No One Home Nights or Weekends at Vermont Data Center

CIO - The data center for the state of Vermont provides application and storage for the services provided by the state's government, from processing registration information for the Department of Motor Vehicles, to ensuring that enrolled citizens benefit from the state's food subsidy program.

In an effort to cut costs, Joe Ng, the information-technology manager responsible for the government's data center, embarked on a program two years ago to automate management of the facility, moving from operation around the clock to locking the doors and turning off the lights between midnight and 6 a.m. on weekdays and for the entire weekend.

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Given the critical nature of the services, going "lights out" for almost half the week was not an easy sell, Ng says.

"It took a long time to convince people, and the resistance was pretty stiff," Ng says. "But everything went well, and people are really behind it now."

After six months operating in its lights-out mode, the data center group was able to cut staff by more than 40 percent and significantly reduce costs.

Automating data center operations and allowing for remote management-the core characteristics of a lights-out facility-are a natural fit for many companies that want to save money and increase security. In 2006, Hewlett Packard heavily pushed the lights-out concept for data centers, and since then it has quietly taken off, says Gary Thome, chief architect for HP's Infrastructure and Blades group.

"Most customers are really serious about wanting to go lights-out, to fully automated data centers," Thome says. "The ideal is to just be able to sit around and wait for something to happen."

Here are five key lessons Ng learned in his Vermont lights-out project.

1. "Lights out" is not all or nothingWhile some companies may aim to depopulate their data center around the clock, for most companies being lights out is not a black-and-white concept. The definition of lights out is not zero population all the time, says Ng.

"The concept extends from totally nobody there to lights out for a certain period of time," Ng says. "For the State of Vermont, we cannot go lights out 24-by-7."

Increasingly, data centers are being designed assuming that fewer, or no, people will work in them, says Joseph Pucciarelli, program director of technology, financial, and executive strategies for business intelligence firm IDC.

"You used to have a data center with a lot of office space around it filled with IT people," he says. "Now, you don't see a lot of office space because they don't want to have a lot of people in the data center."