WIN AN IPAD 2 see page 27 for entry details
Inside a cutting-edge
Mapping
data centre
the geospatial
Carbon data-ing
future
qr-enabled interactive councils
JULY AUGUST 2012 • ISSUE 13
Renovate, rebuild or reassign?
DOINg data-centres cloud right roundtable meeting-room cloudtechnology privacy ■
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cover story: Carbon data-ing: Renovate, rebuild or reassign?
Introduction
The new carbon-pricing regime and growing interest in cloud computing have given data centres strategic primacy. Yet with a glut of new capacity come tough choices for government organisations that are now staring down an extreme ICT makeover.
35 Opinions: Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum;
2 Editor’s letter 3 News
Dirk Klein, SAS; Malcom Keys, Airwave Solutions; Karen Raccani, Nuance; Esri.
Features 27 Postcodes no longer geospatial gold standard
Government data is often grouped by postcode – but one expert warns that’s no longer enough.
28 QR-enabled interactive councils
Innovative councils around the world are exploring the use of QR codes to enhance interactivity.
49 Data-centre roundtable
SPECIAL features
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Growing demand for cloud-computing capabilities is driving a new wave of data-centre investment and solutions. Data-centre industry experts tell us what to expect.
46 Health agencies balance IT mandate with local innovation
Personally controlled e-health records are live as of July 1, but they’re not the only challenge health agencies face.
Case studies 40 The ATO wants to be your friend
It’s not known for its warmth and fuzziness, but the Australian Taxation Office is making plans to get closer to ratepayers using social media.
42 Better security on the Horizon
The need for SCADA security ensured an interesting virtual-desktop rollout for state-owned WA utility Horizon Energy.
Inside a cutting-edge data centre
Mapping the geospatial future
Just months old, a government-backed University of Melbourne data centre is showcasing the latest in power, cooling, and high-performance computing. GTR got an exclusive look inside.
Cloud storage, cloud analytics and an explosion in new data sources are redefining the possibilities of geospatial information in government bodies.
44 Taking control of printing
Massive paper wastage led Bellingen Shire Council to revisit its printing and slash usage dramatically.
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One day, in what we would hope will be a cleaner and greener future, we will look back on the introduction of the government’s carbon tax with a mixture of relief and what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger wistfulness. But right now, the tax has created a broad sense of uncertainty across most sectors of business, whether because it affects their company directly (and there are few in this basket) or because it affects suppliers who will, common sense dictates, have no choice but to raise input prices. There would be few parts of the IT industry feeling this last point more keenly than the data centres segment. Recent years have seen a rush towards building new data-centre capacity, and our cities are now awash in new floorspace – serviced, in most cases, by cutting-edge cooling and power infrastructure that represents a marked advancement from the freezer philosophy that has prevailed in the past. This month’s focus on data centres takes us across the breadth of the new glut in government-focused data centre supply, backed by a strengthening AGIMO mandate that is setting the tone for all three layers of government. We also take an in-depth tour of a government-backed data centre that went live just months ago, packing ridiculous amounts of computing power per rack to fuel a new generation of research computing capabilities. Much of this is driven from the cloud, and one industry where the cloud is quickly finding its feet is in spatial information systems: this month, we also look towards the future of this critical area of government technology. A few years from now, it’s a safe bet that a massive share of government data will live not on local servers but in private or even public cloud systems hosted in a data centre elsewhere, managed by somewhere else. This raises interesting possibilities and difficult challenges as well. I’d like to point your attention to our reader survey, which offers the opportunity to win an iPad 2 in exchange for a few minutes of your time. As I’ve mentioned previously, we are eager to get your feedback on GTR – what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see more or less of. Please gather your thoughts and complete the survey at www. govtechreview.com.au for your chance to win a great piece of shiny. It won’t cut your power bill or singlehandedly save the earth, but it will help us ensure that GTR is as valuable to you to read as it is enjoyable to us to produce.
