covers data Centre:Layout 1 - New Statesman1).pdf · 2017-07-21 · 1 Measure Start to measure,...

GOING DIGITALData Centre Myths and Reality

Part two

of two reports

In collaboration with Sponsored by

covers data Centre:Layout 1 08/10/2013 14:08 Page 4

The average age of a data centre is 9+ years and many highly inefficient.Energy efficiency is not just a cost saving exercise but an environmentalresponsibility.

Following an award winning 3 year efficiency programme resulting in annual savings of €4 million in energy bills, we have created somestraightforward guidelines that you can start to implement today.

1 Measure Start to measure, record and track power use on a regular basis

2 Regulate air flow A data centre is essentially a structure that manages the flow of cold airin, and extracts hot air. Allowing the hot and cold air to mix will result inmore energy being used to cool it.

3 Align hot and cold aislesAssign hot and colt aisles, then ensure all servers within the racks androws are facing the correct direction. Cold air is directed to the front ofthe server and hotter air flows from the back.

4 Reduce airflow leaksInstall blanking plates to fill any gaps. These can stop air escaping between equipment within racks.

5 FlooringCheck your flooring; gaps behind and beneath equipment and revisingthe position floor tiles.

6 Aisle containmentIntroducing roofs and/or doors to the end of aisles can be particularly effective .

7 Control air temperatureThe average data centre runs at 21 degrees, but temperatures from 18 – 27 degrees are acceptable.

8 Regulate humidityMaintaining humidity within a data hall within tight bands is like permanently boiling a kettle. By operating between 20 – 80% energyconsumption can be reduced.

9 Check transformer voltageCheck the voltage of your transformers to ensure they match exactly thesupply voltage requirement for your equipment.

10 Remove isolation transformers Isolation transformers were a design preference from the 1990s. Thesecan drain on your resources but are usually no longer required.

11 Turn off redundant equipmentSwitching off or changing redundant equipment is a simple, yet an oftenoverlooked. A single new server can now do the job of multiple olderservers and saves energy.

12 Measure againRegular meter readings will help you understand trends and eliminateany seasonal spikes or oddities to introduce further energy saving measures over time.

Colt is the first data centre operator in Europe to be awarded the M&OStamp of Approval for operational excellence, and also claimed the Energy Efficiency and Environmental Sustainability award at the 2013 International Data Centre & Cloud Awards.

About ColtColt is a leading international network and IT services company. We helpbusinesses perform better by removing the complexity around deliveringand integrating compute, network and data centre services. This is whatmakes Colt the Information Delivery Platform.

Colt own and operate 20 data centres across Europe and has 15 years ofexperience managing 30,000sqm of data centre facilities.

To tour of one of Colt's efficient data centres contact [email protected]/datacentres

12 Steps to a more energy efficient Data Centre

by Ian Dixon, VP Operations, Data Centre Services, Colt

Colt fp adv:Layout 1 08/10/2013 13:32 Page 1

11–17 OCTOBER 2013 | NEW STATESMAN | 3

New Statesman7th FloorJohn Carpenter HouseJohn Carpenter StreetLondon EC4Y 0ANTel 020 7936 6400Fax 020 7936 [email protected] enquiries,reprints and syndication rights:Stephen [email protected] 731 8496

Supplement EditorJon BernsteinDesign & ProductionLeon ParksGraphicsValeria Escalona

Commercial DirectorPeter Coombs020 7936 6753Account DirectorEleanor Ng020 7936 6417

Myths and reality

Facts & figures P23

4 Facts & figuresThe European colocation market by numbers

5 View from WestminsterData centres are the tangible manifestation of the internet, writes David Willetts

8 Power, consumption and liesBusting common data centre myths, by Emma Fryer

14 Case studyThe Amadeus data centre faces some familiar challenges, by Jon Bernstein

16 Digital EconomyData is the iron ore for a new industrial revolution, writes Dennis Layton

16 Industry viewAsk not what the country can do for you, says Bernard Geoghegan

17 Cost of ownershipHow to plan for success, by Liam Newcombe

18 Skills gapA global industry with a few local difficulties, by Nicola Hayes

19 TrainingBig data, big skills gap, by Andrew Stevens

22 A very British opportunityUK plc must stop looking across the Atlantic for a quick sale, argues Julie Meyer

23 Facts & figures IIThe view from the boardroom

The paper in this magazineoriginates from timber that issourced from sustainableforests, responsibly managedto strict environmental, socialand economic standards. The manufacturing mills haveboth FSC and PEFCcertification and also ISO9001and ISO14001 accreditation.

To borrow the words of David Willetts,writing overleaf, data centres are “thephysical, tangible manifestation of thesomewhat invisible and ethereal conceptwhich is the internet.”

The Universities and Science Minister goeson to argue that data centres are “absolutelyfundamental” to a successful informationeconomy in the UK while acknowledging thatgovernment needs to better understand thesector as a whole.

This, the second New Statesman data centresupplement, is a contribution to filling theknowledge gap, throwing a spotlight on an

industry that has been largerly in the shadowsas far as policy makers are concerned.

Across the following pages we return tosome of the themes introduced last monthincluding the myths and reality of powerusage (page 8), cost of ownership (page 17) anda looming skills gap (page 18). On page 22,serial investor Julie Meyer makes the case forthe UK technology industry while a visit torural Bavaria (page 14) reflects some globaltruths and challenges for providers.

Finally, for those who missed the firstsupplement in this series, it is available todownload at the web address below. l

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First published as a supplement to the New Statesman11 - 17 October 2013.© New Statesman Ltd. All rightsreserved. Registered as anewspaper in the UK and USA.

This supplement, and other policy reports, can be downloaded from the NS website at newstatesman.com/page/supplements

Case study P14

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

Power myths P8

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FACTS & FIGURES

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We live in an increasingly data-rich world. This is a globaltrend to which the govern-ment is very much alive. Welead the world in our open

data agenda, with over 10,000 public datasets now published on data.gov.uk. Bigdata is one of our eight great technologies –areas of scientific potential and where theUK has a distinct capability – and in lastyear’s Autumn Statement the Chancellorprovided £189m of capital investment forbig data and energy efficient computing.

