of Digital Realty argued that auseful analogy for the data centre waswith the automotive industry where taxbreaks are offered for hydrogen cars but“just because cars are designed to be effi-cient doesn’t mean you emit less carbonthan that car because you may not drive itproperly.” He said the neglected serverwas the equivalent of “a poor driver of acar”. “The data centre community nowprovides [help to] drive your car.”

Given the issues raised by the NY T, isPUE the best measure of efficiency ormerely the best measure we have? RobCoupland again: “PUE has the advantage

of being something that is relatively easyfor everybody who operates the data centre to get hold of that as a measure anddo something with it. Where it becomesslightly tricky is that you end up in an arms race.”

Regulation and incentivesCoupland’s concern is that all data centreowners – of “well-built, well-managedsites that minimise the impact of carbon”– are being punished for the inefficienciesof others and for a general misunder-standing of their role. This, he and hispeers believe, is exemplified by articleslike that in the New York Times. (It is atheme picked up by Steven Norris, for-mer cabinet minister and now chairmanof the Data Centre Alliance; see page 28).

As a result the incentives put in place bysuccessive governments and based on thecarbon reduction commitment (CRC) en-ergy efficiency scheme are misconceivedand, Coupland argued, run against the intended aim.

Why? Because it acts as a “counter incentive” for someone who is sitting ontheir data in a small but inefficient serverroom to bring it into a large but efficientdata centre. “You actually get penalisedfor doing that,” Coupland said. “That degree of uncertainty plays against uswhen people are deciding whether theyshould go to the UK or whether theyshould go to the Netherlands, or

Germany, or other places.” So what is the answer? A line in the

sand – based on an agreed PUE rate –above which companies will be punishedbut below which they will be rewarded bymeans of a sliding scale of exemptions.“CRC is a fairly blunt instrument,” Coup-land said. “There is fairly large amount ofinefficient use out there and that’s whatwe should be focusing on.”

Miller pointed out that other industriesare developing some useful metrics tomeasure their overall carbon emissions.He cited the transportation industrywhich uses a “wells to wheels” measureto assess the energy consumption overthe life cycle of a vehicle.

Ed Cooke, partner at legal firm Bird andBird and specialist in complex real estate,

said it was time Parliamentdemonstrated a proper under-standing of the industry. “Iwould like to see the data in-dustry not be used as a whip-ping boy,” Cooke said.

“If policy makers really un-derstood the data centre in-dustry and could bring consis-tency to their policy-makingacross all the different areas inwhich policy affects data cen-tres markets, then that wouldbe a great step forward.”

Bernard Geoghegan added:“I believe the data centre in-dustry is the most efficient in-dustry that’s there is.”

Economic model“Information Technology is a derived demand,” said Emma Fryer. “You don’tlook at zeros and ones for the joy of looking at zeros and ones, you design ITlike you design transport to do some-thing, and therefore you want to look atIT in terms of what is delivered. What’sthe net outcome?”

“So if the net outcome is lots of videosof tap dancing dogs well I don’t thinkthat’s particularly useful in terms ofemissions or in terms of our economy. Ifthe net outcome is actually massive im-provements in efficiency, in either logis-tics or putting in processes systems car-bon or doing things like improvingtelecoms, you can gradually make the in-frastructure better or more intensive,then those things are great.”

Ah, tap dancing dog, the other player inthe energy and economic debates. Not thedogs themselves but the viewers of videos

ROUND TABLE

“Optimising efficiency hasmade us look like big, ugly

consumers of power”Rob Coupland

t


of tap dancing dogs (and cute cats). If theincentives are misaligned for the data cen-tre providers then there are arguably no in-centives at all driving the general public tolimit their consumption.

Energy supplyFryer identified the freemium model,beloved by digital companies, as a majorpart of the problem. As a business model,freemium works because revenues comefrom a small percentage of the audiencewho pay for a premium service, while thecost of providing a basic (and free) serviceto the rest is marginal. As Fryer points outthat means there is “no price signal” forthe majority of users. Moreover, “peoplehave absolutely no concept of the energyimpact of these activities because a lot ofthat energy is invisible.”

Dennis Layton, echoed thispoint. “There is no model inplace so if you watch 50 danc-ing dogs it costs you the same[as watching one]: nothing.”

Both James Dodsworth andDennis Kehoe raised the spec-tre of scarcity of supply duringthe conversation. “Just as wetalk about the capacity and thecontext of our other infra-structure, whether it is air-ports or roads, we need to talkabout data centres and capac-ity and focus in the sameway,” said Dodsworth.

Meanwhile, Kehoe as-serted: “If you plotted the current projec-tions, the best case apparently is that if thetrend continues it will consume all thiscountry’s electricity by 2020. And theworst case is that it will be nearer 2016. Sothe lights are going to go out shortly be-cause of the dancing dogs.”

Fryer disagreed. “The dancing dogs willhave to meet the market” Meaning? “Themarket will change. If I’m going to uploada video of tap dancing dogs and I’ve got topay 50p to do that so I might think, ‘Hmmshall I do that?’ I don’t think the freemiummodel is sustainable.”

Despite this market solution to a pend-ing problem, the view shared among manyattendees was that there needed to begreater assurances around future powersupply. Rob Coupland pointed out thatbuilding and running a data centre is “acapital investment where the business cycle is maybe 15 to 20 years. These are notshort term investments, they are infrastructure investments that pay out

ROUND TABLE


over the very long term, so having visibil-ity and certainty around supply is absolutely critical.”

Skills gapAnother topic of concern for the data cen-tre industry is the lack of skilled and quali-fied people coming through. For SimonCampbell-Whyte of the Data Centre Al-liance the question is who is going sustainthis part of the knowledge economy given“there’s more than one grey-headed per-son in this industry”. He believed datacentres have “fallen between the cracks oftraditional engineering and scientific vocations” when it comes to attracting ayounger generation.