EDITOR David Braue E: editor@govtechreview.com.au NATIONAL SALES MANAGER Yuri Mamistvalov E: yuri@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5008 ART DIRECTOR Annette Epifanidis E: annette@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5030 DESIGN & PRODUCTION Nicholas Thorne CONTRIBUTORS Beverley Head, Brad Howarth, Dr Steve Hodgkinson,
Dirk Klein, Malcom Keys, Karen Raccani MELBOURNE OFFICE Level 8, 574 St Kilda Rd. Melbourne Vic 3004 PO Box 6137, St Kilda Rd Central 8008 Phone: 03 8534 5000 Fax: 03 9530 8911 Government Technology Review is published by CommStrat ABN 31 008 434 802
www.commstrat.com.au All material in Government Technology Review is copyright. Reproduction in whole or in part is not allowed without written permission from the Publisher.
David Braue, Editor E: editor@govtechreview.com.au
2 | GTR JUNE/JULY 2012
To subscribe to GTR magazine phone: 03 8534 5009, email:subs@govtechreview.com.au or go to www.govtechreview.com.au/subscribe
Government to certify cloud vendors After extensive consultation and planning, AGIMO first assistant secretary Glenn Archer has confirmed the body will proceed with plans to introduce a “light touch” certification program for cloud vendors supplying government agencies, although timelines are still up in the air. AGIMO will compile a ‘multi-use list’ through October, Archer told the recent CeBIT industry conference in Sydney, comprising a list of approved cloud vendors whose services can be easily procured for rapid cloud deployments. Criteria will revolve more around the financial viability of the providers than their specific technical capabilities, which will
be assessable by departments through normal procedures. An internal survey had revealed 44 of 110 FMA departments had some plans to embrace some form of cloud computing, Archer said. The move is part of a broad revisitation of AGIMO cloud policy, which has progressed rapidly in the past year as the agency rushes to catch up with the fast-changing field and embrace a more strategic position towards cloud computing. Best-practice guides and specific policies are being formulated in the area and many, including the new certification program, may be revisited next year to ensure their fit for purpose. www.finance.gov.au/agimo
Governments need to make digital services more relevant: Accenture Citizens are ready and eager to use online government services if government agencies are ready to offer them, an Accenture survey has found. Called the Accenture Digital Citizen Pulse Survey, the survey included over 1400 respondents from Australia, France, Germany, India, Singapore, the UK and the US. Urban respondents made up 41 per cent of the respondents, with 33 per cent in suburban areas and 26 per cent in rural areas. The survey’s results confirmed broad public support for the idea of digital services, with more than half indicating they want to conduct all their government business online in the future and 63 per cent agreeing that the government would be more easily accessible digitally. “Governments may have come farther in their game of catch up with the private sector than many observers have suspected,” the report’s authors concluded. “The biggest challenge for government is not catching up with the private sector. It’s giving digital citizens what they want while using digital channels to improve public value.” Indeed, the survey found that many government organisations are perceived to
be far ahead of private-sector firms when it came to key usability metrics. For example, 42 per cent of people said interacting with the government online is about the same as it is interacting with private-sector firms, while 29 per cent said it is easier to access government services. Those who said interacting with government services is easy, generally said they found government services easier to interact with than private-sector services. Accenture’s analysts took this as a good sign for government, with half of respondents suggesting better digital interactions would encourage them to engage with government better. And while it may come as little surprise that 70 per cent respondents were most likely to use online Web portals to interact with government, other categories fared surprisingly well. A similar percentage said they were likely to take advantage of electronic renewal alerts and electronic emergency broadcasts and alerts were they available, while fully 60 per cent of respondents said they would use a digital post-styled online service – and a similar percentage would be open to using government secure identity-as-aservice offerings.
