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Changing the economics of facility design

When it comes to data center design, the pressures — and the conflicts swirling around them — have never been greater.

On the one hand, you need to accommodate an increasingly dense technology infrastructure, stringent service-level demands and ever-higher system and application availability requirements.

On the other hand, the cost of constructing a new data center or retrofitting an existing facility can be enormous, and in today’s tough economic climate major projects are being put on hold. But standing still can dull your competitive edge and prevent you from leveraging new opportunities when the economy turns around.

This dilemma is intensified by the often conflicting goals of your IT and Facilities organizations. IT tends to focus on immediate applications and SLA needs. Facilities concerns itself with longer-term maintenance and scalability issues — as well as potentially prohibitive upfront construction outlays and ongoing operations.

	Traditional data center design: monolithic redundancy facility-wide

	Behind today’s quandaries lies the fact that data centers have traditionally been engineered to deliver the highest-affordable availability levels. To meet the requirements of just a handful of critical applications, full redundancy is often built in throughout the facility. This includes redundant power and cooling and other mechanical/electrical infrastructure, redundant computer systems and network infrastructure, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and the like. The inevitable result: an over-engineered, over-provisioned facility rife with unnecessary CAPEX and OPEX.

Multi-tiered hybrid design: innovation for facility optimization and cost-reduction

HP is pioneering a cost-efficient alternative to the traditional monolithic model: multi-tiered hybrid design. In this future-focused approach, the facility is engineered to incorporate multiple operational environments, each aligned with the business priority and criticality of specific systems and applications. Environments that require similar levels of redundancy — high, mid-level or low — are grouped within segmented raised floor spaces, or “pods,” supported by appropriate levels of facilities and technology infrastructure.

Each pod is engineered to match the availability requirements of the specific systems/applications tiers deployed within it, as determined by a structured business impact analysis.

Business-critical applications, for example, are deployed only within pods designated for high-availability operational models. These environments are equipped with fully redundant feeds to all IT equipment, redundant computer and telecommunications networks, industrial-strength security hardening and redundant power and cooling and other mechanical/electrical infrastructure components. Less-than-critical environments are deployed into pods engineered on lower-level operational models.

The bottom line: The unnecessary redundancy that marks traditional facilities is eliminated. So upfront capital investments and ongoing ownership costs are dramatically reduced.

Bridging the IT-Facilities gap

Multi-tiered hybrid design incorporates a unique methodology that involves close cooperation between HP consultant/design teams and leaders of IT and Facilities organizations. In this collaborative process, IT and facilities infrastructures are aligned with business goals to “right-size” each pod’s availability/redundancy.

The multi-tiered hybrid approach satisfies IT’s need to have availability requirements matched with the appropriate facility infrastructure support systems. And it satisfies the facilities department’s need to provide the adaptability required for long-term viability and cost-containment. Modular “blocks” in the power and cooling systems, for example, can be readily reconnected to modify various pods’ redundancy levels. And the multi-tiered pods are designed with built-in scalability based on projections from the business impact analysis.

Toward better business outcomes

HP multi-tiered hybrid design points the way toward the data center of the future. Prospective benefits of this approach include:

Lower capital costs. Upfront data center construction outlays can be trimmed by 15 to 25 percent. For example: According to HP customer data, the original capital cost of building a high-redundancy facility could be cut from $184 million to $138 million — a savings of $46 million.*

Lower operations costs. By avoiding overprovisioning and unused redundancy, the multi-tiered hybrid model consumes fewer resources, occupies less space and requires less maintenance and support.

Higher energy efficiency. Dynamic cooling capabilities provide targeted capacity to both high-density technology and less-demanding pod environments.

Increased operational flexibility. Adaptability and scalability are designed in.

Reduced business continuity risk. Systems and equipment failures are contained within smaller, more readily addressable, areas of the data center.