Schneider Electric: 2014 Data Center Market outlook

Two key points for a new year in the business:

1. Green, efficient it will be the chief information Officer and Enterprise of the most important. As energy costs continue to rise, companies will seek the help of CIOs to manage and reduce costs.

2. Find reliable people to do the right job. Professionals are hard to find, and even if they are found, they are hard to keep, especially in the data center.

Green IT

At present, IT infrastructure is overwhelmed by the growth of it requirements caused by business requirements. The increase in it demand is bound to lead to increased power consumption in the data center. Frost & Sullivan, an internationally renowned analyst, points out that more than 80% of the major data centers in the Asia-Pacific region are operating at nearly 90% of the capacity of 1. In the face of this situation, companies in the Asia-Pacific region are grappling with data center capacity constraints caused by inefficient equipment and power stranding.

Energy efficiency management and carbon emissions are critical to the profitability and sustainability of the IT community. To remain competitive in the current market, companies must change the way they evaluate the value of their data center investments. Green, efficient data can slow the rise in energy costs, control spending, increase profitability and help reduce carbon emissions.

Energy costs are usually one of the most expensive operating costs for an enterprise--accounting for about One-third of the total operating cost, but also one that can be controlled in operating costs. Choosing the right energy-saving equipment and deploying an integrated energy management program can achieve up to 30% of the cost savings. These savings can help companies gain a more competitive edge and enhance profitability by creating more cost-effective products and solutions.

As a result, many companies are shifting more budgets to energy management that promotes technology and facilities management. This is supported by an increasing number of data center infrastructure Management (DCIM) software such as Struxureware, extensible modules, and prefabricated modular solutions. In fact, according to projections, spending on infrastructure management in the data center will grow by more than 20% in 2013, and by 2016, sales will reach $690 million trillion 2, further confirming that energy costs will be the focus of the future.

Talent War

In the booming IT industry, data centers are facing the plight of technical personnel unable to meet industry needs. This lack of human resources means higher wages and higher corporate costs. From an industry perspective, the challenge of engineering, it, and technical capabilities is second only to sales; the latter is hailed as the most challenging skill.

The trend of big data growth has made the war on talent even more pronounced. There is a huge gap between the supply and demand of human resources. As data continues to grow exponentially, those who face problems quickly provide solutions and insights through organizing, storing, and retrieving data will become highly technical and valuable IT professionals.

Here is a ballpark figure about the talent problem. In the United States alone, the shortage of talent with analytical expertise is roughly 140,000–190,000. It is expected that by 2018, the US will demand more than 60% of the actual supply of higher-level graduates.

This has also spread to Asia. The whole region faces this problem. In view of this, educational institutions everywhere need to keep up with the competitive job market trend and ensure that job seekers can find jobs that can truly display their professional skills. To find and retain talent, businesses must plan their workforce and develop practical strategies that can adapt to regional disparities.

Energy efficiency management issues for enterprises in Asia Pacific and Japan in the 2014

Today, there is a lack of understanding of energy management. In Asia, companies have varying levels of energy management maturity.

In the area of green data centers and energy-saving data centers, developing countries in parts of Asia lag far behind by a combination of factors. and the relevant construction of relatively perfect countries, including Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong, also need to face the challenge.

Data growth and rising energy costs are the two major challenges facing today's mature Asia-Pacific Data Center market.

Challenge 1: Data growth

90% of the world's data are created in the 3 of the past two years. According to IDC, our digital world will be doubling 4 every two years from now until 2020. In addition to data generated from consumers and businesses, data generated from monitoring devices and intelligent city sensors will also greatly contribute to the proliferation of digital information.

As a result, many data centers are buying and installing additional physical and virtual high-density servers to keep up with exponential growth. Businesses spend as much as $45.05 trillion a year on servers. The addition of servers means that data center complexity and new challenges to server management increase. The challenge arises when it is still managing virtual servers like a physical machine. This backward management is not only inefficient, but also costly. Schneider Electric found that the enterprise spends more than three times times as much on server management as the server device itself. The cost of server management continues to grow even as the number of servers increases as the consolidation and virtualization of the past few years flatten. But in the long run, this trend will not last long.

