2011 was a great year for technology innovation. The science of data center design and operations continued to improve, the move away from mixed-use buildings used as data centers continued, the watts/sqft metric took a second seat to overall kilowatts available to a facility or customer, and the idea of compute capacity and broadband as a utility began to take its place as a basic right of citizens.
However, there are 5 areas where we will see additional significant advances in 2012.
1. Data Center Consolidation. The US Government admits it is using only 27% of its overall available compute power. With 2094 data centers supporting the federal government (from the CIO’s 25 Point Plan to Reform Fed IT Mgt), the government is required to close at least 800 of those data centers by 2015.
The lesson is not lost on state and local governments, private industry, or even internet content providers. The economics of operating a data center or server closet, whether in costs of real estate, power, hardware, in addition to service and licensing agreements, are compelling enough to make even the most fervent server-hugger reconsider their religion.
2. Cloud Computing. Who doesn’t believe cloud computing will eventually replace the need for a server closets, cabinets, or even small cages in data centers? The move to cloud computing is as certain as the move to email was in the 1980s.
Some IT managers and data owners hate the idea of cloud computing, enterprise service busses, and consolidated data. Not so much an issue of losing control, but in many cases because it brings transparency to their operation. If you are the owner of data in a developing country, and suddenly everything you do can be audited by a central authority – well it might make you uncomfortable…
A lesson learned while attending a fast pitch contest during late 2009 in Irvine, CA… An enterprising entrepreneur gave his “pitch” to a panel of investment bankers and venture capital representatives. He stated he was looking for a $5 million investment in his startup company.
A panelist asked what the money was for, and the entrepreneur stated “.. and $2 million to build out a data center…” The panelist responded that 90% of new companies fail within 2 years. Why would he want to be stuck with the liability of a data center and hardware if the company failed? The gentleman further stated, “don’t waste my money on a data center – do the smart thing, use the Amazon cloud.”
3. Virtual Desktops and Hosted Office Automation. How many times have we lost data and files due to a failed hard drive, stolen laptop, or virus disrupting our computer? What is the cost or burden of keeping licenses updated, versions updated, and security patches current in an organization with potentially hundreds of users? What is the lead time when a user needs a new application loaded on a computer?
From applications as simple as Google Docs, to Microsoft 365, and other desktop replacement applications suites, users will become free from the burden of carrying a heavy laptop computer everywhere they travel. Imagine being able to connect your 4G/LTE phone’s HDMI port to a hotel widescreen television monitor, and be able to access all the applications normally used at a desktop. You can give a presentation off your phone, update company documents, or nearly any other IT function with the only limitation being a requirement to access broadband Internet connections (See # 5 below).
Your phone can already connect to Google Docs and Microsoft Live Office, and the flexibility of access will only improve as iPads and other mobile devices mature.
The other obvious benefit is files will be maintained on servers, much more likely to be backed up and included in a disaster recovery plan.
4. The Science of Data Centers. It has only been a few years since small hosting companies were satisfied to go into a data center carved out of a mixed-use building, happy to have access to electricity, cooling, and a menu of available Internet network providers. Most rooms were 
designed to accommodate 2~3kW per cabinet, and users installed servers, switches, NAS boxes, and routers without regard to alignment or power usage.
That has changed. No business or organization can survive without a 24x7x265 presence on the Internet, and most small enterprises – and large enterprises, are either consolidating their IT into professionally managed data centers, or have already washed their hands of servers and other IT infrastructure.
The Uptime Institute, BICSI, TIA, and government agencies have begun publishing guidelines on data center construction providing best practices, quality standards, design standards, and even standards for evaluation. Power efficiency using metrics such as the PUE/DCiE provide additional guidance on power management, data center management, and design.
The days of small business technicians running into a data center at 2 a.m. to install new servers, repair broken servers, and pile their empty boxes or garbage in their cabinet or cage on the way out are gone. The new data center religion is discipline, standards, discipline, and security. Electricity is as valuable as platinum, just as cooling and heat are managed more closely than inmates at San Quentin. While every other standards organization is now offering certification in cabling, data center design, and data center management, we can soon expect universities to offer an MS or Ph.D in data center sciences.
5. The 4th Utility Gains Traction. Orwell’s “1984” painted a picture of pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control (Wikipedia). Many people believe the Internet is the source of all evil, including identity theft, pornography, crime, over-socialization of cultures and thoughts, and a huge intellectual time sink that sucks us into the need to be wired or connected 24 hours a day.
