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The Economist recently tackled the trend around cloud computing and the issue of energy usage in datacentres. It's amazing to think that datacentres collectively now create more carbon emissions than Argentina or the Netherlands. The author of the article is slightly cynical about hardware makers who are hyping the issue and suggests that datacenter owners are burying their heads in the sand as far as their inherent inefficiency is concerned.

And rightly so, because the challenges within the datacentre go far deeper than simply the hardware and energy they use. We're likely to see a sea-change in the way datacentres are run. As the rate of growth in datacentre-usage keeps sky-rocketing, datacentres are not only going to have to learn to cope with growing energy consumption, but they're going to be challenged to optimise how services are run and maximise capacity. To that end, we've started thinking about how BSM can contribute to the datacentre environment.

The considerable disadvantage that datacentre administrators face, now (and particularly with the advent of technologies such as virtualisation) is that they don't know what applications use what servers. One huge problem that datacentres - and indeed the wider IT community faces - is that when it comes to the wide-scale management of software, companies fail to understand how software interrelates and crucially, the relationship between IT assets and the commercial value of the services they provide. Without the ability to understand this, datacentres have little chance of powering down components that are commercially not critical. They have even less chance of prioritising, from a business perspective, the usage of each component and correcting issues that arise.

Until datacentres develop to the point that they can understand the commercial value of services on both a macro and a granular level, they won't be able to control change within their systems, or pinpoint the impact of potential changes. They certainly won't be able to report to their customers that they are saving the planet.

Sean

I recently attended and enjoyed the DatacenterDynamics Command and Control conference in London. With increasing energy costs and growing environmental concerns optimisation of the datacentre has become topical. I gained an insight into how sophisticated facilities management (FM) in the datacentre has become. There are many technologies in the datacentre that require management: Fire detection systems, power and thermal, security, CCTV etc. Adding to this array of technology, the latest chip designs reflecting cost and environmental concerns include power and thermal monitoring and the ability to throttle back.

There appears to be general agreement that to attain an optimal datacentre requires a convergence of the FM and IT disciplines. Many believe it would be beneficial if the cost of the datacentre fell within the IT budget. IT would then be compelled to take responsibility for this aspect of IT costs. Such a convergence is challenging, since the management tools and the cultures of FM and IT are different.

The danger to avoid is creating silo’d management systems that restrict us into making isolated non-holistic decisions – that is, technology decisions without an awareness of the business services that are involved. In IT management it is now well accepted that service management rather than the traditional component management is the optimal way to manage IT systems. This service management concept needs to be applied to the management of FM technology. So for instance a decision to throttle back would be taken with full awareness of what business function the server was supporting.

Business Service Management (BSM) has proven very successful in bringing this business service perspective to IT and it would seem logical it can also accommodate FM. BSM can be envisaged as consisting of three tiers:

1) The first integrates with the existing management tools. This could easily be extending to incorporate the FM management tools.

2) The second tier models the services and once again could easily incorporate the FM components.

3) The third provides secure views tailored for different user groups and would provide personalised views for FM community user groups.

The advantage of converging the FM and IT management domains at the BSM level is you get a service perspective, making for better informed decision making, and a more common level of terminology, improving communications.

It will be interesting to see if BSM can bring these anticipated benefits of a more efficient and effective datacentre through the service perspective and the cultural alignment.

-- Jim