Here’s a compelling argument in favor of putting your IT infrastructure at a managed-services provider such as EasyStreet: The risk of wasting big dollars in capital and operating costs by overbuilding your own data center.
American Power Conversion (APC)—a Rhode Island-based major supplier of integrated critical power and cooling services—polled a number of its customers regarding their data center utilization and came up with some surprising findings.
Such as: Utilization of physical and power infrastructure in customer data centers is less than 50 percent. This gap is the result of anticipated loads versus actual loads. For example, APC found that, typically, power and cooling systems were completely built-out from Day One in data centers with design lives of 10 years. And the actual loads never came close to what had been anticipated.
A common assumption in these data centers was that start-up loads would be 30 percent of the eventual expected load. In fact, the actual start-up loads tended to be only 30 percent of what was anticipated for start-up. Likewise, the eventual actual load in these data centers amounted to only 30 percent of installed capacity.
What does it mean? “The average data center is ultimately oversized by three times in design value,” the survey report states. “At commissioning, the oversizing is even more dramatic, being typically on the order of 10 times.”
Stay tuned for Part 2, dealing with the wasted costs of overbuilding.
I try to keep up with some of the info-buzz happening each week. An interesting way to check out the techno highlights each week is to take the InfoWorld news quiz. At the end of the 10-question quiz, I’m often ranked as “News Challenged,” but it’s an educational diversion and, therefore, within the realm of activities I can call “work.” You can find a link to the InfoWorld news quiz page here.
Over a quarter of workers in London are using laptops in bed, according to a recent survey with the odd title “Laptop Use in Bed and the Security Implications.” International data security company Credant Technologies polled 300 workers in London in April for the purpose of determining “whether the UK has become a nation of work-obsessed, laptop-dependent key tappers and to highlight the security implications of unsecured mobile devices,” according to the Credant press release.
Of the one-in-four who do work in bed, nearly 60 percent do so between two and six hours a week. Forty-four percent admitted they are holding important work documents on their mobile devices, of which 54 percent were not adequately secured with encryption.
And eight percent admitted they spend more time with their laptops than talking with their partners. To which the survey authors concluded: “Little wonder that the survey also found that the majority of their bed partners found their partners’ obsession with their laptops ‘a very annoying habit.’”
More IT departments could be more successful if it weren’t for the mindset of the people managing them, according to Ilya Bogorad of Bizvortex Consulting Group, located in Toronto. “I often encounter situations where I can’t help but feel that an IT department could be a runaway success within its organization if it weren’t for the beliefs that their leader seems to hold,” he says.
Ironically, some of the ideas holding down IT (and one suspects other parts of the organization as well), seem on the surface to simply make sense. But Bogorad encourages organizations to examine these ideas at a deeper level. Here, for example, are three of them:
1. We are under-resourced.
“This is a universal complaint,” Bogorad says. “You can never have enough time, staff or money if your priority system is out of order. The key is in using the resources you have in such a way that they produce the best ROI possible.
2. Projects must save costs or generate revenues.
“If you merely concentrate on the financial side of costs and benefits and require that all projects have a positive immediate ROI to be pursued, you’re killing innovation in your organization,” he contends. “Think about it. How innovative would you want to be if every suggestion you make is immediately evaluated in respect to financial benefit?
3. In difficult times, we must cut costs
“Prudent financial management is a must at all times, good and bad. But consider this: it’s impossible to become successful by pinching pennies,” Bogorad warns. “It just doesn’t happen. The best value generated by an IT department today does not lie in trivial and often mindless cost-cutting but in innovation, business alignment and strategic thinking.”
Bogorad has this advice for executives in these difficult times: “Invest – not cut – time, money, and executive support into business-critical projects, while completely abandoning projects that are no longer relevant. You must constantly challenge your people to critically examine the ways you do business and to improve them.”
For more of Bogorad’s observations and ideas, visit his column at TechRepublic.
If most of you are unaware of our recent power and network upgrades, that’s a good thing! It means all of our extensive planning and testing resulted in no disruption of service to our customers.
We recently added a third back-up generator, and on Saturday, May 9, we doubled the Portland General Electric power coming into our data center to 1500kVA. The process took seven hours, five electricians and a quarter mile of 1-inch diameter wire. Our generators took the load for the entire time it took to complete the upgrade. They have since been re-fueled with 594 gallons of diesel.
We’re also making network improvements, including increasing our upstream capacity by 6X to 3 Gbps.
You can see all of our “current” data center specs here.
