Server, heal thyself

Less is more

But can computer equipment vendors really usher in era of more revenue from less data centre floor space? HP believes a large amount of data centre floor space can be trimmed by installing a UDC.

Average floor space savings is on the order of 40%, says HP's Nick Van der Zweep, but varies depending on how densely packed the existing equipment is. Typical data centres set aside rack space on a per application basis and end up wasting floor space with partially filled racks and consoles, he says. The UDC will fully use all rack space and also consolidate all consoles in the data centre.

Van der Zweep believes the scope for reduction of computing appliances also varies. If the company deploying a UDC has an unconsolidated data centre and there is a fair number of volatile applications (usage patterns vary), the number of computing devices could be significantly reduced, he says. At an extreme, a UDC implementation focused on current unconsolidated [quality assurance] environments could see an 80% reduction in needed equipment.

Matthew Keep of Sun Microsystems says his firm's N1 product offers substantial savings because it is designed to deliver much higher hardware utilisation rates in especially in servers. Higher utilisation equals more efficient use of floor space as a result of fewer servers, storage arrays, etc.

Adding to this, says Keep, is the development of blade servers, which can deliver density rates of 160-200 servers in a single 42U rack, compared with 40 rack-optimised 1U servers.

-------------------------------------------------------------Reproduced with the kind permission of ZeroDownTime magazine. ZeroDownTime is the premier business publication for IT professionals whose responsibilities lie in maximising uptime of mission-critical business operations.