Kehoe of AIMES Grid Services agreed itwas a pressing issue. He said: “Two and a

half million cloud engineers are requiredworldwide between now and 2015, the USneeds one and a half million. BT aloneneeds 50,000 over the next two years.How many did the universities producethis year to the nearest thousand? Zero.We have a really major problem abouthow we are going to develop that in theUK but we need to prioritise it and to see itas an opportunity.”

In an effort to plug the skills gap, theDCA has joined forces with the Univer-sity of East London and the University ofLeeds to create a data centre “boot camp”(see page 9). This will feature data centretraining and suitability assessment with

the aim of giving graduates the additionalknowledge they need to successfully ap-ply for data centre related jobs.

As the debate drew to a close a succes-sion of data centre insiders pleaded for thebetter understanding of their industrywhile acknowledging that part of the re-sponsibility was their own.

ConclusionsGabriel Harris, director of CBRE DataCentres, said: “The United Kingdom andLondon in particular is one of the largestdata centre markets in the world and cer-tainly the largest in Europe and so we havea real opportunity now right to show realleadership from the government that weare going to put proper policies in place todeal with this.”

For Dennis Layton the focusshould be on three areas: first,relaxing regulatory breaks; sec-ond, enabling the conditionsfor success; and thirdly ensur-ing the talent is in place.

Campbell-Whyte said peo-ple should recalibrate howthey think of data centres. It was, he said, more accurateto think of them as “the digitalfactories of the digital revolution, something thatthey should be looking at as a good thing.”

Emma Fryer added that shewanted politicians to startmaking informed decisions

but conceded that the industry had a roleto play in this. “I’m not after special plead-ing for data centres,” she said. “I’d just likeintelligent policy making. The obviousconclusion of that is that we need to do theinforming so I think the priority is to makesure we explain our sector in words thatpeople can understand and so that is actu-ally my key priority.”

Andrew Miller agreed. “You’ve got to goout and educate policy makers about it,”he said before suggesting a rather unex-pected approach. “My challenge for you isto go and see your own MP so that they …understand it. During busy surgerieswhen you are dealing with people withlots of problems, MPs actually quite likesomeone coming to them and telling thema good news story. I love it.”l

The round table took place on 11 July 2013 atPortcullis House adjoining the Palace ofWestminster. For a full list of participants, see page 2

“You’ve got to go out thereand educate policy makers

about data centres” Andrew Miller


16 | NEW STATESMAN | 30 AUGUST – 5 SEPTEMBER 2013

We need energy targets. We

need them to help usachieve our emissions reduction targets and weneed emissions reduction

targets in the UK because internationalclimate change negotiations are movingat glacial speed. So in the short- tomedium- term at least, the policy initiative has to be taken either at nationalor regional level. This creates somethorny issues .

Rolling out unilateral constraints on carbon is always going to be problematicwhen the organisations subject to them operate in a global market that is not simi-larly constrained. While some data centreoperations are location-specific, the major-ity of data centre services can be locatedanywhere in the world. Data is, after all, the most mobile commodity in existence.Moreover, many of the organisations usingthese services are themselves location agnostic.

It is easy to see that applying constraintsin one jurisdiction can have negative conse-quences. UK businesses are placed at a com-petitive disadvantage compared to theircounterparts overseas. Secondly it discour-ages inward investment. Why pay carbontaxes in the UK when you can go to the USand pay none?

There is a third problem relating to ourglobal market. All carbon and energy tar-gets for the UK relate to production ratherthan consumption. So we are measured bywhat we emit in the UK not what we im-

port as embedded emissions in goods andservices. It might appear at first glance thatwe have decarbonised our economy but wehaven’t. We have just shifted the carbon in-tensive activity elsewhere. If you add con-sumption emissions to our tally, emissionsare rising, not falling.

Restricting production emissions without addressing imported emissionscan drive activity to other, more carbon intensive, regimes. This is known as carbonleakage.

So the global market is one issue. Thenext issue is the conflict between absoluteemissions reductions and the need forgrowth. By their nature, almost all targets

and accompanying legislation are focusedon net reductions. This is a particular prob-lem for data centres for two reasons.

Firstly, the sector is growing quickly andit is creating a rapidly expanding ecosystemof high value-add jobs and services. Al-though efficiency (in terms of processingpower) is increasing very fast too, it can’tquite keep pace with the explosion in de-mand. Policy tools like CRC (the carbon re-duction commitment) or other “polluterpays” mechanisms penalise this growth.

Secondly, the purpose of data centres isto concentrate computing functions into

The powerparadox

The challenge is to providestrong incentives without

damaging growth

by Emma Fryer

Every time a physical process is replaced by a digital one, theemissions change sector and IT picks up the tab. This is a perverse way to look at carbon productivity

OPINION

specialised, purpose built facilities. By do-ing so they replace inefficient “distributed”computing (which was the traditional ap-proach) with a far more efficient alternative.However, current legislation punishesthem for doing this because the emissionsassociated with the computing resource(which had previously been hidden in of-fice buildings) become transparent and ac-countable for the first time – even thoughthey are lower.

Net emissions decrease, but data centreemissions increase – and so do their carbontaxes. Instruments like CRC with an energythreshold are particularly damaging herebecause they encourage inefficient distrib-uted computing, which remains below theradar, rather than consolidation.

This is true of IT generally: computingunderpins every industry sector so everytime an energy intensive, physical processis replaced by a digital one, the emissionschange sector: if a logistics software solu-tion saves fuel for a truck company thetransport sector benefits from the emis-sions reduction but the IT sector picks upthe additional, albeit minimal, carbon. Pol-icy tools often don’t recognise that oureconomy is not a series of unconnected sec-tors but a complex ecosystem.

So what is the answer? Achieving our 80 per cent reduction tar-

gets by offshoring all our energy intensiveactivity and destroying our own economywould not represent a successful policyoutcome. We need to focus on energy effi-ciency and carbon productivity as well as

16-17 Voices from the Industry:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:41

30 AUGUST – 5 SEPTEMBER 2013 | NEW STATESMAN | 17

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net reductions. There is a policy tool thatdoes exactly this – a Climate Change Agree-ment, or CCA – available to energy inten-sive sectors subject to overseas competi-tion. This provides strong incentives forimproving energy efficiency without dam-aging growth. The data centre sector is cur-rently negotiating a CCA with government.