Yes, that is pretty much true, and if we do not consider the 1000 good things about the Internet vs. each 1 negative aspect, it might be a pretty scary place to consider all future generations being exposed and indoctrinated. The alternative is to live in a intellectual Brazilian or Papuan rain forest, one step out of the evolutionary stone age.
The Internet is not going away, unless some global repressive government, fundamentalist religion, or dictator manages to dismantle civilization as we know it.
The 4th utility identifies broadband access to the ‘net as a basic right of all citizens, with the same status as roads, water, and electricity. All governments with a desire to have their nation survive and thrive in the next millennium will find a way to cooperate with network infrastructure providers to build out their national information infrastructure (haven’t heard that term since Al Gore, eh?).
Without a robust 4th utility, our children and their children will produce a global generation of intellectual migrant workers, intellectual refugees from a failed national information sciences vision and policy.
2012 should be a great year. All the above predictions are positive, and if proved true, will leave the United States and other countries with stronger capacities to improve their national quality of life, and bring us all another step closer.
Happy New Year!
In the good old days (late 90s and most of the 2000s) data center operators loved selling individual cabinets to customers. You could keep your prices high for the cabinet, sell power by the “breakered amp,” and try to maximize cross connects through a data center meet me room. All designed to squeeze the most revenue and profit out of each individual cabinet, with the least amount of infrastructure burden.
Forward to 2010. Data center consolidation has become an overwhelming theme, emphasized by the US CIO Vivek Kundra’s mandate to force the US government, as the world’s largest IT user, to eliminate most of more than 1600 federal government owned and operated data centers (into about a dozen), and further promote efficiency by adopting cloud computing.
The Gold Standard of Data Center Operators hits Speed Bump
Equinix (EQIX) has a lot of reasons and explanations for their expected failure to meet 3rd quarter revenue targets. Higher than expected customer churn, reducing pricing to acquire new business, additional accounting for the Switch and Data acquisition, etc., etc., etc…
The bottom line is - the data center business is changing. Single cabinet customers are looking at hosted services as an economical and operational alternative to maintaining their own infrastructure. Face it, if you are paying for a single cabinet to house your 4 or 5 servers in a data center today, you will probably have a much better overall experience if you can migrate that minimal web-facing or customer facing equipment into a globally distributed cloud.
Likewise, cloud service providers are supporting the same level of Internet peering as most content delivery networks (CDNs) and internet Service Providers (ISPs), allowing the cloud user to relieve themselves of the additional burden of operating expensive switching equipment. The user can still decide which peering, ISP, or network provider they want on the external side of the cloud, however the physical interconnections are no longer necessary within that expensive cabinet.
The traditional data centers are beginning to experience the move to shared cloud services, as is Equinix, through higher churn rates and lower sales rates for those individual cabinets or small cages.
The large enterprise colocation users or CDNs continue to grow larger, adding to their ability to renegotiate contracts with the data centers. Space, cross connects, power, and service level agreements favor the large footprint and power users, and the result is data centers are further becoming a highly skilled, sophisticated, commodity.
The Next Generation Data Center
There are several major factors influencing data center planners today. Those include the impact of cloud computing, emergence of containerized data centers, the need for far great energy efficiency (often using PUE-Power Utilization Effectiveness) as the metric, and the industry drive towards greater data center consolidation.
Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, strongly believes ”Just as in the last decade we saw the assembly of disparate networks in to newly formed common, physical layer interconnection facilities in major markets we are now seeing a real coordinated global effort to create new and assemble the existing disparate infrastructure elements of dark fiber, wireless towers and data centers. This is the next logical step and the first in the right direction for the next decade and beyond.”
We are also seeing data center containers popping up along the long fiber routes, adjacent to traditional breaking points such as in-line amplifiers (ILAs), fiber optic terminals (locations where carriers physically interconnect their networks either for end-user provisioning, access to metro fiber networks, or redundancy), and wireless towers.
So does this mean the data center of the future is not necessarily confined to large 500 megawatt data center farms, and is potentially something that becomes an inherent part of the transmission network? The computer is the network, the network is the computer, and all other variations in between?
For archival and backup purposes, or caching purposes, can data exist in a widely distributed environment?
Of course latency within the storage and processing infrastructure will still be dependent on physics for the near term, actually, for end user applications such as desktop virtualization, there really isn’t any particular reason that we MUST have that level of proximity… And there probably are ways we can “spoof” the systems to think they are located together, and there are a host of other reasons why we do not have to limit ourselves to a handful of “Uber Centers…”
A Vision for Future Data Centers
What if broadband and compute/storage capacity become truly insulated from the user. What if Carr’s ideas behind the Big Switch are really the future of computing as we know it, and our interface to the “compute brain” is limited to dumb devices, and that we no longer have to concern ourselves with anything other than writing software against a well publicized set of standards?