KPMG expects $3b gov and biz productivity boost from cloud A KPMG report has tied growing takeup of cloud computing to real increases in national GDP, with adoption of cloud services across 75 per cent of ICT spending by 2022 boosting GDP by $3.32 billion annually (at 50 per cent spending levels, the GDP growth will be $2.16 billion annually). The report, entitled Modeling the Economic Impact of Cloud Computing and available through www.kpmg.com.au, was commissioned by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and found that Australia’s cloud-computing adoption is relatively immature compared to that in the US and Europe. Fully 24 per cent of respondents identified as being involved in public-sector operations. Organisations are still more likely to be using private cloud rather than public cloud solutions, and cloud services offer great advantage for small organisations that can access better IT solutions they previously couldn’t afford. It also identified potential cost savings through the substitution of physical services with cloud-based services for delivering products, customer interactions and other services. Furthermore, the report’s authors warned that cloud-based solutions do not always deliver immediate, identifiable cost savings; intangible beenfits, however, would boost flexibility and timeliness of delivery to market. “Governments in the past have improved productivity by implementing a large number of reforms, but these have typically been the ‘low hanging fruit’ ilke industrial relations, tax and savings reforms. However, a number of factors have seen productivity slump over the last ten years. Widespread adoption of cloud by businesses and government is the next key area of potential productivity improvement.”
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Hacking government data pays off The pantheon of government-sponsored hacking competitions got several new entrants as GovHack 2012 brought together developers on more than 40 projects to work on government-related projects of all stripes. Judging for the event, which ran in Canberra and Sydney for 48 intensive hours of development on June 1 and 2, comprised representatives of the major prize supporters, half the event organisers, and others. Major prizes ranged up to $5000 and included: Digital Humanities Category – Best use of the National Archives data set Canberra: History in ACTION – a Web site that lets visitors make a personalised bus tour exploring Canberra’s history. Sydney: Photo Search by team Double Rainbows – Images of our history and identity let us discover the country through its history. Digital Humanities Category – Best overall Digital Humanities Award A Day in the Life by team The Outsiders – provides “a personal connection” with the archives and statistical data.
Science Category – Best use of Bureau of Meteorology data sets WeatheredOak by team NullReference – an API for the ACORNSat historical weather data. Science Category – Best use of Geoscience Australia data sets Safe Route by team The Hackeroos – helps users monitor bushfires in their region, alerts them in case of emergency, assists with evacuation, and allows users to notify Emergency Services if they need rescue. Science Category – Best Overall Science Award – unreliant on any particular data sets Time Capsule by team Laser Explosions – visualises trends in 44 metrics over the last 30 years, sourced from 15 government data sets. Best API development for government data sets on data.gov.au WeatheredOak by team NullReference – an API for the ACORNSat historical weather data. Particularly amazing “was the strong sense of comraderie that the teams shared,” organisers wrote in the event blog. “There were certainly some highly competitive teams but there was also a lot of sharing, mutual support, encouragement and general mutual appreciation for cool hacks. This was aprt of what made it such a pleasure for us to run such an event.”
Singaporean government gets cloud green-light The race to get governments into the cloud just got another player, with Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) recently letting a tender that will enable all of the country’s government organisations to tap into a new private-cloud infrastructure to be rolled out by year’s end. SingTel has been given a five-year contract, with five-year extension option, to provide government-wide cloudcomputing resources under the auspices of
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a banner name called Government Cloud, or G-Cloud. The tender provides a big shot in the arm for the local cloud-computing industry, which is already ranked third in terms of cloud adoption across the Asia-Pacific region. It will see IDA promoting cloud computing through various initiatives, and working alongside IT standards organisations to lay down cloud-computing policies and an auditable standard for compliance.