Challenge 2: Energy efficiency

Today, energy efficiency improvements in traditional data centers are the main challenges that data centres face in improving energy efficiency. This is because traditional data centers consume more power to cope with growing data needs and new technologies: virtualization, for example, increases the value of traditional data center Pue (Power Usage effectiveness). Although power costs may exceed the cost of the power system itself over the entire lifecycle of the data center, or exceed the cost of IT equipment by 5, energy consumption is not a typical data center design standard, nor is it effectively managed as a cost, especially for traditional data centers. Basically, capital costs will be overtaken by operating costs (OPEX) within a few years.

Another major factor in the low energy efficiency of data centers is over planning. Over-planning is one of the biggest drivers of power waste in data center, and it is also the biggest difficulty for users to understand and evaluate. Whenever the design value of the power and cooling system exceeds the IT load, the power and cooling equipment size is too large.

Although the installation of excessive power and cooling equipment is clearly a waste from an investment perspective, the excessive planning model leads to a significant reduction in overall power efficiency, while the problem of persistent excess power consumption is not obvious. Most users do not understand that both the power and cooling systems have fixed losses and are proportional to the overall rated power, regardless of whether it loads exist or not. These fixed losses are the main forms of power consumption in the data Center physical infrastructure (DCPI) under Typical installation. At a smaller it load rate, the fixed loss of the data center infrastructure typically exceeds the IT load. When the data center infrastructure is over planned, the proportion of fixed losses in total power costs increases by 6. This means that the customer is using capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating costs (OPEX) to support the load capacity that has not really occurred.

The traits most needed by IT executives in the 2014

Effective and comprehensive energy management will go beyond IT management, so it executives need to work closely with facility management to develop a comprehensive energy management strategy.

For data center policies and Energy management, it executives also need to build a more comprehensive, end-to-end approach, rather than looking for fragmented solutions, such as server virtualization or data center infrastructure management, while also focusing on in-house talent strategies and succession planning.

2014 changes in management strategy, IT infrastructure strategy, spending, and corporate confidence

In the 2013, many enterprises developed energy-efficient and reliable data centers using a single solution, such as server virtualization, data center infrastructure management, and reasonable planning. In the 2014, the enterprise's data center strategy will be more inclined to adopt a comprehensive, end-to-end approach. The goal of the enterprise is to assist in the planning, design, construction, transportation and optimization of the data center through its lifecycle, which will ensure the efficiency and security of the data center throughout the life cycle.

Advice to the Enterprise

A comprehensive, end-to-end approach is critical to the enterprise's data center strategy in order to operate an energy-efficient, reliable data center to meet exponential data challenges from smarter cities. Schneider Electric provides customers with support throughout the data center lifecycle, and assists in planning, design, construction, and operation of peacekeeping facilities, which will ensure the efficiency and security of the data center throughout the lifecycle.

Assessment

Learn how to improve operational efficiency and energy efficiency, and understand that the corresponding data center ecosystem operations will have a real impact on the bottom line of the enterprise. A detailed analysis can help organizations understand their data centers and help them solve the following problems:

· Is energy part of your IT strategic plan?

• Is your data center physical infrastructure guaranteed to continue running?

• Do you know how to optimize data center availability and performance?

• Do you know how to increase operational efficiency?

· Do you know your datacenter Pue value?

· Do you know the lifecycle, productivity, and threats of an aging infrastructure?

· Do you know how to reduce operating costs and better manage capital expenditures?

· Do you know how to reduce energy consumption?

• Does your business plan provide an opportunity for energy savings?