This is an area that government takes se-riously and so it makes sense that the op-portunities – and challenges – which datapresents were a key focus of the Informa-tion Economy Strategy which the PrimeMinister launched in June this year. In thatdocument we committed to developing astrategy, working with business and acade-mia, to ensure the UK can be at the forefrontof the data revolution.

We will publish our data capability strat-egy at the end of this month. There aremany aspects to capability – the most obvi-ous, perhaps, is ensuring we have the skillsin data science and analytics, with researchand development coming a close second.But just as important, and what I want tofocus on here, is the infrastructure thatsupports our data-driven economy.

Our e-infrastructure is essential to oureconomic and academic success – it is adriver for growth across all sectors of theeconomy – and to that end I established theE-infrastructure Leadership Council inearly 2012 which has helped raise the profileof this area in government. We are also

working in partnership with industry ex-perts to develop a UK strategy for our digi-tal infrastructure, which we expect to pub-lish at the end of 2014.

Data centres are a crucial part of that in-frastructure, and are an area that the gov-ernment needs to understand better. Theyare the physical, tangible manifestation ofthe somewhat invisible and ethereal con-cept which is the internet. They are ab-solutely fundamental to a successful and vi-brant information economy in the UK,supporting some of our biggest global com-panies, and our research institutions. Lon-don’s successful financial sector could notfunction without the state-of-the-art datacentres in areas like Docklands, enablingcomputer-based and low-latency trading.

Moreover, in the UK we are good at puttingtogether data centres – and this is expertisewe can export to the world at a time whenglobal spending on data centres is predictedto reach $149bn next year.

Despite our relatively small size, we haveone of the largest data centre markets in theworld, with over 60 per cent of the Euro-pean data centre market. With such a UKsuccess story to tell here, we in governmentcan and should do more to understand thedata centre industry. Part of this is gettingout and seeing for ourselves what data cen-tres actually do. My ministerial colleagues

At the heart of avibrant economy

Data centres are thetangible manifestation of

the ethereal internet

by David Willetts

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

Michael Fallon and Ed Vaizey have bothtoured some of the facilities in London.Vince Cable has recently visited one ofTelecityGroup’s sites in Helsinki, to learnabout the Finnish approach.

But there is a lot the industry can do itself,and in many cases is already doing. I re-cently spoke at a Royal Society event aboutsustainable computing, and I am heartenedby the steps that the data centre industryhas taken to improve its energy efficiencyand reduce the emissions from data centres.We should also remember that by enablingsophisticated data analytics, our e-infra-structure supports more efficient use of en-ergy, whether that is video conferencing toavoid business travel, logistics companiesbeing able to make fewer journeys, or mak-ing smarter use of energy by understandingour patterns of consumption. We can dostill more to improve energy efficiency,with ground-breaking research and devel-opment, working closely with the Depart-ment of Energy and Climate Change.

I was also delighted to hear about thework that the Data Centre Alliance, Tele-house and Telecity have undertaken to im-prove skills in the data centre industrythrough the “bootcamps” held at the Uni-versity of East London. I hope this collabo-ration will continue to develop and grow. Itis an excellent example of business and aca-demia working together to tackle problemsand develop the skills that are essential forsuccess of the UK data centre industry. Wein government are looking forward to play-ing our part in ensuring that success. lDavid Willetts is Minister of State forUniversities and Science

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FEATURE

08-12 Data Centre Fact or Fiction:Statesman supplements 08/10/2013 13:08 Page 4


1 Data centre power demand

is growing exponentially

False: But there’s no room for compla-cency. Demand for digital data is growingexponentially and to keep up with this de-mand, one might expect that data centrepower usage would increase in line. Fortu-nately it doesn’t because of Moore’s Law. Infact, the power required by a chip to processa given amount of data has decreased by sixorders of magnitude in thirty years. Never-theless, despite Moore’s law, data centrepower demand is growing year on year; anincrease of around 14 per cent a year, ac-cording to figures from DCD.

There are a number of reasons for this.Firstly the rate of increase in demand fordigital data is faster than the savingsachieved through Moore’s Law. SecondlyMoore’s Law applies to leading edge tech-nology only and state of the art computingequipment will not be installed in everydata centre so there will always be a lag.Thirdly the IT sector is gradually movingaway from distributed computing (qv) to-wards the consolidation of computingwithin purpose built facilities (data cen-tres) so power use that was previously hid-

den is now appearing in these figures, eventhough there is a net energy saving.

2 Data centre operators don’t

care about power because they

simply pass through power costs

to their customers

False: Data centres may pass power coststo their customers but that doesn’t meanthey don’t care about power. In fact, this isone of the reasons that they do care so muchabout power. Data centres provide highlycommoditised services for location-agnos-tic organisations. Data, after all, is the mostmobile commodity on earth and the major-ity of companies needing data services canchoose where they buy them from depend-ing on cost. Energy is a very high propor-tion of data centre cost and the higher thatenergy cost is, the less competitive that op-erator is in a global market.

3 Data centres use noisy

polluting generators

0.1% true, 99.9% false: Data centresrely on electricity from the grid. Very occa-sionally there is a power cut and grid elec-tricity is not available. Data centres have to

Power, consumptionand liesby Emma FryerIllustration by Valeria Escalona

Myths about the data centre industry’s use of powerabound. Here are ten of the most common.

continue running irrespective of interrup-tions in power supply so they have batter-ies to supply immediate power in the eventof short term grid failures and generatorsto provide power for longer outages. Thesegenerators have to be test fired on a regularbasis to ensure they will work if they areever needed.

The number of times data centres actually run “for real” on diesel generatorswill be dictated by the number of signifi-cant grid power outages. How many ofthose can you remember in the last year?The answer, in case you wondered, is veryclose to zero in the UK.