DSD resolves government bodies’ BlackBerry jam Following on the heels of a recent decision to certify Apple’s iOS mobile operating system for secure use within government, the Defence Signals Directorate has cleared the use of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS 7.0 and 7.1 – potentially giving the struggling company a boost as it opens up new options for departments struggling to reconcile bring your own device (BYOD) demand with internal policies mandating certain levels of security. RIM’s Playbook tablet was approved by DSD in mid 2011, but the new approval – to EAL4+ security criteria – significantly expands the company’s profile within the government sector. The two operating systems can now be used in environments where information is secured up to PROTECTED classification in Australia (or RESTRICTED in NZ). Security has long been a crowing point for RIM, with BlackBerry 7 incorporating technologies like Elliptical Curve Cryptography, AES, and security between BlackBerry smartphones and internal network systems. See www.blackberry.com/go/security or www.dsd.gov.au/infosec/epl/
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Most organisations fear disaster recovery incomplete Fully 81 per cent of Asia-Pacific companies aren’t sure they could recover their data fully after a disaster, a survey by storage giant EMC has concluded. Conducted across 2500 companies throughout the region, EMC’s survey – The Disaster Recovery Survey 2012: Asia Pacific and Japan, which was conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne – found that 71 per cent of respondents had suffered systems downtime and/or lost data over the course of the last year. Hardware failure, data corruption, and loss of power – 60 per cent, 49 per cent and 44 per cent respectively – were named as the key causes of data loss and downtime, with loss of employee productivity the most likely consequence when data was lost and systems down as a result. An average 10.48 per cent of IT budgets was spent on backup and recovery, while 51 per cent of organisations only increased their backup and recovery spend after a disaster. The survey found an average of two lost working days per systems failure, with an average 484GB of data – the equivalent of 12.1 million emails – lost during a 12 month period.
Long-running standard backup procedures got a working-over, with 44 per cent of organisations still using tape for recovery – and 37 per cent still using CD ROM – when they stored backup copies offsite. Fully 83 per cent said they wanted to move away from tape, although regional differences still abounded: 44 per cent of Indian respondents still take backup tapes home with them, while just 7 per cent did the same in Australia. However it’s accomplished, the resutls suggest that improving DR outcomes is a battle still not won, Shane Moore, director of backup and recovery systems told GTR. “Many organisations think they have bulletproof disaster recovery systems in place,” he explained, “but if they’re not very confident and there is some chance they’re not going to be able to recover the system, they must have a DR strategy that works.” Tape should be one of the first things to go, Moore added: “Tape has disappeared from pretty much every other part of the world apart from IT. And with innovations like embedded deduplication and purpose-built backup devices, there’s no reason to use tape anymore.”
Despite lack of proof, data security remains cloud showstopper Security remains an obstacle to greater cloud uptake by US government IT professionals, a recent survey by Meritalk has found. In speaking with 108 such staff, Meritalk found that 85 per cent of respondents said data security was still an impediment to their efforts. This, despite a US government mandate in the form of the government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy, which requires government agencies to consider cloud options first when they need access to many types of new technologies. “The security issue still baffles me,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder of Meritalk. “I have yet
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to see what I consider sufficient documentation that the cloud carries any more risk than most existing federal IT operations.” While the survey showed that cultural and political obstacles to the cloud remained, government spending on cloud solutions is tipped to surpass $US3.2 billion annually by 2017, according to separate figures from research firm Deltek. Deltek noted that cloud transitions had engendered a strong spend on logistical, security, operational and other guidance that had grown out of the decision to go with the cloud.
Also high on the agenda are compliance and governance: what with data-protection acts, prudential requirements, and other legal and regulatory requirements, the bar has been lifted higher for private and public-sector organisations. Yet despite this change, most organisations are failing to take advantage of insurance benefits available for organisations with comprehensive DR plans in place: 39 per cent of respondents said their insurer had offered reduced premiums based on their IT systems backup/DR strategy, but one-third of respondents didn’t even know whether such discounts were available to them. Although calls for strong backup and DR practices are nothing new, many organisations simply have not heard the call, Moore said, although it’s not always due to ignorance as much as sheer weight of inertia. “It’s a pretty dynamic landscape in IT,” he explained. “We talk with organisations that say as they make this shift to data centres, their DR and ability to recover also needs to change. Things like data growth just keep putting the pressure on. Disaster recovery isn’t something you set and forget.”