What if the next generation of Equinix is a partner to Verizon or AT&T, and Equinix builds a national compute and storage utility distributed along the fiber routes that is married to the communications infrastructure transmission network?
What if our monthly bill for entertainment, networking, platform, software, and communications is simply the record of how much utility we used during the month, or our subscription fee for the month?
What if wireless access is transparent, and globally available to all mobile and stationary terminals without reconfiguration and a lot of pain?
No more “remote hands” bills, midnight trips to the data center to replace a blown server or disk, dealing with unfriendly or unknowledgeable “support” staff, or questions of who trashed the network due to a runaway virus or malware commando…
Kind of an interesting idea.
Probably going to happen one of these days.
Now if we can extend that utility to all airlines so I can have 100% wired access, 100% of the time.
2010 brings great opportunities and challenges to IT organizations in Indonesia. Technology refresh, aggressive development of telecom and Internet infrastructure, with aggressive deployment of “eEverything” is shaking the ICT industry. Even the most steadfast division-level IT managers are beginning to recognize the futility in trying to maintain their own closet “data 
center” in a world of virtualization, cloud computing, and drive to increase both data center economics and data security.
Of course there are very good models on the street for data center consolidation, particularly on government levels. In the United States, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) lists data center consolidation as the second highest priority, immediately after getting better control over managing budget and operational cost.
In March the Australian government announced a (AUD) $1 billion data center consolidation plan, with standardization, solution sharing, and developing opportunities to benefit from “new technology, processes or policy.”
Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner noted Australia currently has many inefficient data centers, very suitable candidates for consolidation and refresh. The problem of scattered or unstructured data management is “spread across Australia, (with data) located in not just large enterprise data centres, but also in cupboards, converted offices, computer and server rooms, and in commercial and insourced data centers,” said Tanner.
“These are primarily older data centres that are reaching the limits of their electricity supply and floor space. With government demand for data center ICT equipment rising by more than 30 per cent each year, it was clear that we needed to reassess how the government handled its data center activities.”
The UK government also recently published ICT guidance related to data center consolidation, with a plan to cut government operated data center from 130 to around 10~12 facilities. The guidance includes the statement “Over the next three-to-five years, approximately 10-12 highly resilient strategic data centers for the public sector will be established to a high common standard. This will then enable the consolidation of existing public data centers into highly secure and resilient facilities, managed by expert suppliers.”
Indonesia Addresses Data Center Consolidation
Indonesia’s government is in a unique position to take advantage of both introducing new data center and virtualization technology, as well as deploying a consolidated, distributed data center infrastructure that would bring the additional benefit of strong disaster recovery capabilities.
Much like the problems identified by Minister Tanner in Australia, today many Indonesian government organizations – and commercial companies – operate ICT infrastructure without structure or standards. “We cannot add additional services in our data center,” mentioned one IT manager interviewed recently in a data center audit. “If our users need additional applications, we direct them to buy their own server and plug it in under their desk. We don’t have the electricity in our data center to drive new applications and hardware, so our IT organization will now focus only on LAN/WAN connectivity.”
While all IT managers understand disaster recovery planning and business continuity is essential, few have brought DR from PowerPoint to reality, putting much organization data on individual servers, laptops, and desktop computers. All at risk for theft or loss/failure of single disk systems.
That is all changing. Commercial data centers are being built around the country by companies such as PT Indosat, PT Telekom, and other private companies. With the Palapa national fiber ring nearing completion, all main islands within the Indonesian archipelago are connected with diverse fiber optic backbone capacity, and additional international submarine cables are either planned or in progress to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other communication hubs.
For organizations currently supporting closet data centers, or local servers facing the public Internet for eCommerce or eGovernment applications, data centers such as the Cyber Tower in Jakarta offer both commercial data center space, as well as supporting interconnections for carriers – including the Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX), in a similar model as One Wilshire, The Westin Building, or 151 Front in Toronto. Ample space for outsourcing data center infrastructure (particularly for companies with Internet-facing applications), as well as power, cooling, and management for internal infrastructure outsourcing.
The challenge, as with most other countries, is to convince ICT managers that it is in their company or organization’s interest to give up the server. Rather than focus their energy on issues such as “control,” “independence (or autonomous operations),” and avoiding the pain of “workforce retraining and reorganization,” ICT managers should consider the benefits outsourcing their physical infrastructure into a data center, and further consider the additional benefits of virtualization and public/enterprise cloud computing.
