Mike has a new post on a practical guide to data center containers. 

Bottom Line: Because containers encapsulate a large amount of information capability with power and cooling infrastructure, the decision to use containers requires a multi-discipline view of the benefits and impacts of using Containers.  Google and Microsoft have done this exercise, and any one who is thinking about containers should consider both of these companies have figured out where it makes sense.

It is one of Mike’s long posts, so I’ll give you excerpts, and give you a Part 1 to get started, and work on a Part 2 later.

I will do my best to try and balance this view across four different axis the Technology, Real Estate, Financial and Operational Considerations.  A sort of ‘ Executives View’  of this technology. I do this because containers as a technology can not and should not be looked at from a technology perspective alone.  To do so is complete folly and you are asking for some very costly problems down the road if you ignore the other factors.  Many love to focus on the interesting technology characteristics or the benefits in efficiency that this technology can bring to bare for an organization but to implement this technology (like any technology really) you need to have a holistic view of the problem you are really trying to solve.

Mike contrasts Moore’s law vs. the glacial pace of innovation in the data center.

Isn’t it interesting then that places where all of this wondrous growth and technological wizardry has manifested itself, the data center or computer room, or data hall has been moving along at a near pseudo-evolutionary standstill.  In fact if one truly looks at the technologies present in most modern data center design they would ultimately find small differences from the very first special purpose data room built by IBM over 40 years ago.

Mike goes on to discuss modularization in the data center.  The NSA is listening to advice like this and have made modularization a requirement of their $1.5 bil data center.

Data Centers themselves have a corollary to the beginning of the industrial revolution.   In fact I am positive that Moore’s observations would hold true and civilization transitioned from an agricultural based economy to that of an industrialized one.   In fact one might say that the current modularization approach to data centers is really just the industrialization of the data center itself.

In the past, each and every data center was built lovingly by hand by a team of master craftsmen and data center artisans.  Each is a one of a kind tool built to solve a set of problems.  Think of the eco-system that has developed around building these modern day castles.  Architects, Engineering firms, construction firms, specialized mechanical industries, and a host of others that all come together to create each and every masterpiece.    So to, did those who built plows, and hammers, clocks and sextants, and the tools of the previous era specialize in making each item, one by one.   That is, of course, until the industrial revolution.

Data Centers are not buildings they are information factories.

The data center modularization movement is not limited to containers and there is some incredibly ingenious stuff happening in this space out there today outside of containers, but one can easily see the industrial benefits of mass producing such technology.  This approach simply creates more value, reduces cost and complexity, makes technology cheaper and simplifies the whole.  No longer are companies limited to working with the arcane forces of data center design and construction, many of these components are being pre-packaged, pre-manufactured and becoming more aggregated.  Reducing the complexity of the past. 

And why shouldn’t it?   Data Centers live at the intersection of Information and Real Estate.   They are more like machines than buildings but share common elements of both buildings and technology.   All one has to do is look at it from a financial perspective to see how true this is.   In terms of construction, the cost of data centers break down to the following simple format.  Roughly 85% of the total costs to build the facility is made up of the components, labor, and technology to deal with the distribution or cooling of the electrical consumption.

Data Centers are mostly built out of sync with the pace of technology change.

From the perspective of the technology drivers behind this change is the fact that most existing data centers are not designed or instrumented to handle the demands of the changing technology requirements occurring within the data center today.

Data Center managers are being faced with increasingly varied redundancy and resiliency requirements within the footprints that they manage.   They continue to support environments that heavily rely upon the infrastructure to provide robust reliability to ensure that key applications do not fail.  But applications are changing.  Increasingly there are applications that do not require the same level of infrastructure to be deployed because either the application is built in such a way that it is more geo-diverse or server-diverse. Perhaps the internal business units have deployed some test servers or lab / R&D environments that do not need this level of infrastructure. With the amount of RFPs out there demanding more diversity from software and application developers to solve the redundancy issue in software rather than large capital spend requirements on behalf of the enterprise, this is a trend likely to continue for some time.  Regardless the reason the variability challenge that data center managers are facing are greater than ever before.

Mike brings up the problem that occurs as people build costly custom buildings.

From a business / finance perspective companies are faced with some interesting challenges as well.  The first is that the global inventory for data center space (from a leasing or purchase perspective) is sparse at best.    This is resulting from a glut of capacity after the dotcom era and the resulting land grab that occurred after 9/11 and the Finance industry chewing up much of the good inventory.    Additive to this is the fact that there is a real reluctance to build these costly facilities speculatively.   This is a combination of how the market was burned in the dotcom days, and the general lack of availability and access to large sums of capital.  Both of these factors are driving data center space to be a tight resource.

In my opinion the biggest problem across every company I have encountered is that of capacity planning.  Most organizations cannot accurately reflect how much data center capacity they will need in next year let alone 3 or 5 years from now.   Its a challenge that I have invested a lot of time trying to solve and its just not that easy.   But this lack of predictability exacerbates the problems for most companies.  By the time they realize they are running out of capacity or need additional capacity it becomes a time to market problem.   Given the inventory challenge I mentioned above this can position a company in a very uncomfortable place.   Especially if you take the all-in industry average of building a traditional data center yourself in a timeline somewhere between 106 and 152 weeks. 

to be continued…