Very occasionally a data centre operatormay have an agreement with their electric-ity supplier to use their generators for shorttimes to reduce load on the grid when peakdemand becomes critical. Since this allowsthe National Grid to manage fluctuations indemand without expanding our generatinginfrastructure, this practice has a beneficialimpact by smoothing demand.

4 Data centres are going to

gobble up all the electricity

until there is none left for

anyone else

False: Our insatiable demand for digitaldata will not lead to system meltdown.



FEATURE

Why not? Because the movement of digitaldata is price elastic. If power is either notavailable or the market price for power in-creases, then people will think twice aboutwhat they upload or download.

If we ever got to the stage when a Googlesearch really did consume the same amountof power as boiling a kettle (contrary to themyth, see below) then there would be astrong price signal against frivolous activi-ties involving the movement, storage orprocessing of digital data.

5Data centres are full of

servers doing nothing except

using energy

Generally (but not always) false: Indata centres where work can be scheduled,server utilisation rates should be high.Maintaining high utilisation in other areasis more problematic unless demand is verypredictable. In many cases, however, utili-sation rates are low and could be improved.This may be due to reasons like institu-tional memory loss (people simply don’tknow what those servers are doing sodaren’t turn them off – they could be stor-ing records of shoe sizes of people fromWolverhampton in 1972 or they could bemanaging all the applications that supportan active communications or IT infrastruc-ture) or risk-averse planning (people use anew server for every new application be-cause they are worried about compromis-ing an existing server’s performance).

However, in a country like the UK whereenergy costs are relatively high it would besurprising to find a commercial operatorwith a data centre full of comatose servers.It is increasingly common practice to auditdata centre activity regularly to identify andlocate comatose servers, and to make betteruse of them by consolidating computing activity.

Server utilisation is a very serious issuebecause a typical server does not use muchmore power when it is working at capacitythan when it is idling.

6 Servers are inefficient because

they can only operate within a

very small temperature range

False but often treated as true: Onetraditional concern of data centre operatorswas that certain operating conditionsmight lead to the servers breaking down or

malfunctioning. So in 2004 the AmericanSociety of Heating, Refrigeration and AirConditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) de-fined a common set of guidelines for oper-ating conditions in data centres that wouldnot invalidate the warranties provided byserver manufacturers.

In 2004 the original envelope proposedwas 20°C to 25°C (68-77F). In 2008 therange expanded from 18°C to 27°C (64.4-80.6F). In 2011 the envelope was challengedagain and allowable operating ranges aswide as 5° to 45°C (41 to 113 F) have beenconsidered.

Many manufacturers guarantee theirequipment to work reliably beyond of the2008 ranges, and experiments at the Uni-versity of Hertfordshire have demon-strated that server equipment works per-fectly well in quite extreme ranges of bothtemperature and humidity.

So there is no need for temperatureswithin data centres to be maintained sostrictly. Yet we often find that they are oper-ated within this range. Why? Because safeoperating ranges of temperature and hu-midity are set by service level agreements(SLAs) between operator and customerwhich require the data centre to operatewithin unnecessarily constrained environ-mental conditions. In other words, opera-tors are contractually obliged to waste en-ergy on cooling.

This is an important issue because cooling is very energy intensive – more energy intensive than heating. Relaxingtemperature constraints by even 1°C couldreduce the power used for cooling by up to 4 per cent.

7Data centres should all

be moved to Iceland

False. But... Since data centres use a lotof power and many of the services they pro-vide are not dependent on a particular geo-graphic location, it might seem sensible tolook for places where there is a high propor-tion of renewable power and where ambi-ent temperatures are low.

Low ambient temperatures are impor-tant because this enables a data centre to becooled by fresh air through ventilation (thisis known as free cooling) instead of usingenergy intensive refrigeration units(chillers) to physically cool the air beforecirculating it around the data centre. Ice-land is certainly an attractive location from

the point of view of renewable power sincethey have a significant and reliable source ofgeothermal power.

However, Iceland is no different frommost of Northern Europe in terms of thescope to use free cooling. So in terms of ambient temperature, Iceland has no advantage over the UK. The UK, however,does have several advantages over Iceland.Firstly, data centres need two things to function: power and connectivity (access to high bandwidth communications infrastructure), and the UK has far betterconnectivity than Iceland, effectively acting as the node connecting the US to therest of Europe.

Some communications such as stockmarket transactions have to be almost instantaneous and do need to be physicallyclose to trading platforms. This proximityis termed “low latency”.

Secondly, the UK is not vulnerable topermafrost in winter which can affect datacentre operation. Thirdly some operatorsrule out Iceland because its geologicalvolatility increases the risk of particulatesin the air.

8 A Google search takes the

same amount of power as

boiling a kettle

False: A Google search takes less than 0.2per cent of the power used by boiling a ket-tle. A 2KW kettle takes about 4.5 minutes to boil when full which equates toabout 150Wh (you can test with your ownkettle, a watch and a portable appliancetester).

An average Google query, includingbuilding the search index, uses 0.3Wh.150Wh/0.3Wh = 500, or 0.2 per cent.

9 A medium sized server has the

same annual carbon footprint as

an SUV doing 15 mpg covering

15,000 km

False: Around an order of magnitudeout. A server’s carbon footprint is only afraction of that of an SUV. Neither themaths nor the assumptions bear scrutiny.Let’s look at each in turn.

Firstly let’s do the SUV carbon footprint.The mixed units suggest a rather blunt ap-proach to the problem but we can deal withthem. Converting gallons to litres, miles tokilometres you get the SUV doing 5.3kmper litre of fuel and therefore using 2830



litres of fuel in a year. Using the CarbonTrust’s conversion factors you end up withthe SUV emitting 6.54 tonnes CO2 if it ispetrol and 7.550 tonnes CO2 if it is diesel(fuel was unspecified). Obviously wehaven’t factored in the embodied carbon.

Now let’s look at the server. A single unit(1U) server uses 80-120W constantly and adouble unit (2U) server uses 160-240Wcontinuously. So the smaller server hasemissions around 450kg CO2 per serverand the large one around 900kg CO2 .

