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If you take a long, hard look at many of today’s data centres and server rooms, what you'll see isn't very inspiring: Rats' nests of cables spill out of racks and bunch under raised floors. Air conditioning blasts at subarctic temperatures in an attempt to cool a few server hot spots. And, lots of administrators run around trying to keep the IT engine tuned up and running.
It’s enough to make you grateful these IT hubs are so often located in the back office, in the basement or even in a different town.
Running out of options
Despite huge changes in the speed of commerce and the way most companies do business, many data centres don’t look very different from the way they did when everyone was worrying about the Y2K problem.
“A data centre that looked new and shiny in 1998 now looks inadequate in many cases,” says Jonathan Eunice, an IT adviser at analyst firm Illuminata. “A lot of people are just out of space, out of power, out of cooling,” he says. “That’s why in some data centres you have cables everywhere – often stuffed under the raised floors that are supposed to be primarily supporting cooling – and you can occasionally even see hardware-store fans on the floor in an attempt to [get enough cooling power to] extend data centre life a little bit longer.”
The need for genuinely new choices
But Eunice says he sees three promising new trends coming together in creative new choices that could transform those overstuffed rooms: modular computing such as blades, better administration software and the greater power efficiency and cooling innovations of recent server introductions.
“When managed well,” says Eunice, “modularisation – such as blades – can help solve the cable mess, as well as the installation mess that often happens when you have to coordinate new server changes and additions,” he says.
Stoyan Kenderov, director of product marketing for the customer management division of Amdocs, agrees. “When launching new services, service providers need to be agile in responding to the subsequent customer demand. One irritating customer experience can send a new customer running and impact the perception of his family and friends,” he says.
“Some of our largest customers have adopted blades,” says Kenderov. “Blades help them deploy agility best practices and address many problems at once. Blades also help them save precious data centre space and incorporate thermal management features that can cool data centres better. This can have a massive impact on the data centre,” he explains.
Better server management and power management
In addition, command-and-control software for blades is progressing rapidly, so blading everything can make a dent in both administration and power-and-cooling challenges. The end result is that many of the components of cooler, less power-hungry infrastructure are increasingly able to communicate what power they’re drawing.
“Many of these components can be controlled by software, so that something like HP Systems Insight Manager or HP Insight Control Environment can use this information to help you cap or throttle power,” says Eunice. “That means you can make good decisions on how much power you need now, he says.
Using blades to manage enormous expansion
Some firms are already using these tools to take their data centres to the next level. When communications provider Acision started out in the early 1990s, it handled about 10 text and multimedia messages each second. Today, Acision handles about half of the world’s SMS messages and processes on the order of 16,000 messages per second – all using a cluster of HP Integrity server blades inside an HP BladeSystem enclosure.
“We built our SMS service on top of HP servers because of the high availability and clustering capabilities of the HP solution,” says Steven van Zeanen, vice president of marketing for Acision. “We’ve been able to scale our system to become an industry leader while providing continuous service to our customers. It’s unthinkable that an SMS actually wouldn’t be delivered – that’s where our HP and OpenVMS solution comes in,” van Zeanen says.
Van Zeanan says his company is looking forward to new advances in data centre technology, such as the HP Integrity BL870c, because the server offers new power and new choices in the blades arena
Integrity BL870c: increasing the options
At double the memory capacity and four times the processors of earlier blades, each Integrity BL870c blade supports a choice of four operating systems, so that different types of HP blades can handle a wide variety of applications, all from the same enclosure.
For enterprises running many different types of software, this can radically expand their options. “Having much of their infrastructure in blades means that companies can quickly scale their capabilities up and down, and they can move resources where they’re needed through server and storage virtualisation,” says Amdocs’s Kenderov. "That wasn’t possible with legacy hardware, which required a lot of resources to respond to new demand,” he explains.
Of course, all the features that have made HP BladeSystem so successful: the small footprint, HP-pioneered power-and-cooling technologies, such as Thermal Logic, and administrative innovations such as HP Virtual Connect and HP VSE for flexibility and easy administration.
British politician Harold Wilson once said that “the only human institution that rejects progress is the cemetery.” Thanks to recent innovations in blades, administration software, and power–and-cooling technology, the data centre need not be added to that list. And the BL870c wraps these advances into one powerful multiprocessor package that promises to help with the first significant data centre transformation in many years.
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