Cybersecurity a target of multinational pacts Separate agreements with the United States and Japan have extended Australia’s cooperation with other global governments in combating cybercrime and boosting cybersecurity. The agreement between the US and Australia, signed in May, will see staff shared between Australia’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and counterparts in the US. Also on the cards are a broader range of digital wargames, made possible through an extension to the long-running ANZUS treaty. Australia’s separate agreement with Japan, designed to bolster resistance to China’s growing regional strength, has a much broader remit and will allow the countries to share national security-related information and sets out policies for the protection of information. It will also allow both countries to share data easily with the US, facilitating better collaboration throughout the region.
More councils getting NBN funding A range of local government bodies have been named as recipients for funding under the third round of the federal government’s Digital Local Government Program (bit.ly/oxON3X), positioning them to capitalise upon the opportunities posed by the national broadband network (NBN). The program provides up to $375,000 to help councils deliver projects that improve online council services, complementing the rollouts that are progressively being effected in various parts of the country. The eleven new councils include localgovernment authorities in Adelaide Hills, SA; Auburn, NSW; Belmont, WA; Brisbane, Qld; Clarence, Tas; Launceston, Tas; Mandurah, WA; Melbourne, Vic; Melville, WA; Penrith, NSW; and Salisbury, SA. Awards under the program are based on the progressive fibre footprint maps for the NBN rollout, with each council’s relative number of NBN rollouts and planned rollouts a key criteria.
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Carbon data-ing
Renovate, rebuild or reassign?
Data centre consolidation is expensive, complex, painful – and, if you’re in government, increasingly unavoidable. Are you ready to get dense? Story by Beverley head
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ew South Wales has gone through four state premiers in the time it has taken to make significant headway on its plans to rationalise 130 state-owned data centres into just two. The rewards of reform, however, still promise to be significant and the introduction of a price on carbon from July 1 has added fresh urgency to the need for data centre reform at all levels of government. The Australian Energy Market Commission has tipped that electricity costs will increase 5.6 per cent this year as a result of the price on carbon, while data centre operator Macquarie Telecom has forecast price hikes of 40 to 50 per cent within three years. It was back in 2008 when NSW’s data centre consolidation plan was hatched – around the same time as Sir Peter Gershon was shining his spotlight on data centre operations as part of a Federal Government wide ICT review. He found that while the Commonwealth was spending $170 million a year on electricity in its data centres, only $70 million worth was running the computers; the bulk was spent on keeping them cool and illuminated. The Gershon report called for significant data centre reform in order to protect the Commonwealth from about $1 billion of costs over the next decade. It’s against this backdrop that NSW signed its $183 million deal in May, which will see Metronode build two giant data centres in Silverwater and Unanderra. The facilities are expected to be ready for use in about a year’s time, and are expected to save NSW $1 million a year purely from lower electricity bills; over the ten-year lifetime of the project, the state expects overall savings of $230 million as it moves ahead with plans to use the data centres to host a private government cloud.