And finally, one that’s true (and for goodreason)…

10 Data centres use

lots of power

True: Data centres use lots of power.And this is why. Firstly, data centres support and enable service economies inthe way that heavy industries have sup-ported manufacturing economies, so youshould expect some energy intensive activ-ity to be taking place.

Secondly, data centres represent the consolidation of computing demand. Thismeans they are concentrating lots of activi-ties that individually are not very energy intensive but cumulatively demanda lot of power. The good news is that con-solidating this IT function is far more en-ergy efficient than leaving it distributed incupboards and server rooms.

Thirdly, data centres use power in twoways: they need power to run the IT equip-ment that they house (servers which execute the digital transactions that we relyon) and, because servers emit heat whenthey are working, they need power to keepthose servers cool enough to function reli-ably. A very large data centre may consume30GWh of power in a year, costing its oper-ator around £3m for electricity alone.

A handful of sites in the UK consumeeven more than this although the majorityof sites consume far less. The total powerdemand of the UK data centre sector is between 2-3TWh per year. Energy is usu-ally the largest single element of operatingcosts for data centres, varying from 25-60per cent. lEmma Fryer is an associate director ofIntellect. This feature is extractedfrom “Data Centres and Power: Fact or Fiction?”. It is available to download from intellect.org

A data centre is a building (or self-containedunit within a building) used to house com-puting equipment such as servers along with associated components such as telecommu-nications, network and storage systems.

A data centre is equipped with a guaran-teed power supply and high bandwidth connectivity. Resilience is critical so redun-dancy (duplication) of networks, power andother infrastructure is common to ensure con-tinuity. Other facilities include building man-agement controls such as air conditioning tomaintain the environmental conditions for theequipment within a specified envelope oftemperature and humidity, and security sys-tems to ensure that the facility and its data re-main secure.

But what does this actually mean? Datacentres house computers so that they can:

a) Do stuff like process, manage, store andtransmit data and b)Talk to each other or to digital equipment

in other data centres or in offices, homes, ve-hicles, in satellites orbiting the Earth, on themoon or in fact anywhere you can think of.

Business processes, government services,telecommunications, transport infrastruc-tures all depend on computers interacting inthis way, exchanging digital information.Many everyday activities also rely on data cen-tre processes, including using a smartphone,the internet or sending email, and less obvi-ous things like doing the shopping or catchinga train.

The kind of computers you find in data cen-tres are known as servers (computers that areusually assigned to specific roles as opposedto personal computers which are moregeneric). Servers perform computing func-tions remotely from their operators andtherefore don’t have keyboards or screens orpeople hunched over them in the way thatdesktops would.

Servers run on electricity so data centresneed to have a good power supply that willnot get disconnected. This is called UPS or un-interruptible power supply. Back-up powersupply is usually provided to make sure thateven in the event of a power cut to the grid,the data centre is not left without electricity.

Servers also need to talk to other digital de-vices so data centres need to have excellentcommunications infrastructure in the form ofhigh bandwidth connections, often from morethan one telecommunications provider to en-sure that if one option fails, connectivity is notlost. Essentially a digital economy is a net-worked economy and data centres can beseen as network nodes.

It might help to think of a data centre as a bitlike a brain, which stores lots of informationand runs both cognitive functions - the thingswe realise we are doing, and unconsciousfunctions – the invisible things that we take forgranted like breathing and keeping our heartsbeating. If the oxygen supply to the brain is cutoff then the consequences are rather signifi-cant. In the same way a data centre needs itsown form of oxygen – a continuous, reliablepower supply. And just like a brain has a nerv-ous system to tell heart and lungs and armsand legs and eyeballs what to do, data centresneed their own nervous system – telecommu-nications connectivity – to keep things likeATMs, street lights, telephones, hospital com-puters and air traffic control runningsmoothly.

An office is not a data centre, even if thereare lots of computers in it. A call centre is nota data centre and neither is a factory thatmanufactures computers or even a ware-house in which computer equipment isstored. Call centres and offices primarily ac-commodate people, a factory makes com-puters that aren’t doing anything and thingsstored in warehouses are inert. Your nextdoor neighbour’s garage, filled with comput-ers, isn’t a data centre, even though he mightlike to think it is. Your next door neighbour’scomputers aren’t adequately protectedagainst changes in temperature or humidityor theft or flooding or power cuts or tele-coms failures or his wife taking an axe to it allwhen resentment over her techno-widow-hood overflows.

A data centre is there to manage, store,process, transact, manipulate or transmit digi-tal data at scale, within a controlled, pro-tected, resilient environment.

If it isn’t doing any of those things then it isn’t a data centre. l

SO WHAT IS A DATA CENTRE, ANYWAY?

SO WHAT ISN’T A DATA CENTRE?





Among the patchwork fields –all reds, yellows, browns andgreens – and hamlets charac-terised by rouge rooftops andbulbous church towers that

resemble nothing so much as onions(hence the term “Zwiebeltürme”), sits asprawling asymmetrical bunker that feelsmore north American security servicesthan rural Bavaria.

Low-rise, windowless and concrete, it issurrounded by movement-sensitive fencesand ditches either side. This is the home ofAmadeus, the company that provides aglobal distribution system for airline book-ings and associated IT services from bag-gage handling and cargo load planning tocheck-in and boarding. Amadeus’s datacentre is situated on the outskirts of Erding,28 miles north-east of Munich, and to com-plete the sense of incongruity there’s anAldi supermarket opposite the main gates.

The data centre handles 24,000 transactions per second in peak times, itmanages bookings for 95 per cent of theworld’s scheduled network airline seats and

it houses 7,500 servers and 16 petabytes ofstorage. That it resembles a home to secu-rity services is no surprise given that the siteis modelled on late 1980s anti-terrorism

OBSERVATIONS

best practice. The steel-enhanced concretewalls are one metre thick and designed toabsorb up to 100K of TNT. One hundredand forty cameras monitor operations andthe 24/7 security is provided by a thirdparty to ensure there is no chance of favoursgiven or received.