Our objective is not to make specialpleading for our sector but to ensure thatpolicy making is properly informed andthat data centres are treated equably. Wehave seen some very poor policy tools in-flicted on business over the last few years.Most worryingly, political intransigenceover a demonstrably dysfunctional regula-tory approach undermines the social con-tract between government and businessover policy formation. Climate change pol-icy is not easy, but the verdict from industryis “can do better”. lEmma Fryer is associate director of climatechange programmes, energy andenvironment, at Intellect, the tradeassociation for the UK technology industry.

All humanendeavourby David Snelling

The more resource efficient (andcheaper) data storage becomesthe greater the demand – oftenfor uses that didn’t exist before

The global data centre industry

has become one of modern soci-ety’s most important pieces ofinfrastructure. Whether it isstoring data for big business or

enabling effective public services, the easystorage of – and access to – data is funda-mental to almost everything we do today. Itis also one of the fastest growing contribu-tors to carbon in the atmosphere. That’swhy data centres and the way they operateneed to move up the policy making agenda.

Top of the list for consideration is thegrowth in the amount of data stored. Theproduction of data is infinite whichmeans that the only restriction that existson demand is cost. Paradoxically, the

more resource efficient (and thereforecheaper) data storage becomes, thegreater the demand; often for uses thatdidn’t exist before. For example, cheaperdata and better technology has made itcost effective to allow people to commu-nicate with their friends anywhere in theworld through social media – somethingthat would not have been possible with-out more efficient data storage.

On the other hand, by improving tech-nology and making storage more effi-cient, data centres have reduced demandfor other carbon intensive activities in thephysical world. For example, company lo-gistics is now more efficient, reducing thenumber of deliveries and the time theytake. Moreover, the need for travel hasbeen reduced because of email, telephonyand video conferencing.

But in another example of how efficientIT has resulted in some unintended con-sequence, it’s possible to argue that it hasgiven rise to the low-cost airline industry.New and emerging airlines have been ableto strip out a lot of expensive complexityin back office logistics. This in turn has al-lowed for far cheaper airline travel and in-creased the global carbon emissions.

In truth it is virtually impossible to ac-curately state whether the data explosionis leading to a net increase or decrease incarbon emissions.

The UK data centre industry faces par-ticular challenges in becoming more en-ergy efficient. London was one of the ma-jor global centres of data centredevelopment in the mid-1990s with theadvent of the commercial internet. Many

of these data centres need to be upgradedand seriously lag in energy efficiencyterms when compared to new facilitiesbeing built today. We could halve the en-ergy consumption of the UK data centre estate through a wholesale improvement programme.

The good news is that the data centreindustry, through organisations like TheGreen Grid, recognises the challenge. Arange of efficiency metrics and tools havebeen developed that help identify howenergy consumption can be improved.These metrics also help improve trans-parency and allow customers to choosedata centre suppliers with a more sustain-able carbon footprint.

Cloud computing has also improvedpower usage as it allows lots of different organisations to store their datatogether in larger and more energy effi-cient data centres rather than in their owncomputer rooms.

Public policy can play a vital role inguiding the improved energy efficiencyof data storage. Within the EU, data cen-tre efficiency is primarily driven throughbroader energy saving initiatives andpolicies to improve product and buildingdesign. These policies apply equally todata centres as to factories.

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme(ETS) also presents data centres with anuncertain indirect cost that might have tobe passed onto their customers. Other fi-nancial costs and incentives have alsobeen put in place to encourage greater en-vironmental responsibility.

However, while measures like this willimprove the energy efficiency of the datacentre estate itself, it does not address theimpact on the environment of all the hu-man activity that increased data is bring-ing. Efficiency will be massively im-proved but total energy consumption willstill continue to rise.

Data centres are not an isolated piece ofinfrastructure but an enabler in nearlyevery human endeavour. The environ-mental impact of data centres thereforestretches into every discussion of envi-ronmental sustainability. These biggerquestions about controlling our environ-mental impact and limiting what we doand why we do it in the context of near-limitless data storage, has barely even be-gun to be considered. l

David Snelling is research project managerfor Fujitsu and a member of The Green Gridthegreengrid.org

Fryer: we need properly informed policy making

16-17 Voices from the Industry:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:41


SNAPSHOT

18-19 Snapshot:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 15:11 Page 4


Data centres come in a variety of shapes and sizes. A disused

mine in Eid Municipality, 15 miles from Maloy, Norway, is the

site for a large colocation site. It lies beside a deep, cold fjord,

has a reliable power supply and good access to carbon-neutral

energy such as hydropower and wind power.

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Colin Rees knows more than mostabout other people’s eating habits,their takeaway habits at least. AsIT director for Domino’s he cantell, for example, that the most

popular time to order a pizza across theweek is between 7pm and 9pm on a Friday,Saturday and Tuesday night (Tuesday isspecial offer night). That’s the pattern thatcan be guaranteed across the UK. In Ger-many, where Domino’s has recentlyopened stores and where Sundaylunchtimes prove popular for pizza, thepattern is different but no less consistent.

These peak times are up to 20 timesbusier than the rest of the week, says Reeswho knows not only when people orderbut how. Specifically, that over 50 per centof business comes from online sources,more than 20 per cent from mobile chan-nels and that iPad and iPhone users aremore likely to use their devices to orderthan those with other makes of tablets andsmartphones.

Domino’s has over 800 stores in the UKand Ireland, in addition to those recentlyopened in Switzerland and Germany. The

ability to deal with peak traffic is whatshapes Domino’s technology strategy andwhat led Rees to the conclusion that thecompany’s needs would be best served byhousing office-based, as well as customer-facing IT in an external data centre.

“I joined Domino’s three years ago nowand the plan when I arrived was to buildour own data centre. We changed tack,”Rees explains. The existing unreliability

of Domino’s technology infrastructureand the opportunity to take advantage ofan established colocation market drovethat change in thinking.

