{"id":9359,"date":"2009-01-23T10:18:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9359"},"modified":"2009-01-23T10:18:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"hps-9-data-centre-trends-in-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9359","title":{"rendered":"HP’s 9 Data Centre Trends in 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

HP’s community blog has a post on what they think will be hot in 2009<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Power: We all got stung by the increased power costs in 2008.\u00a0 As usual, when oil went up, power costs immediately went up.\u00a0 When oil costs came down, power costs stayed up.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that’s the trend for the ongoing future.\u00a0 We need to get more out of every watt we consume.\u00a0 In Ireland we saw a little bit of marketing efforts about IT power consumption last year.\u00a0 I think power consumption will become a decision making factor in 2009.\u00a0 I know in 2008 we were doing that, we went with one model of Cisco switch over another because of it.\u00a0 We went with blade servers because of it.\u00a0 And we deployed machine virtualisation because of it.<\/li>\n
  2. TCO: "Total Cost of Ownership" is one of those annoying consulting phrases from the mid-nineties.\u00a0 It’s back.\u00a0 Things like cloud computing and software-as-a-service have brought TCO back into play.\u00a0 We’re re-thinking about the need to own and manage a server(s) because we need an accounting system.\u00a0 Why build a power station in your back yard when you just want to turn on a light in the kitchen?<\/li>\n
  3. Capacity Planning: Money is tight and those people who are deploying systems want to deploy them right, first time.\u00a0 They don’t want a machine that’s over-spec’ed or a solution that needs to be re-engineered because it’s not up to scratch.\u00a0 Microsoft has made some efforts with System Center Capacity Planner.\u00a0 I recently mentioned the volume sizing tool for DPM 2007.\u00a0 You should have a look at my posts for Hyper-V on RAM sizing<\/a> and LUN sizing<\/a> too.\u00a0 Beware of dealing with service providers where you only get to talk to salesmen.\u00a0 There’s absolutely zero capacity planning going on when you deal with them.<\/li>\n
  4. Packaged Infrastructure: I think HP are selling things like pre-built blades\/storage\/clusters here.\u00a0 I’ll agree with it.\u00a0 Buying in a pre-built solution is much easier than buying servers from A, racks from B and storage from C, only to find incompatibilities, missing components and engineers saying "they’re responsible for that, not us".\u00a0 Again, you might want to look at managed server hosting where all of this is taken care of for you.<\/li>\n
  5. Unified is hot: Welcome back to the mid-nineties \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Back then we used to hear about things like CA Unicenter as being the unified solution for managing an IT infrastructure.\u00a0 I consulted on that stuff and it was good, as long as you loved patching … every week and on every machine starting directly after installing the software to get core functionality working *exhausting*.\u00a0 People got burned and along came open source.\u00a0 Then the point solution was the buzz.\u00a0 We’re back again at unified solutions.\u00a0 We have HP servers, SAN fabric and storage and it definitely works out better than a jumble.\u00a0 The integration makes us flexible …. fungible even (thanks Dave for that word!).\u00a0 We have integrated management thanks to Microsoft System Center, e.g. health and performance from OpsMgr and virtualisation from VMM.\u00a0 That’s all tied together using Active Directory.\u00a0 For h\/w management I have one interface.\u00a0 For everything else, I have System Center.<\/li>\n
  6. Performance per sq ft, per dollar per watt is HOT.\u00a0 Moore\u2019s Law is NOT:\u00a0 Agreed.\u00a0 For 90% of servers, a single 4 core CPU is more <\/em>than enough.\u00a0 We’re all about getting more from less now.\u00a0 For load balanced servers we can get more out of running fewer machines with x64 operating systems.\u00a0 We can consolidate servers using virtualisation.\u00a0 Space and power are expensive so we want to cut those costs.\u00a0 Even now when we don’t have money, we can probably justify the cost of a virtualisation project by the reductions in space and power.<\/li>\n
  7. DAS is hot, SAN is not:\u00a0 Yes and No.\u00a0 There’s two ways to look at this.\u00a0 If you know that you have limited and predictable storage requirements then DAS is the way to go.\u00a0 However, if you need large scale or unlimited growth storage then SAN is the only choice.\u00a0 I’ve looked at the cost per GB of DAS VS SAN.\u00a0 DAS for small amounts is cheaper for the purchase but more expensive per GB than SAN as time goes by.\u00a0 DAS also eliminates server flexibility.<\/li>\n
  8. Virtual infrastructure is HOT.\u00a0 Virtual machines are NOT: 100% agreed.\u00a0 I think I read somewhere that Gartner said that the real challenge with virtualisation is the management of it.\u00a0 With virtualisation everything becomes intangible.\u00a0 Virtual machines are files on a disk.\u00a0 Virtual networks are settings in software.\u00a0 This is why we went with Hyper-V.\u00a0 Virtual Machine Manager 2008 gives fantastic centralised management.\u00a0 It ties in with OpsMgr 2007 SP1 to give us top-bottom and cradle-grave management of the entire network, regardless of whether I’m dealing with virtual machines, virtual networks, physical machines, services, applications, hardware, storage or physical networking.<\/li>\n
  9. Dynamic Core Utilisation: The days of one application – one processor are over.\u00a0 Virtualisation has made sure of that.\u00a0 Are you one of those people who has a dedicated anti-virus server, a dedicated WSUS server, etc?\u00a0 You should have a look at virtualisation now<\/em>.\u00a0 MS is planning some really cool improvements with Core Parking to take this to the next level so that unused loads don’t consume resources.\u00a0 VMware does a nice job with VI3 too.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    HP’s community blog has a post on what they think will be hot in 2009. Power: We all got stung by the increased power costs in 2008.\u00a0 As usual, when oil went up, power costs immediately went up.\u00a0 When oil costs came down, power costs stayed up.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that’s the trend for the ongoing future.\u00a0 … Continue reading “HP’s 9 Data Centre Trends in 2009”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}