April 9, 2007 (Computerworld) --
Rick King helps run a $3.1 billion information services business for The Thomson Corp., and he says it’s crucial to get enough power to store the 2.5 petabytes of legal and regulatory data the company provides to its customers.
King, executive vice president and chief operations officer for Thomson’s North American Legal business, completed a 17,000-square-foot upgrade of two 10-year-old data centers in May 2005. Among other things, he boosted the power available from the original 25 watts per square foot to the 60 watts required by today’s denser, virtualized servers and storage. He also added redundant power feeds from separate electric substations and added more backup batteries and generators.
With the online share of Thomson’s business growing rapidly, King can’t afford to rely on third-party data centers that might not have access to sufficient power — or the will to make costly upgrades. So he’s preparing to consolidate smaller data centers and build a new 80,000-square-foot data center (with at least the same 60-watt-per-square-foot capacity) to house servers and storage for his company’s growing customer base.
Thomson’s hardware footprint is no small investment. And with power costs on the rise, King says his main concern now is finding and keeping skilled staffers who understand the interplay of computing technology, power requirements and facilities design.
Those skilled staffers come at premium prices, stretching budgets even further. In the second half of 2006, pay for some storage administrators grew 20%, according to David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at IT workforce consultancy Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan, Conn. Salaries for senior storage network administrators had risen 10% in the 18 months prior to December 2006, which was “well beyond the average growth in pay for IT jobs overall,” Foote says.
The combination of scarce and more expensive power, rising administrator salaries and storage needs that are growing as much as 70% annually is hitting IT budgets hard. Here’s how some companies are coping with these multiple storage headaches.
Where’s the Juice?
Disk and tape drives typically consume only one-fifth or less of the electricity used by a data center, with servers using much of the rest. But every terabyte of data stored online and available for production applications needs to be backed up for disaster recovery, with a third copy often archived for legal purposes. Saving data in triplicate can, of course, triple the amount of power required to run and cool storage devices. It can also lead to a need for more ducts or water pipes and an increase in the emergency battery or generator capacity needed.
Electricity is also getting more expensive. Commercial customers such as data centers paid an average of 7.43 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2000 and an average of 8.67 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. By November 2006, the average price had risen to 9.11 cents per kilowatt-hour, the department says. And regional spikes to as high as 14.38 cents per kilowatt-hour in some locales led customers such as Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Intuit Inc. to build large data centers near power sources in eastern Washington, says Jim Kerrigan, a principal at The Staubach Co., a commercial real estate firm in Chicago.
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