Cloud Computing: Growing concern

More space wanted: Brennan IT’s Nick McMenemy

Nick McMenemy, head of marketing and product management for information technology supplier Brennan IT, needs data centres. And he needs them to be reliable, secure and available so he can provide his customer base with storage, processing, back-up and communications services.

Data centres are so vital to a company’s progress that Brennan IT has expanded from its traditional base as information technology integrator to building its own data centres, rather than relying on the plans and promises of telecommunications companies and data-centre suppliers.

“Building our own data centres was all about maintaining control, so that we could say to our customers ‘yes, we can host your equipment’, or ‘we can provide you with infrastructure as a service or with a private cloud’,” McMenemy says.

“It gives us more flexibility and more redundancy. We’re mitigating the risks of running into shortages and being affected by price rises if the supply falls short.”

While new data-centre projects find it difficult to secure foundation tenants and funding to get projects started, many existing data centres are facing serious constraints at the same time as demand for their services is increasing.

Research group Frost & Sullivan has found that demand for and spending on third-party data centres across Australia and New Zealand is growing 14.8 per cent a year and the percentage probably is greater still if it were to include spending on data centres within large companies and corporations.

As demand for cloud computing grows, data centres, many of which were built at the beginning of the dotcom boom, are rapidly running out of capacity.

Initially, the constraints placed on data centres were based on physical size. Every piece of software required its own discrete server and every server took up space. Data centres in effect were large data warehouses, complete with multiple power supplies and telecommunication links. Over the past five years, however, a technology called “server virtualisation” has enabled many software applications to be stored on a single server. As a result, many of these large facilities have been able to reduce the number of servers they operate while increasing the number of customers they support.

A similar technology called “storage virtualisation” has enabled data from many companies to be stored across pooled servers, again reducing the demand on the physical size of data centres but increasing demand on power supplies and communications links.

There are more than enough data centres operating in Australia, Simon Kaye, cloud computing expert with IBM Australia, says. However, many of these have yet to be upgraded from a traditional server structure to a more flexible virtual environment and ultimately will face power constraints unless they adopt a radical new approach to green design and power co-generation techniques.

“Australia is facing a shortage of capacity rather than a shortage of physical data centres,” Kaye says. “There are a lot of facilities facing power and cooling capacity limits, which in turn are impacting IT projects by constraining growth.”

With 21 data centre sites already operating in Australia, IBM is building a new facility in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley and plans to build additional sites in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

In a similar vein, Strategic Directions, which built the $220 million Polaris data centre near Brisbane, is also on the verge of announcing a similar project in Melbourne.

Many groups are also checking out the Canberra market as the government considers consolidating its data processing and storage requirements due to implementation of the Gershon review of IT spending.

Describing the whole situation as a chicken and egg scenario, Jeyan Jeevaratnam, country manager for IT integrator Avenade Australia, is concerned that the rapid increase in demand for capacity in third-party data centres, combined with the high capital cost of new
data centre construction will soon result in a supply shortage.

Jeevaratnam believes this will be especially felt in the high-end tier 3 and 4 data centres that provide extremely high levels of security, as well as power and communications link redundancy.

“As customers begin to use cloud computing services, data centres will become more and more critical,” Jeevaratnam says.

“The number of data centres needs to grow hand in hand with the continued rollout of cloud computing services across Australia.”

BRW

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