As data centres go, it has been around fora while. Conceived and built in the eighties,it was operationally open for business in1990. Three quarters of the company’s rev-enues come from its original bookingsbusiness while a quarter comes from pro-viding IT services to airlines, a business itintroduced in the early 2000s. Competitorsinclude Sabre, Pegasus and Datalex.

Physical security is just one of the chal-lenges. Downtime, and the avoidancethereof, is perhaps the major preoccupa-tion. Network and telecoms managers talkabout “five nines” to refer to the desiredavailability of their networks: 99.999 percent uptime. Given the nature of the busi-ness and a customer-base in 195 countriesworldwide, Wolfgang Krips, enterprisevice president at Amadeus, claims the relia-

CASE STUDY

Among theZwiebeltürme

AMADEUS BY NUMBERS

7,500 servers

16 petabytes of storage

24,000 transactions per secondduring peak times

3.9 million online bookings / day

9 diesel generators

12MW power capacity

4,800 IT infrastructure changes / month

6,000 square metres dedicatedto IT equipment

by Jon Bernstein

Operational for nearly a quarter of a century, the Amadeusdata centre just north of Munich is home to some familiar challenges: downtime, security and power usage

14-19 Run-on:Statesman supplements 24/10/2013 12:41 Page 14


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bility of his data centre is “somewhere be-tween five and six nines”.

Referring to the airlines logistics business, Krips says: “It’s pretty clear that if the system is down the aircraft can’t leavethe gate.” Amadeus uses an instant messaging system in the event of likely oractual downtime so the engineering andoperational teams can talk through possiblesolutions together in real-time.

“Because we require such a high level ofavailability, the human factor becomes im-portant. On the engineering teams we request standardisation – x86 [processors],open systems, a single operating systemideally.” Any changes to the hardware andsoftware have to take place while the service is running. “It’s a special challenge,”Krips concedes.

The human factor also means Amadeusdeploys a “follow the sun” approach wherethe team on the “operations bridge” at theErding site hands over to a team in Miamiwhich in turn hands over to a team in Syd-ney which hands back to Germany the fol-lowing morning. A fourth site is being builtin Bangalore. The common language isEnglish. “Everyone says 7 by 24 is impor-

tant – it’s on their business cards – but, re-ally, what are the implications if it’s notthere?” asks Krips rhetorically.

In the first New Statesman data centresupplement, more than one contributorcharacterised data centres as factories of thedigital age. Krips agrees. “One hundred percent they are. The difference is these facto-ries don’t produce goods, they produceservices.” As with traditional factories, hesays, much of what you are trying to do isreduce complexity, standardise processesand work with highly skilled people to en-sure they execute tasks flawlessly. “Youneed the cleverest guys in operations be-cause we are at levels of availability wherewe have to have end-to-end understandingof our processes.”

The power efficiency of the Erding site asmeasured by the PUE (power usage effi-ciency) ratio of consumption required forall functions divided by consumption re-quired for computing, is 1.39. The team de-ploys hot and cold aisle techniques to keepthe data centres at optimum temperatureand uses free air cooling when the outsidetemperature drops to six degrees centigradeor below. How often does that happen?

“Half of the year,” says Krips, before addinga qualifier: “at least.” The Erding site hasnine diesel power generators and four un-interruptable power supply (UPS) systemsin case of power failure.

The business of travel distribution andlogistics is a profitable one but given that theprovision of data centre space is too, I won-der aloud whether Amadeus should be inthe co-location business. Peter Raven, di-rector of business development says no. Inpart this is down to security, he says, butmore because of an assessment of where the“strategic value” lies. Amadeus turns overnearly €3bn a year and, says Raven, of “allthe systems that generate that [money], theprimary location is here. Divide that threebillion by 6,000 square metres [the size ofthe data centre’s computing space] and youhave a very big number.”

“The value of this facility to our companyis its business value not as a data centre.Everybody is creating value above what’s intheir data centre. In our case, that’s us.” l

Jon Bernstein was deputy editor NewStatesman between 2009 and 2012. He is a freelance editor and writer

Low-rise, windowless and concrete: the Amadeus data centre in rural Bavaria handles 24,000 transactions per second at peak times


OBSERVATIONS


DIGITAL ECONOMY

Data is the iron orefor a new industrialrevolutionby Dennis Layton

The industrial revolution was a triumphfor Britain, allowing it to leapfrog the av-erage standard of living of its Europeanand international peers.

Many factors contributed to the indus-trial revolution: increased trade, consumerand business demand, new technologicalbreakthroughs, and a stagnant workforcewhich required inter-generationalreskilling.

But what created a new S-curve forBritain was its use of iron to create a new in-frastructure which combined privatelyfunded investments (in railways andbridges, for example) with government toaccelerate most sectors of the economy si-multaneously in a virtuous circle. Signifi-cant emphasis was placed on using regula-tory powers to strengthen the economy.Although some mistakes were made, thecontrols put in place were aimed at remov-ing obstacles (such as purchasing land fromreluctant landowners), so that the interestsof society and social utility were put aheadof individual interests.

Britain’s early adoption enabled it to bethe prime mover in the next waves of innovation and opportunity. This providedBritain with political stability at home anddisproportionate strength and influence on the global stage for more than a hundredyears. There is an argument that Britainfinds itself in a similar situation today but this time with data playing the role ofiron ore.

Britain already has the second largestconcentration of data centres in the world.It has a robust data analytics industry. It has the potential for strong demand fromother parts of the economy such as financialservices, healthcare, pharmaceuticals andnew media. Innovations in manufacturingand increased trade/offshoring have oncemore highlighted the importance of equipping the workforce with the rightskills for the new data economy.

Three broad questions underpin any crit-ical transformation programme. Firstly,does Britain have a sufficiently co-ordi-

nated aspiration to be a prime innovator inthe data economy and to use its regulatorypowers to accelerate and to remove obsta-cles? For example, is it creating incentivesfor investments to maximise the size of itsdata resources and data infrastructure –such as data centres – to move inefficientdata centres and servers into larger scalemore efficient ones, and to equip its work-force with the right skills?