Surging demand At the Federal level, data centre reform programmes are being driven by AGIMO (the Australian Government Information Management Office), which is pushing all Federal agencies to revisit their data-centre requirements: “All data centre operators and customers should optimise their energy efficiency,” a spokesperson told GTR. “The carbon tax is an added incentive to so.” Local government, meanwhile, is acutely aware of the challenges posed by the introduction of a price on carbon – but most of its attention is focussed on landfill. Matthew Dudley, team leader for sustainability and environment at Albury City Council, said that he had met with the IT team, and was looking at possibly relocating and updating the Council’s server room, but that this was more about ensuring business continuity than cutting electricity costs for ICT. Governments aren’t tackling data centre costs in isolation; all enterprises are seeking to consolidate and improve efficiencies in the data centre, and where appropriate consider alternative delivery models such as cloud computing. Analyst firm Gartner expects that as a result the total number of data centres operating in Australia will peak this year at almost 50,000 – but that by 2015 that will drop back to 45,545 as organisations virtualise their environments, consolidate and start to offload some processing to clouds. While AGIMO’s focus is necessarily on the Federal government, it offers valuable insights for all levels of government grappling with data centre reform. In a recent address in Canberra, first assistant secretary John Sheridan stressed that data centre plans should be considered in in
“Technology consolidation means the server room in most government agencies is likely to shrink and morph, becoming less of a processing environment and more of a communications hub.” GTR JUNE/JULY 2012 | 9
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tandem with other technology trends such as the rise of cloud computing and the dawn of Data Centre as a Service (DcaaS) offerings. Sheridan said the Federal Government spent around $870 million a year on data centres, and would continue to invest in them, but that strategies such as the Data Centre Optimisation Targets (DCOTs) and the introduction later this year of a Multi-Use List of companies certified to supply DCaaS for contracts of $80,000 or less would further streamline agencies’ – particularly small agencies’ – data centre activities. AGIMO has also overseen the introduction earlier this year of a Data Centre Facilities Panel which nominates data centres authorised for use by the 110 agencies subject to the Financial Manageability and Accounting (FMA) Act. While all Commonwealth, state and territory bodies can use the panel, FMA agencies have priority. Any agency buying data centre services from the panel will see electricity usage on their invoice; for some this will be the first inkling of how much electricity their IT operations use (By some estimates, only 20 per cent of Australian IT managers ever see an itemised electricity bill.) Tim White, Fujitsu’s group executive for managed services, said AGIMO’s data centre thinking reflected a fundamental shift underway where organisations sought computing capability instead of just a data centre footprint. White said New Zealand Government has embraced this “outcomes based” computing approach and the elasticity and scalability it
Tim White, Fujitsu’s group executive for managed services
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promises. He acknowledged, however, that Australian governments had been slower, in part because of lingering concerns about security in situations where they might share data centre space with other organisations. Veto power It’s certainly an issue that has exercised the NSW Government: Metronode will be able to sell excess capacity in its two data centres to other organisations, but the government retains a veto over which organisations can move in. Not surprisingly, the state government has opted for data centres located in NSW. However, White says public sector organisations need to carefully weigh the options available. “Certainly there is a geographic discussion about having your data centres close and working with latency…but with enough separation to ensure business continuity,” he said. Currently all the vendors on AGIMO’s Data Centre Facilities Panel are based in Australia. While there is no outright prohibition on government agencies considering using international data centres, many remain sensitive about hosting data offshore. This lingering reluctance is one thing driving international companies to set up in local data centres. SAP’s cloud offshoot, SuccessFactors, recently signed a deal to offer a locally hosted version of its cloud service that will be housed in one of the Government panel data centres. According to Robert Yue, vice president and managing director of SuccessFactors ANZ, public sector organisations retain “a number of concerns, rightly or wrongly, about privacy and security” when data centres were offshore. As cloud services begin permeating the public sector, there will be a knock-on effect in terms of the nature of government operated data centres. According to David Yip, ANZ technology leader for IBM’s smarter planet programme, technology consolidation means the server room in most government agencies is likely to shrink and morph, becoming less of a processing environment and more of a communications hub – linking agencies to larger clouds, whether they be government or public clouds. He expected local government in particular would embrace Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds to host non sensitive data processing. At present he said many organisations were “dabbling to see how it works”,
“AGIMO’s data centre thinking reflected a fundamental shift underway where organisations sought computing capability instead of just a data centre footprint.”