“I was running a very small team whowere spending an awfully large amount oftheir time trying to keep our systems run-ning … and so going for an external datacentre allowed me to instantly to addressthe reliability,” says Rees of his decision to

Tales from thefrontline

“Feeding and wateringcomputers doesn’t drivecommercial advantage”

by Jon Bernstein

What drives decision-making when selecting the right datacentre solution? Domino’s, Morrisons, Trader Media, Foxtons and others explain all

CASE STUDIES

collocate his servers with Rackspace. “Itallowed me to get a very competitive price… and it allowed me to focus more of myteam’s resources internally on things thatreally gave us competitive advantage. Sothings like the iPhone app which actuallygrow the business forward.”

“In the nicest possible way, feeding andwatering the computers doesn’t reallydrive any commercial advantage. It’s whatyou do with them that counts.”

Feeding and watering computers as adescription of what a data centre can pro-vide resonates with Tim Jones, chief infor-mation officer of Trader Media. As a pub-lishing house Trader Media is best knownfor Auto Trader magazine. Today, the keymarketplace for buying and selling newand used cars is most definitely digital.The Auto Trader website is visited by overten million readers a month with peaks inthe run up to the change of registrationplate each spring and autumn; weeklytraffic spikes on Fridays and Sunday andad hoc spikes when BBC’s Top Gear coversthe second hand market.

As with Domino’s, Jones’s initial incli-

22-25 Case Studies:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 15:28


BFK

nation was to build an in-house data cen-tre but an ever increasing demand for“compute capacity” made a third partyoption more appealing. “The demand forthe internet outstripped our ability to do iton premise,” he says. Four million usersnow access the site via mobile (“often us-ing it on dealer forecourts to price com-pare what’s in front of them”) and thosethat are accessing via 3G make additionaldemands on the network. “It takes up adisproportionate amount of infrastruc-ture in the data centre,” Jones explains.

Trader Media chose Telecity’s KilburnHouse facility in Manchester to house itsserver in part as a “location play” given thepublishers’ technology team, 300 engi-neers strong, is based in the north-west. Ithas allowed them to remain “hands on”.

In addition to dealing with expandingcapacity, Jones wanted to avoid hiringstaff with engineering disciplines “just todo the physical things like cooling andmanaging power”. He now leaves that tohis data centre host. In the future hewould like to pass more over, he says.

“Where we would ideally want to be as

a media business is ‘platform as a service’so I haven’t got to run the data centres, norhave I got to run the servers, I haven’t evengot to worry about the operating sys-tems,” he says. “So [I’d like to be in a posi-tion where] I’m deploying all my people,skills and efforts in building something forthe consumer as opposed to keeping thelights on,” he adds.

Like Trader Media and Domino’s, theinternet is becoming increasingly impor-tant as a sales channel for estate agent Fox-tons, which operates in London and thesouth east. It chose to co-locate its serverswith Timico to ensure it could deliverbandwidth- and storage-intensive toolslike interactive floorplans, virtual toursand slide shows.

“Historically we did not have the capac-ity in-house or enough disaster recoveryfor a public-facing site,” says web managerLeo Lapworth. For a company the size ofFoxtons it is unrealistic to pay for and runtwo generators for back up, two sources ofpower, and two or more points of connec-tivity into their servers.

Meanwhile, for BFK – a consortium of

Tunnel vision: BFK chose to outsource its data centre “because of the transient nature of what we do”

three tunnelling, civil engineering andconstruction firms working on the Cross-rail project – the decision to head downthe data centre route was driven by the na-ture of the business relationship and thenature of the work it performs. “From avery early stage we realised that we had tohave a common platform,” says GeoffBull, quality manager, BFK. “And becauseof the transient nature of what we do – weare in flux setting up offices, moving of-fices – [an outsourced approach] gives usthat surety of where the data is. We don’thave local servers so from that perspectivedisaster recovery is so much easier.”

A major concern for BFK, which out-sourced the data centre and cloud manage-ment to Fordway, is ensuring guaranteedconnectivity at the capacity required, his-torically a difficult thing to achieve in Lon-don. Bandwidth of 50-100Mbps is typical,says Bull. “Because of the mobility of theprojects getting connections in time is al-ways one of the things we struggle with.The cloud is a way of solving this.”

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Coun-cil chose a different approach. Having t



traditionally housed and managed its ITinfrastructure in-house, the councillooked for at a variety of outsourcing alter-natives. As part of a deal it signed with BullInformation Systems in 2008, Bull built a£1.5m Tier 1 data centre within an existingcouncil building. According to KathyClark, head of ICT business performanceat Barnsley council, the nature of the deal,which sees Bull hosting other customerson that site – including Danske Bank, andCoventry University – meant the datacentre effectively costs the council noth-ing to build.

Taking this route, she says, has allowedthe council to reduce costs and create jobs.“Barnsley is quite socially deprived so itwas important to us that any jobs createdstayed in Barnsley.” The data centre cur-rently employs 120 people and, says Clark,a clause in the contract obliges Bull to cre-ate an additional number of jobs, 42 in all,for the duration of the contract.

Had the council gone with a colocationdata centre – a serious consideration at onetime – Clarke fears jobs would have beenlost from the area. But did housing a largedata centre within Barnsley lead to any re-sistance from the local population? “Wehaven’t suddenly created a brand new

square box,” says Clarke. “As far as the lo-cal population was concerned they saw nodifference in usage.”

Thirty miles up the road in West York-shire, supermarket Morrisons is equallydependent on its data centres but uniquelyamong the companies spoken to by the New Statesman, it built, runs andmanages its own.

“As long as I’ve been with Morrisons it’ssomething they’ve always tried to do.” ex-plains Ryan Hopson, the supermarket’sdata centre specialist. “They’ve has alwaystried to own the asset: from owning thefield to grow potatoes all the way throughto the infrastructure and the data centre.”