Is it exploiting fully the significant dataresources it has (such as in the NHS) fornew innovations? And has it got the criticalbalance right between opportunity and riskin order to maximise social utility?

Secondly, does Britain have an informedassessment of how its aspiration comparesin scale and timing to its global competi-tors? Is it aware of the key competitive met-rics in the data economy, such as the avail-ability and predictability of power –perhaps the single biggest constraint – andapproval times and criteria to build newdata centres? Thirdly, does Britain have acredible and measurable plan to close thegaps with its competitors to give it a primemover advantage in the data economy?

Britain has multiple public and privateinitiatives in place, and senior roles havebeen created in both the public and privatesectors to focus on the opportunity. Thequestion is how those compare to theircompetitors and the gap to achieving theiraspiration. British innovation shaped theworld that we all live in today. It can do soagain. But it is unlikely to happen unless westart asking harder questions about thetough trade-offs it will take for that to be arealistic possibility. Dennis Layton is a partner at McKinseyand Company in London

INDUSTRY VIEW

Ask not what thecountry can do for youby Bernard Geoghegan

In the last supplement, Simon Campbell-Whyte, executive director of the DataCentre Alliance, argued that despite datacentres underpinning so much of the na-tion's commerce, the UK government wason the verge of strangling the industry. Inmany ways I don't disagree with Simon.The data centre industry can be hugelyvaluable to the UK and should be drivingdiscussions around IT investment strate-gies, cloud innovation and energy policy,all of which are at the heart of the UK'sgrowth agenda.

But Simon's article also got me thinking.Perhaps what is needed is a simple reversalof the question at hand. Rather than askingwhat the country can do for the data centreindustry, perhaps we should be askingwhat the data centre can do for the country.

Data is now not only the jewel in the cor-porate crown but also key for the effectivedelivery of future public sector services.Many government departments are en-hancing services and delivering them on-line. Over 80 per cent of HMRC’s tax re-turns are submitted via the internet and thegovernment recently announced a cash in-jection for the NHS so that patient data canbe shared electronically. The drive to mod-ernise government services and engage thedigitally disenfranchised can only become areality if the right infrastructure is in placeto support these capabilities.

Data centres have become as importantas the national grid or the transport net-work. From power and water to transportand telecommunications, data has estab-lished itself as the lifeblood of the nationaleconomic growth.

The establishment of data centres in theUK can create a competitive advantage forgovernments and a magnet for global busi-ness investment. Location should offerunique opportunities for scalability andflexibility, as well as a high quality of serv-ice. Geographic dispersion of networkeddata centres can enable governments to op-timise application response and allows forflexible mobility of workloads across data

Shock and ore: data is the new iron

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£0

£1,000

£2,000

£3,000

£4,000

£5,000

£6,000

Power

Staffing

Data Center Capacity

Network and Comms

Installation

Server Hardware

£0

£0.20

£0.10

£0.30

£0.40

£0.50

£0.60

£0.70

£0.80

High Cost Low Cost

Power Cost inc Overhead

Staffing and Maintenance

M&E Capital Cost

Construction Cost

Fig. 1: 3-year cost of a single physical server

Fig. 2: Differing unit cost of a delivered IT kWh


centres avoiding demand hotspots andtherefore fully using the available capacity.

The data centre community works withleading technology, cloud, finance and cor-porate organisations from across the worldto create an ecosystem where organisationscan join and utilise as they require. An anal-ogy to this would be an underground mapwhere data centre hosting companies, suchas Digital Realty, now act as the operatingcompanies. Each stop is then a data centrefacility – with the different line routes act-ing as the interconnected network provid-ing access to all the hosted cloud solutions.

The network connectivity ecosystem al-lows governments to innovate with newonline services and scale rapidly in busy pe-riods. It means that in periods of high datatraffic the infrastructure is flexible to thebusinesses needs without disrupting theusers. It is also highly cost competitive.

There is no doubt that the relationshipbetween governments and data centres hasgrown in importance over the last fewyears. Politicians talk a lot about “moderngovernment” and “modern society”, anideal that can only really be achieved if thecorrect digital backbone and infrastructureto support innovation and the delivery ofservices is in place.

Having a scalable, well connected datacentre infrastructure that is flexible hasnever been more vital because it equips UKplc with backbone to grow and in turn em-ploy more people. It is for that reason weask not what the country can do for the datacentre industry, but what the data centrecan do for the country. Bernard Geoghegan is managing directorEMEA at Digital Realty

COST OF OWNERSHIP

Planning forsuccessby Liam Newcombe

From initial construction, to the energypowering them, the total cost of data cen-tres keeps climbing. The EU estimated in2009 that data centres in Europe alreadyused as much electricity as Portugal: thisnumber, and the associated cost, has onlyincreased since then. Careful planning isneeded to make sure businesses are keep-ing their IT service total cost of ownership

(TCO) as low as possible. Many busi-nesses will rent, lease or otherwise out-source their data centre requirements inorder to avoid capital costs. Here there aretwo emerging trends.

First is the growing realisation that treat-ing IT as an overhead cost to be minimisedwith the lowest bidder is the wrong strat-egy. General Motors for instance has beguntaking its IT and data centres back in-house:recognising such services as an essentialpart of its competitive advantage andswitching from 90 per cent outsourced ITto outsourcing the commodity services butowning and innovating their differentiat-ing value in-house.

Second is the much-hyped “cloud com-puting” revolution. Cloud is to the IT

service provider market what deregulationand globalisation was to manufacturing inthe 1980s. A combination of maturingtechnologies and internet bandwidth hasmade it practical to deliver most IT servicesfrom any physical location and to havethose services up and running in as little as a few hours.