q u i c k
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• Work out how much electricity information processing uses, and determine your agency data centre’s PU E (power usage effectiveness) rating. • Assess current server usage rates and start planning for consolidation and virtualisation, which can lead to savings in terms of both power and space. However, be aware that this is a non-trivial exercise requiring in depth analysis of current and future processing requirements. • Consider bringing forward technology refreshes in order to access more energy efficient hardware. • Check air conditioning settings. ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and AirConditioning Engineers), the leading standards organisation in this area, has significantly extended the safe operating temperature range for various classes of data centre equipment that may allow air conditioning settings to be increased. • In raised floor data centres, ensure all the tiles have been replaced properly after routine maintenance. Missing tiles can significantly reduce energy efficiency. • Ensure all the racking plates are properly fitted in enclosed server aisles to ensure optimal airflow.
Fujitsu PRIMERGY Server Portfolio Dynamic Infrastructure for Workgroups, Data Centers and Cloud Computing* German design with Japanese quality assurance, as used in more than 100 Fujitsu data and cloud computing centres in Australia, New Zealand and around the world. au.fujitsu.com/primergy servers@au.fujitsu.com *or as the designer‘s say: „Dynamische Infrastruktur für Arbeitsgruppen, Rechenzentren und Cloud Computing“
shaping tomorrow with you
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mindful that such a change signalled not just an IT transformation, but a cultural change as well where IT staff would be refocussed on the application layer rather than “tinkering around in infrastructure”. But there are still huge gains to be made by infrastructure tinkerers. In June, power specialist Emerson Network Power released its eighth annual report on regional data centre trends and found that there had been a 14 per cent increase in planned data centre projects. “Companies in Australia and New Zealand are becoming more aware of improvements in infrastructure options,” says Emerson Network Power ANZ managing director John Simpson, “as they seek to gain traction with optimisation efforts – energy efficiency, lower costs, improved performance – especially with the imminent carbon tax in Australia and the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme.” Mike Coleman, director of strategic solutions for Oracle in Asia Pacific, said there were significant savings from the more modular efficient data centre designs being installed in greenfield data centres. Where shut-down-and-ship-out wasn’t an option, government data centre operators could still squeeze efficiencies by increasing server utilisation rates. Coleman says it is not uncommon to find server utilisation rates of less than 15 per cent in government data centres. It was possible, he says, to achieve considerable savings by virtualising; refreshing technology; and re-architecting workflow so that server utilisation could be increased and active parts of a data centre consolidated into smaller, easier-to-cool areas. “The gains in energy efficiency over the last two years are an order of magnitude more than what was achieved over the last 20 years,” he says.
L e a r n e f f i c i e n c y at D ata C e n t r e U n i v e r s i t y Data-centre architects, or anybody interested in improving data-centre efficiency, may want to spend some time working through the curriculum of Data Centre University (DCU), an e-learning program offered for free online by data-centre infrastructure vendor Schneider Electric. In July, DCU – a seven-year-old e-learning program that has 90,000 registered users that have taken 360,000 courses – was consolidated with Energy University, a vendor-neutral energy efficiency learning program that debuted in 2009 and has since gained over 120,000 users, who have taken over 115,000 courses in 165 countries and 12 languages. The free courses support those involved in decision-making, management, planning, design, or construction of data centres or any other space impacted by energy. Visit www.myenergyuniversity.com.
$ $
A tighter grip on power Virtualisation is certainly one of the drivers of data centre efficiency and, according to VMware Australia, has the world’s second highest uptake rate after New Zealand. AGIMO says federal agencies have virtualised to the extent that the number of operating system instances per server has risen from 1.56 in 2008-09 to 2.51 last year. But virtualising is only part of the story. As VMware ANZ vice president and managing director Duncan Bennett acknowledged, ICT
Over the next three years, the
electricity costs associated with
running a single computing rack would rise from $8,400 a year to $12,000.