Morrisons has three data centres – twolocated in the basement of its Bradfordheadquarters and one, around three milesaway, which acts as a disaster recoverysite. The data centres are used for data pro-cessing, storage and network communica-tions to all stores and distribution centresacross the country. All applications and allservices run from there. Hopson and hismanager have a team of 12 operators work-ing in shifts 24/7 all year around.

In common with other data centreusers, Morrison’s has adopted virtualisa-tion as a means of making its use of tech-

nology more efficient, and cost effective.Where physical servers were running atjust 15 per cent capacity, running multiplevirtual servers on a single piece of hard-ware means far more of that capacity isgetting used today.

One of the implications of virtualisationis the increased processing power within areduced space. This in turn requires moresophisticated cooling systems to ensurethe hardware doesn’t overheat. And hereis one of the major conundrum’s for datacentre users and operators. Not only dodata centres require an enormous amountof power to run the servers that supportUK business, they require an enormousamount of power to keep those serverscool and to provide instant back-upshould the primary source of power fail.

Historically, it has taken as much, if notmore, power to provide these auxiliaryservices as it has to provide power forprocessing and storing data. As expressedby the power usage effectiveness (PUE)measure, the most efficient data centrewould hypothetically have a PUE of 1.0where no excess power is used.

Advances in technology have broughtthose PUE ratios down significantly andenergy considerations – cost and environ-

The construction company: BFKBFK is a joint venture of threetunnelling, civil engineering andconstruction companies (BAM Nuttall,Ferrovial and Kier), brought together towork on the Crossrail project linking 37stations from Maidenhead andHeathrow in the west, to Shenfield andAbbey Wood in the east. Rather thanuse one of the three companies’ existingtechnology infrastructure, BFK decidedto outsource the hosting to Fordwaywhich supplied access to the mainproject site and its satellites. Among thetechnology run over the network isAutoCAD software for technicaldrawings and the consortium’stelephone system.

The local authority: Barnsley Metropolitan Borough CouncilBarnsley met its data centre needs in arather unconventional fashion. A jointventure with Bull Information Systemmeant it got a Tier 1 data centre from

which its IT is stored and run for noupfront cost – and created jobs in thelocal area. Bull, in return, gets to selldata centre space and services to anothereight or nine customers. “We werereally keen for jobs to remain inBarnsley,” says Kathy Clark, head of ICTbusiness performance.

The charity: Cancer Research UKLast year Cancer Research UK teamed upwith Channel 4 to launch the ‘Stand UpTo Cancer’ campaign culminating in afour and a half hour show, broadcast inOctober 2012. To handle anticipatedpeaks in traffic and to manage debit andcredit card payments, the charity chose ahosted cloud solution managed byFirehost. Today it runs all its primarysystems – including its customerrelationship management (CRM)software – via a London data centrecampus managed by Interxion. A keydriver, says IT director Mary Hansher, isthe “ability to guarantee uptime”.

The fast food chain: Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s, the pizza delivery company,has over 800 outlets in the UK. It uses adata centre from Rackspace to host itsecommerce website, dominos.co.uk, itsonline payment gateway, as well as itscompany email, intranet and back-officesystems. High levels of security andscalability (the ability for the technologyto be able to cope at busy times, such asFriday and Saturday evenings) are twokey requirements, says IT director ColinRees. Over 50 per cent of its businesstoday comes from online, one in fiveorders from mobile.

tCASE STUDIES



mental impact – tend to play an importantpart in customer decision making.

“There have been big drives within thedata centre industry as a whole to try andincrease efficiencies where we can,” sayHopson. “Chilled water presents a goodopportunity to gain efficiencies and in-crease rack density. For an open rack youcould get maybe one blade chassis in (ablade chassis houses 16 blade servers). Ifyou have cold aisle containment you canhave two blade chassis.”

Domino’s Rees adds: “The greenness ofthe data centre was part of the decision-making process. One of the advantages ofgoing with an external provider is that youcan maintain your corporate responsibil-ity without having to get involved in thedetail of how that’s delivered.”

Barnsley Council’s Kathy Clark says herteam spent a lot of time discussing energyefficiency and believes they have donemuch to address it. This includes intro-ducing virtualisation, sophisticated hotaisle containment cooling systems andmulti-speed air conditioning fans. “Wealso made Bull responsible for the energycosts,” she adds. PUE is now around 1.5where it was nearer 2.3 in the old, in-housedata centre.

Context, however, is everything and fora construction-based business, where en-ergy-intensive equipment are the tools ofthe trade, data centre power usage is not amajor consideration. “Bearing in mindwhat the project is,” says BFK’s Geoff Bull,referring to his Crossrail involvement,“energy consumption of IT is very lowdown the list. Our installed capacity isabout 10-11MW because of the tunnellingequipment, so the IT usage is minimal.”

Another issue that is likely to be near thetop of an IT director’s priority list is secu-rity, both physical security and the protec-tion of the data held. Many data centreproviders make a big play of their PaymentCard Industry Data Security Standard(PCI DSS) certification – necessary for anycompany that stores, processes or trans-mits cardholder data – for example, ortheir compliance with ISO 27001:2005standard for security management. Andwhile there is nothing to stop an organisa-tion obtaining both for an in-house datacentre, convenience appears to be a majorselling point.

“It’s vital for our business to have it butdo I really need people on the payroll allthe time who can do it?” asks AutoTrader’s Tim Jones rhetorically. “So [using

a third party data centre] enables you totake advantage of people who do this allday, every day.”

While not a pre-requisite, a third partydata centre also provides a platform fromwhich to move into the cloud, lettingusers add capacity by drawing on sharedinfrastructure across networks.

It is something that appeals to Jones be-cause it allows his company to concentratemore and more on the application of thetechnology and less on the plumbing.“Further and further up the ecosystemyou are finding that more and more pointsof differentiation are falling away and be-come commoditised.” For Trader Mediathe cloud is used to deliver services to re-mote countries, for disaster recovery andto handle “unpredictable workloads”.