As a straightforward comparison, thecost of operating a single physical server inan enterprise data centre for three years canexceed £5,000 just for the building, powerand server hardware: without consideringany software (see figure 1, above). Thismight take weeks or months to order, allo-cate capacity and install. Conversely, a largeorganisation can buy virtual servers by thehour from cloud providers for prices as low


OBSERVATIONS


as 2 pence per hour, or £526 over the sameperiod.

Taking both these trends together, busi-nesses should increasingly take a mixed ap-proach: bringing the most essential servicesback in-house while placing the others onthe cloud. Yet without understanding theTCO of their IT services, IT departmentscannot possibly decide on the best ap-proach: leaving them vulnerable to compe-tition or an expensive, General Motors-style reversal.

By taking a few leaves from the cloudprovider book and building what they actually need, rather than over-engineeringa data centre to unnecessary and unrealisticrequirements, an enterprise can ensure ithas the leanest, most cost-effective capacitypossible.

What to measure?

Most importantly, businesses need toknow which data centre metrics and

measurements actually matter. To date theindustry only really has one metric, thePower Usage Effectiveness (PUE), whichessentially measures the ratio of howmuch energy the data centre actually con-sumes in order to power IT equipment:commonly 2.0 or more.

Yet this doesn’t let us see how cost-effec-tive the actual IT services are. eBay, for one,has begun producing some real businessmetrics with their Digital Service Efficiency dashboard (dse.ebay.com). Herethey report the revenue and cost per user,server and power usage: proper metricsthat can be used to make business decisions.

A simple and powerful initial businessmetric for a business data centres is the totalcost of each kilowatt hour (kWh) of elec-tricity delivered to the IT equipment, irre-spective of PUE. In our experience thisranges from less than £0.07/ kWh for olderbuildings in cheap power areas to over

£0.70 / kWh for new buildings, whichhave poor utilisation of capacity, are stillwriting down their capital cost, and are inexpensive city locations on expensivepower (see figure. 2, page 17). lLiam Newcombe is chief technology officer at Romonet

SKILLS

Global industry,local difficultiesby Nicola Hayes

A lack of formal education specific to datacentres, coupled with the fact that the datacentre industry has remained off the radarfor over a decade, means graduates are fail-ing to consider a career in what is, to all in-tents and purposes, a recession-proof

9158

10024

Peru & Chile

22628

89100

12898

12341

6584

3732

CentralAmerica

Alpine

11553

8800 4448

39600UK

26442

24340France

18308

17791

9712

9295

7835

7386

7093Nordics

3986

EasternEurope

38494

20418

20353

11796

11750

11574

6260

Total Data Center Workforce

Planet data: prestige and higher than average salaries are creating an over-supply of skilled workers in emerging markets (source: DCD Intelligence)



growth industry. It is an industry withgreat career prospects, opportunities fortravel and salaries that are often abovethose in the medical profession.

Over 60 per cent of data centre ownersand operators expressed concern aboutthe lack of suitably skilled or qualified staffto run their facilities, according to a recentDCD Intelligence survey, yet not much isever written about the people working indata centres, their salaries or level of qual-ification. In part, this may explain whythere is a lack of interest in data centre ca-reers among graduates.

Over-supply

Globally there are an estimated half a mil-lion people working in and around datacentres (see graphic, opposite). The prob-lems associated with staffing and recruit-ing for data centre roles are far more prevalent in mature markets. Emergingeconomies, by contrast, are not strugglingto attract qualified talent and in some in-stances appear to have an over-supply ofhighly qualified engineers, facilitiesmangers and IT professionals.

Further, markets such as Russia, East-ern Europe and China have a higher num-ber of data centre personnel with graduateand postgraduate levels of education thanthose in North America, the UK andWestern Europe. Levels of pay and pres-tige is one explanation for this.

A comparison of the salaries of a datacentre professional versus a family doctoron a country by country basis reveals thatin particular emerging economies it makesmore financial sense to enter a career in adata centre than a traditional profession.

Western data centre operators, by con-trast, face an under-supply of suitablyskilled and qualified staff.

As discussions with key industry per-sonnel, associations including the DataCentre Alliance, and universities testify,the UK data centre market, like its UScounterpart, is suffering a skills shortage.A lack of formal data centre based educa-tion has led to a shortage of new graduatesentering the profession. And this is com-pounded by a workforce heavily weightedtowards those of retirement age. By way ofillustration, the UK has the highest num-ber of data centre personnel with over 10years’ experience as a percentage of itsoverall workforce (65 per cent).

An under-supply of people means thattraditional supply and demand economies

come into play and salary levels are in-creasing above inflation levels. Althoughthis is not so acute in the UK as in theUnited States (where data centre salariesrose almost 4 per cent above inflation lastyear), it does mean that there is addedpressure on operators’ already squeezedoperating expense. Moreover, innovationis often led by talented graduates and thedata centre industry is missing out on thisvaluable resource.

Attracting graduates

The industry is now looking to redress thesituation with a number of initiativesaimed of attracting more talent, particu-larly at the graduate level. It can’t come toosoon – the latest figures show that in theUK the number of new people enteringthe industry as a proportion of the overallworkforce has dropped. In 2013 only 3.2per cent of the workforce had under ayears’ experience (in other words, gradu-ate and entry level) compared to 4.9 percent in 2011. lNicola Hayes is managing director at DCD Intelligence

TRAINING

Big data, big skills gapby Andrew Stevens

According to research firm Gartner, 4.4million IT jobs will be created to supportbig data by 2015, a figure that reflects thevibrancy of the data centre industry. How-ever, there simply isn’t enough talent tosupport this growth.

Without professionally trained staffthere is a risk that quality standards andcodes of practice within the industry willnot be adhered to and this could impact theday-to-day running of a data centre. It alsoposes a risk of exposing an organisation tothe huge costs associated with correctingerrors or dealing with downtime, costing anaverage $11,000 per minute for enterpriseswhere the data centre is core to the business. Seventy five per cent of all failuresin critical facilities are caused by human error.

For the industry to continue to thrivethere is a need to entice new talent into thedata centre industry with the right founda-

tion level of knowledge, something theData Centre Alliance has been working onwith various universities and sponsorsCNet Training, Telehouse and Telecity-Group.

