Who's Filling Data Centers
Data centers are here to stay, but their purpose is changing, according to Bisnow's Data Center Boom event at the Ritz-Carlton last week. (Unfortunately, they are not being repurposed as skate parks.) Videos courtesy Allen Matkins.
Allen Matkins partner Richard Mallory, who moderated, touched upon many of the sector's hot topics. Is the IT ecosystem an important aspect of data center choice, and how does the new data center look? When is demand going to hit the marketplace, and from where? And is data center consolidation close to dead?
Switch EVP of data center technologies Mark Thiele says the traditional internal data center is very much an island that belongs to the company. If they need help from an HP or Salesforce, the optimistic hope is they will come independently to their facility. The opportunity he sees, however, is to treat a data center as a set of infrastructure tools, akin to building the transcontinental railroad or the national highway system. (Pack all your things in a sack on the end of a stick and hop from data center to data center.) Those things enable economic growth for the country or the region. Thinking of a data center as a venue for manufacturing, shipping, communication, data protection, and aggregation means having access to all tools that support that at economies of scale. Having variety, proximity, and access from an independent standpoint is much different than what a traditional indoor data center or mom-and-pop colo downtown can offer, he says. Watch video.
RampRate CEO Tony Greenberg says the way data centers are being filled up or consumed today versus tomorrow is vastly different. What exists today is an application-centric viewpoint. The majority of large non-tech organizations want nothing to do with data centers and want to shutter them, he claims. Their problem is they have large machines called AS/400s and others that have hundreds of applications that will bring their businesses to their knees unless they can move them out and allow them vast scale. Ebay, one of his clients, has done wonders with its DSE external dashboard—isolating the exact cost of all IT operations and computing and layering that into a public dashboard. That has allowed RampRate to see what the buy and sell looks like at a cost per transaction. Watch video.
TELADATA principal Brian Donathan says it's a unique time trying to look at the future and where software is going to tie into cloud environments and how it impacts real estate. There are going to be up to 50 billion different devices out there connecting to the Internet, he says, (though we're sure not one person will be happy with the speed of their device) and that means starting to look at more of a distributed architecture of the network and having more access throughout the world. That means putting less of an emphasis on the fully redundant facility and more on having multiple facilities and operational, or initial cap X, costs. The trend for the last few years has been getting the most efficient operational data center. He's starting to see less Tier 3 and 4 designs and more of how can it be built cheaper. Watch video.
Corporate Realty, Design and Management Institute prez Alan Whitson says the big topic around Obamacare right now is electronic health records. A buddy at Harvard says an electronic health record is about 80 megabytes, he says; a record is created at every doctor visit, so there's a whopping 1.1 billion created every year in healthcare. That works out to be 176k terabytes of data every year. (And you thought the sniffles were an easy fix.) That's just the patient records, he says (not counting running the hospital, the medicine supply chain, or accounting). The law requires hospitals to keep the data around for at least 15 years; because data storage is so cheap, they are just going to keep it. Watch video.