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consolidating human services The Department of Human Services, which integrates the formerly separate agencies Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support, spends almost $900 million a year on ICT – $756 million in operating costs and $130 million in capital and infrastructure each year. At present it runs its operations out of six separate data centres, but as part of the wider integration of the different agencies that make up DHS, it is planning to reduce that to three next year. By the end of 2014 it hopes to be running its entire operations out of two active data centres along with a remote data vault and back-up facility. According to chief information officer, Garry Sterrenberg; “The decision to consolidate has been based on the Department’s ongoing mandate to achieve efficiencies for Government while ensuring improved speed and reliability of IT services and achieving environmental efficiencies.” Data centre efficiency is measured in terms of power usage effectiveness (PUE), which calculates the total power supplied to the data centre divided by the amount of power used to actually run the computer systems. “The consolidation to the new data centre will significantly reduce our carbon footprint by approximately 50 per cent,” Sterrenberg says. “The Hume data centre is rated to run at 1.3, compared to older centres with a rating of 2.2. This means more energy was required to cool the equipment than was used to power the equipment. The new centre at Hume lessens our impact on the environment while increasing our potential processing capacity and flexibility.” DHS expects to save $5 million a year on power bills alone by moving to the new data centre. Canberra Data Centre’s Hume facility, which will be home to DHS’ processing, is one of the locations on the Government’s Data Centres Facilities Panel that must be used by FMA agencies. DHS is one of a consortium of five different agencies which will be using the Hume facility as part of a $45.6 million ten year consortium lease signed by the Department of Finance and Deregulation as part of a drive to further streamline data centre migration for individual agencies.
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uses about 7 per cent of the world’s electricity – about equivalent to the consumption of the airline industry. Power use has to be another priority. Avocent is a division of Emerson, and has recently released Trellis, a closed loop control system which provides a window onto data centre operation, allowing organisations to move workloads around, suspend power supply to servers not in use, and direct cooling or power to where it is most needed. Tom Waun, president of Avocent global sales marketing and professional services, notes that power management had often been overlooked by IT managers or devolved to facilities managers. He says that modern systems which allowed finer control of data centres offered “great promise” in terms of efficiency improvements. “And they are going to be more and more important as electricity prices continue to soar while computing demand escalates,” he adds. Speaking at a recent roundtable event on cloud computing organised by VMware, Adrian Tudehope, managing director of Macquarie Telecom’s hosting business, forecast electricity price rises of 40-50 per cent over the next three years. He said that this would mean that the electricity costs associated with running a single computing rack would rise from $8,400 a year to $12,000. Pay, pay, le PUE Most data centres assess efficiency using a measure called PUE (power usage effectiveness), which calculates the total power supplied to the data centre divided by the amount of power used to actually run the computer systems. While 1 is the ideal, PUEs of 2 are typical. Commercial data centres are now trending ever lower, with some reporting PUEs as low as 1.1, and in May HP announced a data centre design, using clever workload scheduling, that draws no power at all from the grid, largely by scheduling processing when cheap solar power was available. Lower PUEs can be achieved by improving data centre design, using free cooling, increasing air conditioning settings, embracing high levels of virtualisation and using tri-generation where most power is generated on site and the heat generated by servers is also used productively onsite. Writing in a recent AGIMO blog John Sheridan, first assistant secretary working with AGIMO noted that “sustainability, particularly in the face of rising electricity prices , is likely to be an enduring priority for Government. I think PUE will be a characteristic vendors will be asked to quantify.” Certainly many agencies will have to. Under the Data Centre Optimisation Targets (DCOTs) policy, which is mandated for Government agencies subject to the Financial Management and Accountability (FMA) Act, government departments need to report their PUE. DCOT specifies a PUE target of 1.9 by 2015. Agencies which cannot or do not supply a PUE will be assigned a default score of 3. For its part, Macquarie Telecom is finalising a North Ryde data centre with a slated PUE of 1.3 – but that kind of efficiency comes at a cost. And that cost will be out of reach for most Government agencies unless they work in partnership with specialists. As Tudehope says: “The reality is that it cost us $60 million to get to a PUE of 1.3.”