It also appeals to Domino’s Colin Rees,the man who knows what time you orderpizza. “For us that’s an opportunity forthe cloud. We currently have to pay fun-damentally for a set infrastructure that isdesigned to support our busiest day. Actu-ally we’d only like to pay for that on thedays we do that trade.” lJon Bernstein was deputy editor of NewStatesman between 2009 and 2012. He is a freelance editor and writer

The estate agent: Foxtons

The business of selling houses has beentransformed by the internet. Todaywould-be buyers want to access in-depth information, interactive floorplans, virtual tours and slide shows.Foxtons Estate Agents serves Londonand parts of the south-east and itswebsite is hosted at a colocation datacentre run and managed by Timico. Twokey requirements were to deliver highspeed access to potential customers andto enable Foxtons staff to upload largefiles, including high resolution images ofthe properties for sale.

The supermarket: MorrisonsSupermarket chain Morrisons owns,runs and manages its own data centres.It has two in the basement of itsBradford headquarters and a disasterrecovery data centre three miles away.The data centres serve all its dataprocessing, data storage and networkcommunications needs; as well asapplications from warehousemanagement software to finance toword processing, databases andspreadsheets.

The media company: Trader Media

Trader media is best known for AutoTrader, a one-time print-only magazinethrough the pages of which peoplebought and sold used cars. Today it is apredominantly online business; anonline marketplace according to thecompany itself, with its service availableon the web but also via smartphone andtablet apps. For reasons of resilience,security, speed and more reliableconnectivity it decided to stop hostingits data in-house. Instead it now uses adata centre based in Manchester and run by Telecity.


IN PARTNERSHIP WITH KEYSOURCE

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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH KEYSOURCE

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For those in Westminster andWhitehall circles, Steven Norris isbest known as the mid-1990sTransport Secretary under JohnMajor and for his, ultimately failed,

bids to become London Mayor in 2000and again in 2004.

Since leaving frontline politics – hestood down as an MP in 1997 prior to hismayoral flirtations – perhaps his most sur-prising move has been into the data centreindustry, first as an owner and latterly asthe president of the Data Centre Alliance(DCA), the industry association. It’s sur-prising because the data centre is a highlycomplex – and faintly obscure – arena for ahigh profile public figure.

Indeed during our meeting we arejoined by a more technically-mindedmember of the DCA in case he trips upover some of the technical details. In theevent the “minder” (Norris’s term) isbarely required to interject as the formerConservative politician is able to talk withsome passion and knowledge about hisnew specialist subject.

His involvement began when he be-came part-owner of Virtus which has twodata centres serving the London market. Itwas a “property play”, he says (“most ofmy commercial life was in property”) but

he soon realised that it was actually a pieceof infrastructure (“you buy a £3m shedbut you put about £30m worth of kit in-side it”). In December 2010 Norris, now68, became president of the DCA in partto help make the industry less obscure, es-pecially to policy makers who he says havemuch to learn about the sector.

“I have found the level of awareness ofwhat data centres are, what they do, whattheir impact is on society, what their im-pact is on our energy policy is just simplynot on most politicians radar screens let

alone in a form that would be recognisableas policy,” he tells me from an office meet-ing room not far from Piccadilly Circus.

Norris admits that before he became in-volved in the industry his own awarenessof the data centre – “the place where youpark servers” – was much the same as he’sexperienced in Westminster since. Yet heinsists ministers can’t afford to ignore itany longer. “Data manages all aspects ofour lives.” And while he welcomes the

“Government hasa rather confusedidea about us”

“We are entirely passiveplayers in the great

data explosion”

by Jon Bernstein

Former cabinet minister and mayoral wannabe Steven Norris provesa passionate campaigner for the data centre industry

INTERVIEW

noises coming out of the Treasury and theDepartment for Business, Innovation andSkills (“they see big data as something wecan actually build on”) he is less generousabout the mindset within the Departmentof Energy and Climate Change.

“Their attitude is probably bestsummed up by the very first sentence ut-tered to me by my good friend Greg Barkerwhen he said, ‘Ah, yes data centres. Tellme how much energy are you using thesedays? It seems to go up by leaps andbounds every time I hear.’”

Norris concedes that Barker’s questiondemonstrates “a rather intelligent view inthat at least he understood that data cen-tres are large energy consumers. But whathe hadn’t got his head around – and it’s ourjob as an industry to get the messageacross – is that a good data centre is opti-mising the energy consumption of thatdata in a way that really does mean that itadvantages our energy policy and that itadvantages the UK.”

Norris believes this focus on energyconsumption, rather than an acknowl-edgement that an efficient data centre willresult in an aggregate reduction in poweruse, needs to be addressed. And quickly.

The challenge for his industry remains,however, because energy efficiency does-

28-29 Steven Norris interview:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 15:34 Page 22


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n’t necessarily lead to the consumption ofless energy. Indeed, the more readilyavailable you make data-derived services,the more people are going to use them. Isuggest that it’s like adding an extra lane tothe M25; that as soon as you open the newlane it fills up with additional traffic.

“That’s quite unfair,” Norris says.Why? “Because it implies that our job asdata centres is to encourage people to usedata. That’s simply not the case.” He adds:“We’re entirely passive players in thegreat data explosion.”

“The data centre as a piece of infrastruc-ture is not of itself encouraging people touse more data. Far from it. We have no re-mit to do so nor is it in our particular inter-est to do so. Our interest is in managingthe data that’s currently being serviced byso many facilities that are so inefficient.”

But isn’t it in the owner’s interest to getmore and more customers to put more andmore of their servers in his data centre?“You’re guilty of stigmatising the datacentre industry when actually you shouldreally be doing is talking to the people whomake Angry Birds. “

A “we are where we are” argument, per-haps? “It’s very much a ‘we are where we are’ argument. But of course it has amuch more serious implication becausethose zetabytes of data are not really aboutAngry Birds.”

So if there is a misconception about therole of the data centre within the energydebate, how does this manifest itself inpolicy terms? “Lots of misaligned incen-tives,” replies Norris. “Government isn’tclear whether data centres are ‘a goodthing’ or ‘a bad thing’.