Nurturing existing talent is also a must,by creating an on-going training and devel-opment plan to enhance the skills, knowl-edge, qualification and certifications of ex-isting staff. According to CNet Training, atypical return on investment (ROI) for adata centre technician earning £40,000could be as much as 580 per cent.

Staff effectiveness

We recommend a structured approach tolearning, with programs that are mappedto the actual careers available within theindustry. Certifications offer a channel tolife-long learning as there is a need to re-certify every few years. This approach of-ten involves just a few hours of onlinestudy and exam that tops up the delegates’knowledge ensuring it reflects the verylatest changes within the industry. A re-cent Global Knowledge survey found that92 per cent of companies witnessed in-creases in staff effectiveness followingcertification.

The data centre industry offers excitingopportunities to those working within itand offers an attractive proposition to thoselooking for a fulfilling and rewarding career.But, for it to continue to flourish, there is anurgent need for trained professionals to not only fill the current skills gap but to ensure data centres across the world cancontinue to operate at optimum levels inthe future. lAndrew Stevens, managing director CNet Training

Screen test: there is a lack of talent to support growth

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22 | NEW STATESMAN | 11 -17 OCTOBER 2013

In one vision of the future, big techtakes over every industry just as Ama-zon has taken over storage and books,Apple music and telecoms, Google ad-

vertising. But there is another version ofthe future where big business gets wise tothe game and leans in to the challenge. Itrealises that tech is no longer an industrybut a layer and the chief executive of thoselarge industries embrace that layer. Theywill crave digital revenues whether theyare radio stations, banks, telcos, retailshops, airlines or health care firms.

Innovation is not about technology buteconomics. If it was otherwise, we’d still beflying the Concorde. Instead, we’re stuffedinto jumbo jets. As a case in point, Kodak,Polaroid and Instagram were in the sameindustry yet they didn’t talk. Instagram wasorganised around the consumer while Ko-dak was working for its suppliers.

Size used to drive market power. “I’m arecord label, so I’m big, and you, artist, aresmall. Take it or leave it.” But then cannyDavid’s decided to play a trick on those oldGoliaths. They changed the rules of thegame. They realised that the world had be-come networked. Business was no longerlinear. It wasn’t that I sold, you bought, andone of us had to win, but that we were par-ticipating in a transaction with multipleparties: consumer of music, artist, distribu-tor and so on.

Someone needed to organise those eco-nomics. Enter Apple which broke the holdthat mobile telecoms firms’ had on the con-sumer. Enter Spotify which enabled mass

discovery of music by not only reducing thecost of production and distribution but byorganising the economics for the ecosys-tem at the heart of the music industry.

Enter Monitise whose CEO and founderAlastair Lukies said ten years ago: “If mobilebanking is going to work, it has to work foreveryone – the telco, the bank, and the indi-vidual who gets a lower cost of capital.”More than a thousand financial institutionsare now serviced by Monitise who boughtits US competitor and is backed by Visa.Monitise, in which I was previously a share-holder, created the economics for the mo-bile banking industry; that’s why it’s expe-riencing the biggest “J curve” in UK techindustry history.

But how do you repeat the success of aMonitise over and over again. Where’s theentrepreneur factory? There have alwaysbeen great entrepreneurs throughout his-tory but the infrastructure for releasingtheir gift is not evenly distributed .

Here, however, is a very British opportu-nity. Once upon a time, Britain took overthe world. It said, “The language is English,and the civil service works like this, and thecurrency is the pound.” Britain structuredits universe, and the benefits came backmultiplied. Then Britain opened itself up,

A very Britishopportunityby Julie Meyer

Technology has changed the rules of business and reordered its economics. That’s why UK plc must stop looking across the Atlantic for a quick sale

OPINION

and created a marketplace. The centre of theAnglosphere was London. Today the car-tographers win. As Canadian ice hockeylegend Wayne Gretzky once said, “A goodhockey player plays to where the puck is,but a great one plays to where it is going.”We must grab hold of where the world isgoing, and internalise that future vision inorder to play our best game today.

Our corporates must become a legitimatehighway for the digital cars looking for dis-tribution. We must become the industryarchitects and position our companies asthe operating systems of their industry.

A couple of years ago, I set up a venturecapital fund. We have found great Britishentrepreneurs to back. But what I hadn’tfully appreciated, despite having worked in the high tech industry for 25 years, wassomething called “the game”. The game forevery European tech venture capitalist is to back a start-up and sell it to a US big techfirm. That’s it. It’s actually not creative and I didn’t get into venture capital to sell to theAmericans.

We must change the rules of the game.We must aspire to organise industries. If wegenuinely know where that puck is going,then the game we play today is one of dis-ruptive economics not fixed geography.The software is in the brains of the entre-preneurs but also the corporate CEOs whowill dominate this next decade. Whosecode are you writing? lJulie Meyer is founder of EntrepreneurCountry and chief executive of Ariadne Capital

The game? I didn’t getinto venture capital tosell to the Americans

22 Industry Voice Julie Meyer:Statesman supplements 08/10/2013 13:11 Page 4

11 –17 OCTOBER 2013 | NEW STATESMAN | 23

FACTS & FIGURES IISO

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S: C

AM

POS

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SEA

RC

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AN

ALY

SIS;

DIG

ITA

L R

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LTY

The CIO’s view by numbers

88%68%65%46%

1,300 m² average size requirement

Most popular location for

new data centre

3 reasons for staying

in home country

29% 24% 21% 17%

Will “definitely” or “probably” expand

their data centres before end of 2014

Prefer to locate data

centre in home country

Have built a new data centre

in last 12 months

PARIS NEW YORK FRANKFURT

Shipping container

data centre

45% report using a

shipping

container module

as data centreLONDON

Intend to use two or

more sites

Latency

Security

Connectivity

23 Fact and Figures 2:Statesman supplements 08/10/2013 12:52 Page 23

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