The ever increasing requirements to deploy new applications and to support larger numbers of users coupled with legacy applications that do not share resources running on energy-hungry outdated servers that are sized to handle peak workload have lead many IT organizations to face a space, power, and cooling crunch and have pushed datacenters to their limits of space and energy consumption. Many datacenters built to last for 10 to 15 years have reached a premature end of life because they were not meant to support the growth that has actually taken place. The lack of flexibility caused by populating datacenters with what is now outdated, inefficient hardware has also begun to affect business agility.

Inefficiency can be difficult to address because facilities organizations don’t always understand—or even believe in—the ever-increasing power requirements of IT organizations. Conversely, IT organizations typically don’t understand the time and expense required to implement power and cooling infrastructure to support higher-density datacenters.

By undertaking projects to modernize and reorganize their datacenters many IT departments have reported up to 60% reductions in space requirements and 25% in power consumption.  But most importantly the biggest benefit is making space available for new deployments without the need for expanding their datacenters.

It is however practical for datacenter managers to prioritize their modernization and reorganization efforts in order to deal with their most acute problems first whether these are associated with power consumption, space limitations or cooling capacity. As you work on your most severe problem you are likely to be solving other issues automatically. That is because most modern servers are designed to address space saving, energy efficiency and cooling requirements.

Power optimization is achieved via retiring lightly used old servers, replacing aging energy hungry servers with modern power efficient servers and consolidating workload onto fewer virtualized servers. Although modern high density servers probably require less cooling per unit of processing power they may need more spot cooling so such upgrades need to be taking that into consideration. Nearly all datacenters end up with hotspots due to the inability to deliver the right amount of cooling to every rack, especially in datacenters where server density varies significantly. The use of spot cooling allows you to deal with this issue in a more cost and energy efficient manner.

To reap the most benefit from implementing power, space and cooling optimization strategies, it’s often necessary to reconfigure existing datacenter spaces and dopt world-class redesign methodologies in order to avoid the need for redesigning once again soon.

It might seem counterintuitive to think that moving to higher-density equipment, which generates more heat in a smaller space, could actually increase efficiency. But server consolidation does result in higher performance per watt, and space consolidation enables more-efficient power, cooling, and cabling systems to be deployed. The energy savings of newer equipment is so substantial that it’s worth dedicating a percentage of datacenter reconfiguration costs to acquiring new equipment.

The trouble is that most organizations, big and small continue to automate more of their business processes and establish more electronic communications channels with their customers and partners. All of that require more iron in the datacenter, so the datacenter challenges aren’t going to go away anytime soon. So unless you plan to move some servers to external hosting or replace some of your applications with some cloud based SaaS services you better roll up your sleeves and start working on that datacenter modernization plan!

Surely this won’t be your most glamorous project but so as digging the foundation in order to build a shiny skyscraper.