http://www.modius.com/News_FocusMagazine_June2010

How "The Cloud" has forced power and cooling capacity management to evolve

June/July 2010

Focus Magazine asks Modius' Mark Harris about how the cloud has forced a change to the way supporting data centers manage power and cooling capacity. This OpEd piece was published in Focus Magazine, Volume 10 June/July, page 33. This article is reprinted below for your reading convenience, or you may access the online pdf issue.

While many improvements seen in the IT industry over the past 25 years could individually be viewed as monumental, fundamental IT infrastructure has experienced only a handful of foundational “game changers.”

Today, “the cloud” – in the form of public cloud services available on the open market and private cloud infrastructure within the enterprise – will prove to be one of such improvements.

Both public and private cloud services providers focus on delivering the required amount of dynamic processing capability to meet scaling needs of their customers. But their public Cloud providers realize that their product is delivery of IT services on a per-transaction basis and their cost per transaction is a function of everything required to operate their data centers’ hardware and applications.

For them, reducing operational costs in a modern cloud requires active monitoring of all resources, including infrastructure. Such monitoring provides an accurate representation of processing, cooling and energy consumption.

A private cloud provider must calculate a safety margin above predicted and observed utilization to withstand unforeseen circumstances to avoid the traditional practice of over-provisioning. Bottom-line profitability for a private cloud provider stems from how effectively that provider is able to tune these attributes in the context of their internal guaranteed service levels and contractual obligations.

Private clouds are gaining in popularity and are becoming increasingly viewed as economically viable because they are designed to mimic operational behavior of public clouds. Just like public clouds, private clouds are being tasked to provide low-cost IT services. For instance, demand for email services from any particular IT organization on a Monday morning will far exceed email demand on a Saturday evening, so supporting processing and cooling systems must adapt in real time.

Adjusting these systems involves adding or removing capacity.

Additionally, the IT organization must be nimble enough to adjust processing and cooling capacities to the changing demands across an number of situations with comfortable levels of headroom – all while maintaining a competitive transactional cost structure.