Companies such as VMWare, AGIT, and Oracle are offering cloud computing consulting and development in Indonesia, and the topic is rapidly gaining momentum in publications and discussions within both the professional IT community, as well as with CFOs and government planning agencies.
It makes sense. As in cloud computing initiatives being driven by the US and other governments, not only consolidating data centers, but also consolidating IT compute resources and storage, makes a lot of sense. Particularly if the government has difficulty standardizing or writing web services to share data. Add a distributed cloud processing model, where two or more data centers with cloud infrastructure are interconnected, and we can now start to drive down recovery time and point objectives close to zero.
Not just for government users, but a company located in Jakarta is able to develop a disaster recovery plan, simply backing up critical data in a remote location, such as IDC Batam (part of the IDC Indonesia group). As an example, the IDC Indonesia group operates 4 data centers located in geographically separate parts of the country, and all are interconnected.
While this does not support all zero recovery time objectives, it does allow companies to lease a cabinet or suite in a commercial data center, and at a minimum install disk systems adequate to meet their critical data restoral needs. It also opens up decent data center collocation space for emerging cloud service and infrastructure providers, all without the burden of legacy systems to refresh.
In a land of volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and man-made disasters Indonesia has a special need for good disaster recovery planning. Through an effort to consolidate organization data centers, the introduction of cloud services in commercial and government markets, and high capacity interconnections between carriers and data centers, the basic elements needed to move forward in Indonesia are now in place.
2009 was a horrible year for job seekers, and even those holding on to existing jobs. No bonuses, no promotions, layoffs, and nobody hiring. And SoCal successfully beat most of the United States in unemployment claims, by several percentage points, attaching painful and empirical fact to the grim situation.
But that does appear to be changing. Slowly changing, but it is looking better for job seekers in the region. A recent scrape of job openings for Los Angeles and Orange Counties yielded some pretty strong job titles:
- Director of Engineering – Marina Del Rey
- Chief Integration Engineer – El Segundo
- Director, information technology – San Clemente
- VP Global Services – Los Angeles
- Customer Services Director – El Segundo
- Lead Systems Engineer – Los Angeles
- Senior Industrial Director – Irvine
- Smart GRID Architect – Rosemead
- HL7 Integrator – Los Angeles
- Disaster Recovery Manager – Irvine
- Manager, Operations Systems – Van Nuys, CA
- Systems Architecture Engineer – Huntington Beach, CA
And the list goes on… About 350 good positions listed in my 25 January search.
One additional exciting trend in the job stack is the high number of positions in manufacturing industries. While the services market is great, manufacturing spawns input into the supply chain, which adds a lot of downstream value to those companies increasing or expanding their business operations.
Dust Off that Resume
The time is near, and technology-savvy job seekers will reap rewards if they are prepared for the next boom in business expansion. Cloud computing, unified messaging, IT operations, data center consolidation, process automation, green technologies – corporate jargon to some, but areas with increasing demand for qualified candidates.
Cloud computing and data center consolidation are quite interesting, admittedly because they are new and exciting trends in the IT community.
The Dot.Com era taught us painful lessons on the value of investment money. The venture community sat back after 2002 and made a decision to actually perform a bit of due-diligence prior to throwing money at PowerPoint companies and paper ideas. At least those which were not using private equity with large investments in real estate.
The Dot.OMG era is now just about at an end, and some of the lessons learned are focused on the execution of business plans and intelligent use of capital and operational expenses – while building business.
IT has gone from being a “darling” of the internet age, to a very powerful means of adding tremendous business value through globalization of markets, and real-time transaction processing to support the global economy and marketplace. The only problem was to support that IT engine, technical managers tried to solve their processing challenges by throwing more disk, processors, and bandwidth at their requirements.
The next age will be one where companies refocus their energy on developing their business, and begin to expect processing and IT to be more of a utility than an exceptional part of their business. Welcome to data center outsourcing, virtualization, cloud computing, and Software as a Service/SaaS. Recover the costs of expensive and inefficient data centers.
So those engineers and sales staff still hanging out in the Communicator’s Bar, get ready to get sized for your next retro-logo polo shirt. The time is now for those who can put their fantasy of re-entering the telecom community to deal in bilateral telephone minutes aside and get ready to support thought leadership strategies to bring customers into commercial data center outsourcing models – or go sell them on consolidating their in-house operations into enterprise clouds.
Look at the tech job listings again. Companies are begging for IT and tech visionary managers to solve their growth and development pain. Begging.
2010 is going to be a great year in SoCal, so let’s get out there and make sure it does not pass us by, and does not require our companies to go elsewhere to attract talent. We’ve got the talent right here, and we need to put it back to work.