“It manifests itself in a rather confusingset of standards by which data centres arejudged – nobody is quite clear how you ac-tually assess the value of a data centre par-ticularly when it comes to energy effi-ciency. And the result of both things isthat government has a rather confusedidea about what it should be doing withdata centres.”

“Government ought to see the efficientdata centre as something that is desirablefor the economy to move towards.”

In terms of future policy, Norris saysdata centres that can demonstrate theirenergy efficiency should be exemptedfrom paying the climate change levy(CCL), or at least pay it at a reduced level.The CCL is designed to encourage busi-ness to reduce energy consumption or use

energy from renewable sources.“We are treated as large energy users

rather than large energy savers,” Norrissays. “When the data centre is full and op-erating at optimum capacity it is consum-ing a very large amount of energy. But itwill actually be saving the country a verylarge amount of energy that will other-wise have been expended in your ratherinefficient office.”

All of which means, there needs to besome consistent measure that will allowpolicy makers to distinguish between en-ergy efficient data centres and those thatare not. In other words, a distinction be-tween those that have earned an exemp-tion and those that haven’t.

Within the industry the de facto meas-ure of efficiency is PUE (power usage ef-fectiveness) which compares the amountof energy used to store and process dataand the energy overhead required to keepthose servers cool, backed-up and secure.(As an equation, divide the total amountof energy used by the amount used specif-ically for computing.) An ideal measure ofPUE would be 1.0 where there is no resid-ual power requirement but historically

Steven Norris: “Don’t stigmatise the industry”

PUE has been closer to 2.0 where as muchenergy is required in overheads as it is incomputation. Norris says that thanks todevelopments in cooling and ventilation,modern data centres can attain a PUE of1.2, even 1.1. Policy makers would need todefine a cut-off point below which ex-emptions would be granted.

Norris admits that while PUE providesthe best metric the industry has, it is not perfect. A data centre operating at ca-pacity is likely to have a far more flatteringPUE than one that has just opened, housesjust a couple of customers and has lots ofempty space that still needs cooling. “MyPUE then will look pretty horrible,” henotes.

Sometimes it takes someone not im-mersed in the technology industry to askthe seemingly obvious question. Duringthe interview, Norris wonders aloud:“Why don’t you make the servers operateat much higher temperatures?”

Whichever measure is used to dictatecarbon levies paid, the effect will surely bemore regulation and more red tape, anath-ema to most Conservative politicians, orin this case a former Conservative politi-cian. “It’s certainly going to require re-aligned incentives and trusted informa-tion. [But] once you’ve got that, it doesn’thave to add up to more red tape.”

Given he rejected my M25 analogy outof hand, what does he see as more appro-priate comparison for the industry inwhich he is now immersed?

“It’s more of a factory. Out there every-body is making their own motorcar intheir own front drive and they are doing itincredibly inefficiently. Give it to us andwe’ll make it on a modern production lineand you’ll get your car better made, moresecurely made and at significantly lowerenergy cost. What I can’t express enoughis that the energy is not generated by us.The energy is generated by users.

“As long as government sees the datacentre that’s full as the problem then theyare missing the point. It’s not the problem,it’s the solution. Treasury and BIS under-stand the benefit of big data; DECC is un-derstandably concerned about the impli-cations of big energy consumption.

“But data centres occupy this interest-ing space where they are servicing themarket much more efficiently than ifthose servers were housed disparately.The more energy we consume, the more energy we save.” l

“Full data centres are not the problem. They

are the solution”

28-29 Steven Norris interview:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 15:34 Page 23


CDN (content delivery network)A large distributed network of serversdeployed in multiple data centres acrossthe internet. The goal of a CDN is to servecontent as near to the user as possible,ensuring fast and reliable downloads. ACDN operator gets paid by the likes ofmedia and ecommerce companies fordelivering their content to their audience.

ChillersThese are industrial-scale refrigerationsystems similar to (but many times thesize of) those seen on company roofs topower the air conditioning. Often theseunits are capable of providing half amegawatt of cooling. They chill waterwhich is transported via lagged pipeworkto Crac units inside the data centre.

Cloud (private and public)The Cloud has become a colloquialexpression used to describe a variety ofconcepts that involve computing which,as far as most users are concerned, issimply “somewhere out there”.

There are now a wide and growingrange of cloud services all provided byserver equipment running in various datacentres around the globe. Among the bestknown are iTunes and Microsoft’s i360cloud version of Microsoft Office.

A private cloud is one operated andring-fenced for the benefit of onecompany or organisation. This is usuallyon dedicated hardware so that it is easilysecured. In a public cloud all users sharethe same hardware and also the samesoftware in the case of SaaS.

ColocationA colocation data centre (also spelled co-location, collocation, or colo) is a type of

data centre where racks are available forrental to retail customers. Colos providespace, power, cooling, and physicalsecurity for the racks, servers, storagearea networks, and networkingequipment of many firms.

Significant benefits of scale (largepower and mechanical systems, theoperational systems and staff) result insome very large colocation facilities withmuch lower PUEs than average.

Crac unitsComputer room air conditioning units arevery large fan-based units within the datacentre’s operational area or data hall.They force hot air through a heatexchanger fed with very cold water fromthe external chillers, removing the excessheat and providing cold air back into thedata hall. Air is circulated through theservers to cool down internal electronics.

Data centreA data centre, computer centre or serverfarm is a facility used to house computersystems and associated components, suchas telecommunications and storagesystems plus cooling systems whichextract heat produced by the electronicequipment. Large data centres areindustrial scale operations using as muchelectricity as a town or small city.

Free coolingIn many data centres there is a move awayfrom relying on energy hungry chillersand Crac units. Servers can now operateat higher temperatures than before and insome countries, the UK included, theoutside temperature is low enough mostdays of the year to provide adequatecooling without the need to run chillers.

