Over the last few years, we have seen the number of data centers growing at an exceptional rate to keep pace with the growth in data. And this is a huge concern for IT managers. Until recently, continuous improvements in price and performance made it easy and affordable to solve storage concerns simply by adding more disks to existing storage systems.

Now, each and every enterprise has its own data center. But the complexity of managing these efficiently has also become a challenge for CIOs. An email survey done on CIOs of some SMEs by VOICE&DATA found that there are limits to that easy growth-floor space, weight loads, rack space, network drops, power connections, cooling infrastructure, and even power itself are finite resources. Failing on any one of these limits significantly jeopardizes the ability of the IT department to meet the demands of business.

The Data Center Scenario
The Indian scenario is a bit different from the global for managed data services. In India large enterprises rely on their own in-house data centers, whereas SMEs prefer to outsource. What are the benefits? "That depends on the storage needs. For direct attached storage where data access is needed by servers, in-house storage is a better option," says Rajesh Uppal, chief GM, IT, Maruti Udyog.

High availability, capacity planning, and optimal utilization of resources are some of the biggest concerns for CIOs. Cost cutting is not one of the top priorities. To ensure high availability, power backup has to be there 24x7x365. Data centers should also adopt network load balancing along with disaster recovery (DR) so that stress on them can be minimized. For the critical applications running in the data centers one should have an automatic fail-over set-up. Redundancy building into all the elements can also affect high availability.

If the organization does not have enough trained staff to provide high availability, then outsourcing of critical applications is a better idea. "Enterprises prefer to outsource to data center service providers because of lack of expertise," says Deepak Makhija, business head, Storage Services, HCL Comnet.

To combat the issue of capacity planning, one of the options suggested by some of our respondents was server consolidation. A requirement for which is monitoring the IT resources before formulating the strategy. Broadly speaking, server consolidation translates into IT resource management. You should only revamp your data center if you think it can't take the load of your upcoming projects or if you don't have enough time and budget then-outsourcing, then, becomes a better option.

Virtualization is another solution for capacity planning. With virtualization enterprises can add more apps in the same environment in order to utilize the unused server power, for efficient resource management. This will also help in addressing other concerns like ensuring optimal utilization of resources and keeping costs under control.

Key Management Concerns
Power concerns top the list, followed by crash and recovery. There are also connectivity related cooling and data backup issues. Let's take these issues one by one.

	"In the next 18 months, increase in average storage rack density is expected to raise average power consumption"
	––Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, India, NetApp
	"Enterprises prefer to outsource the data center needs to the data center service providers because of lack of expertise"
	––Deepak V Makhija, business head, Storage services, HCL Comnet
	"For direct attached storage where data access is needed by servers, in-house storage is a better option"
	––Rajesh Uppal, chief GM, IT, Maruti Udyog

Power, undoubtedly, is the basic need for a huge data center. As it grows it requires more electricity in order to power the infrastructure. "In the next 18 months, increase in average storage rack density is expected to drive the average power consumption from 2kw per rack to 30kw," says Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, India, Network Appliance. Here too, capacity planning plays a major role. One has to evaluate the present and future power requirements for a data center.

Servers can alone consume 50% of the power coming into the data center. The first step in reducing power consumption is to attack the power problem where data centers can reap the most gains-consolidating and virtualizing application servers.

In environments with lots of direct-attached storage, as much as 27% of the power going into the data center is being consumed by storage. These days, many organizations have their own power generation units for powering their data center grid.

Next is the crash recovery issue. For instance, if any of the mission critical applications fail due to hardware failure, what would be the recovery strategy to bring back the application with minimum down time? You can keep spares in stock 'so that you can just replace the hardware and host the application on a new piece of hardware', suggests Makhija.

Connectivity issues are another concern that CIOs face. In fact, one interesting aspect that came up from our survey was availability of network equipment. What if one switch fails somewhere in your large data center? For this, you need real time monitoring of the networking equipment, and failover support for the most critical ones.