Planning

Once you have a detailed insight into your data center environment, businesses need to make sure that the right people make informed decisions in a reasonable order. The appropriate planning process can begin:

1. Establish six key project parameters that can control the system architecture, i.e. key, capacity, growth plan, energy efficiency, power density and budget.

2. Select the reference design based on the above six key project parameters and establish the system concept.

3. To improve the system concept by identifying, validating and adjusting the specific design parameters, and adding user preferences and restrictions.

4. Determine landing requirements by collecting standards, specifications, deadlines, resource allocations, and process requirements.

Design

The result of the design phase after merging is the reference of this design stage. At this stage, enterprises can tailor their own data center design according to their specific specifications of the data center.

This phase will help enterprises identify the power and cooling equipment required by the datacenter and adjust the physical infrastructure of the data center to a reasonable scale. As discussed earlier, the overly-planned data center physical infrastructure is one of the main reasons for inefficient data centers in the Asia-Pacific region. Adjusting the size of the data center physical infrastructure can have a significant impact on its power consumption. In practical devices, reasonable planning may reduce power costs by as much as 50%. For a typical system with an IT load rate of 30%, the power cost per kilowatt it load is approximately 2300 dollars per kilowatt year. If the system has a reasonable scale commensurate with the load, the power cost per kilowatt it load will be reduced to about $1440 per kilowatt year-saving 38% of the power cost.

This phase will also help companies determine whether they should choose a virtualized server to handle exponentially growing data. A well-known benefit of virtualization is to reduce energy costs by consolidating physical servers. To illustrate its remarkable energy-saving effect, we assume that 1MW of data, 1000 of each physical server that consumes 250W, and a cost of 0.11 dollars per degree, the energy cost of running these servers annually is about 240,000 dollars; virtualization of these servers in a conservative proportion of 10:1, The remaining physical servers operate at 60% CPU utilization, resulting in a total energy cost of about 60,000 dollars. This indicates that the server has achieved 76% energy savings. This is why virtualization is widely promoted as a data center for green technology. Because of its large decline in energy consumption at the same time, to ensure the stability of computing capacity or even improve 8.

Construction

At this stage, organizations need to focus on the design and deployment of complex infrastructure solutions to ensure that the data center's device configuration achieves optimal performance. This will help businesses save time and cost, and help extend the life of hardware devices.

In addition, data center infrastructure management solutions, such as Struxureware software for data centers, can be installed and integrated at this stage to help businesses monitor each component from racks, cabinets to engine rooms. The Data Center infrastructure management solution provides IT managers with detailed information on the energy usage of data centers and facilities. Creating visibility and full awareness of energy use helps companies control energy costs and energy consumption, and enables data centers and device managers to access enterprise-class Energy information anytime, anywhere, to help them make informed decisions about maximizing energy consumption and cost. Companies can also achieve up to 30% of capital and operational savings, including energy savings from data center infrastructure management solutions. 9

Yun-Wei

Once the data center is up and running, the enterprise needs to maintain, operate, monitor and optimize the unique hardware and software that is configured according to its data center to ensure that they are working properly.

Data centers are extremely energy-consuming devices-a typical large data center can consume 100 times times as much energy as a standard office building. To encourage more business and data center operators to adapt to energy efficiency, they also need to be informed of the economic benefits that energy efficiency can bring. For example, Credit Suisse's regional data center in Singapore has obtained the data center Green Standard Platinum Certification (Platinum under the "Green Mark for data centres certification)." The data center can reduce the overall IT equipment's power demand, achieve 3.85 million-degree energy-saving annual electricity. That means saving 1 million dollars a year for 10.

The simple, cost-free decision made at the time of the new datacenter design will not only achieve less carbon emissions, but also reduce electricity costs by 20% to 50%. Through a systematic effort, up to 90% of electricity spending is avoidable. Given that typical data center energy costs account for more than 50% per cent of operating expenses, if companies can improve energy efficiency in their data centers, they will be able to tap into the enormous cost savings potential.