Added definitionby Phil Turtle

Don’t know your CDNs from your PUEs, your chillers from your cloud? The New Statesmanjargon buster is here to help

JARGON BUSTER

In some systems the external air and thedata hall air are kept separate by heat-exchangers and others add a process ofsprayed water to cool air even more. Thisis far more efficient that usingrefrigeration units. Days whererefrigeration units don’t have to be runare called “free cooling days”.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)IaaS is the most basic cloud service model.Providers of IaaS own and deploy physicalcomputers in data centres and then makeavailable virtual computers, commonlycalled virtual machines. These virtualmachines include processors, disk-spaceand RAM plus access to internetbandwidth and are frequently offered on asubscription or pay-per-use model. TheIaaS customer is responsible for loadingand maintaining the operating systemand application programs (and licences)on their virtual machine(s).

Managed hosting(dedicated hosting)This is where the service provider takesover most of the management, includingsecurity, memory, storage and ITsupport. Usually, the hosting serviceprovider owns and manages the machine,leasing full control to the client.

Network operations centreThis is usually a centralised office withmultiple massive display screens andspecialised control software monitoringthe condition of a data centre, set of datacentres or wide-area networks. It isstaffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

OutsourcingIT outsourcing occurs when a customer

30-31 Jargon busters:Statesman supplements 27/08/2013 14:42


contracts an outside vendor to provide ITservices that the customer wouldotherwise deliver in-house. Servicesinclude disaster recovery, data storage orother IT functions through web-hosting,server-hosting in colocation facilities tothe provision, operation andmaintenance of an entire data centre.

PaaS (Platform as a service)In the PaaS model, the cloud operatorsprovide a complete computing platform,typically including the operating system,the programming language executionenvironment, database and web server inaddition to the virtual machines andphysical hardware. Customers candevelop and run software solutions on aPaaS cloud platform without the cost andcomplexity of buying and managing theunderlying hardware and software layers.

PUEPower usage effectiveness (PUE) is ameasure of how efficiently a data centreuses its power. It compares the powerused by the computing and relatedelectronics with that needed for cooling,lighting and other ancillary systems. PUEis calculated as the total power used bythe data centre divided by the power usedby the IT servers and networkingelectronics. The ideal (but unachievable)PUE would 1.0 where the IT equipmentuses 100 per cent of the energy and otherservices use zero. Older server rooms anddata centres have PUEs of 2.0, 2.7 or evenmore. Modern, large-scale data centreshave PUEs of 1.3 or less.

Remote handsWhen a company has its IT servers andhardware remotely located in a colocationdata centre, there are times when aphysical re-start, a change of connectionsor the insertion of a program DVD isneeded. Colocation centres have technicalstaff who can carry out these tasks onbehalf of the firm’s IT department. The IT person guides or instructs thecolocation technician to do exactly whathe/she needs – hence the term remote-hands.

RackThe 19-inch rack is an internationallystandard frame or cabinet for mountingmultiple equipment modules. Eachmodule has a front panel that is 19 inches

(482.6mm) wide. The height of theelectronic modules is 1.75 inches (44.45mm), also known as one rack unit or ‘1U’.The most common rack or cabinet is 42Utall. 19-inch racks hold most equipmentin modern data centres, ISP facilities andserver rooms. They allow for dense hardwareconfigurations without occupyingexcessive floor space.

TierData centre availability is related to theprovision of redundancy within itssystems. Tier 1 is basic with no redundantcomponents and statistically has anavailability of 99.671 per cent (an annualdowntime of 28.8 hours). The majority ofdata centres are being built now at Tier 3with 99.982 per cent availability or 1.6hours annual downtime. Tier 4 requiresevery system component to be fullyduplicated plus a spare and so is veryexpensive but achieves 99.995 per centavailability or just 24 minutes ofdowntime per year.

SaaS (Software as a service)With SaaS (formerly known as hostedapplications) users are provided access toapplication software and databaseswithout having to give any considerationto the installation and maintenance of thesoftware, operating systems, servers,networking, or any of the physical andsecurity aspects of the data centres inwhich the physical equipment is housed.SaaS is sometimes referred to as "on-demand software" and is usually pricedon a pay-per-use basis. SaaS providersgenerally price applications using asubscription fee. Examples of SaaS include Google Apps,Microsoft’s Office 365, andSalesforce.com.

Server virtualisationStudies in the IT industry a few years agofound that many of the servers incompanies’ server rooms and data centreswere operating on average at 5 to 15 percent of their processing capabilitiesmaking them both expensive andinefficient. A new type of software calledthe Hypervisor enables one physicalserver to run maybe a dozen or morevirtual machines where each has its ownoperating system and a guaranteed shareof the physical RAM, hard disk storage

and processor. Often, as well as theguaranteed share of these commonresources, a particular virtual machinecan use a bit more when the other virtualmachines are not busy making the wholeeven more efficient and effective. Despitethe fact that virtual machines share acommon hardware host they arecompletely isolated from each other andcan only share information via a networkas discrete servers would.

UPS (uninterruptible power supplies)Should the mains power ever fail, mostdata centres have massive dieselgenerators standing by to take over.However, because these can take a fewminutes to get started and settle down, abattery-based system is also providedthat will keep all the servers, systems andcooling running at full power for aroundten minutes until the generators are readyto take over. These systems also step in to smooth outthe power supply when, for example, aheavy load on the national grid causes apower dip or “brown-out”.

Web hostingAn internet hosting service (a pre-cloudterm) that runs internet servers, allowingorganisations and individuals to serveweb content to the Internet. There arevarious levels of service and various kindsof services offered. Most hostingproviders offer a combination of services;e-mail hosting, for example. DNS(domain name system) hosting areusually bundled with domain nameregistration.

White spaceA term used to describe the area within adata centre available for the siting of racksto contain the server and networkingequipment. It is typically, though notalways, an area of raised computer-roomflooring covered in white floor tiles(hence the name) and is usually expressedin square metres or square feet.

Non-white space in the data centrehouses heavy plant like cooling units,uninterruptible power supplies,electricity transformers and sub-stations,generators and diesel storage tanks. lPhil Turtle is CEO ofDataCenterIndustryPR and COO of the Data Centre Alliance

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