Efficient IT

Creating agility for an unknown future Joanne Frearson travels to Barcelona to speak to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

WONDER OF THE WEB

The power behind decisions

NOVEMBER 2014

Efficient IT

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web 25 years ago, on why the evolution of open data is the next big thing

INSIDE Matt Smith talks to Pat Symonds, CTO at Williams Martini Racing DISTRIBUTED WITHIN THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY LYONSDOWN WHICH TAKES SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS

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Global leaders in modular data centres

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Efficient IT

Opening shots Shane Richmond

“

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T USED to take 10 to 18 weeks to procure a server,” said Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services (AWS), at last month’s announcement of a new Frankfurt-based AWS data centre. “Employees used to give up on bright ideas thinking how long it would take to implement it.

But now cloud has changed that.”

AWS, the online retailer’s vast cloud operation, competing services from Google, Microsoft and a raft of others have lured businesses with the promise of speed and convenience. As Jassy noted, Britain’s National Rail Enquiries runs its applications on AWS and British Gas uses it to run its Hive remote-controlled heating service.

However, the selling point that Amazon really wanted to push was privacy. Jassy emphasised that a European-based data centre – this is AWS’s second, following one in Dublin – would be covered

by EU data privacy laws and secure from the attentions of foreign governments. (The extent to which that’s true is debatable: as a US company, even Amazon’s European servers might fall under the Patriot Act, for example, but the general point stands.)

According to Jassy, if companies encrypt their data and retain the key, that data is completely secure, and now they have a choice of where it’s hosted. For some businesses, perhaps even for some consumers, knowing that your data doesn’t leave the EU might be a benefit.

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Deal or no deal: Why privacy could soon become the mark of a premium offer Privacy is increasingly becoming a selling point of cloud services, with both businesses and consumers becoming increasingly aware of the risks of data breaches – both malicious and accidental – as well as surveillance.

In the US, Apple’s decision to encrypt iPhone data so that even it can’t access them without permission from the owner has drawn the anger of law enforcement agencies. James Comey, the director of the FBI, went as far as suggesting that Apple’s encryption was a threat to the rule of law.

September saw the launch of a new social network, Ello, that attempted to compete with Facebook by vowing never to sell user data. It enjoyed a brief flurry of publicity and reached around one million members by early October before interest seemed to wane as everyone returned to Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, the interest in Ello is indicative of a trend.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the new head of Twitter: @ GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, began his reign with shanerichmond

an announcement that Twitter and Facebook are a “command and control” network for terrorists and called for Silicon Valley companies to increase co-operation with what is referred to by the sinister euphemism “the government’s listening service”.

There is a climate of suspicion around cloud storage and web services that collect and sell data.

It grew significantly following the revelations of Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013 but regular reports of data breaches, such as with retailers and cloud service providers, have kept public scepticism high.

The result is an opportunity for businesses to put privacy at the centre of what they offer customers. Consumers are clearly willing to part with personal data in return for free email from Google, free social networking from Facebook and even cheap online shopping at Amazon, but they aren’t fools; they know that they are giving something up to get the service. Privacy could soon become the mark of a premium offer.

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Data efficiency helps keep the internet as a right not a privilege

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NOBTRUSIVELY but surely, data centres have become a foundation of modern life.

As business make greater use of the internet, the role of data centres as facilities which house and protect IT and communications systems has expanded.

Data centres consume between 1.1 and 1.5 per cent of the world’s electricity, with consumption more than doubling between 2007 and 2014. Strong growth between 2010 and 2012 was due to considerable investment in emerging markets, together with the emergence of many established markets from economic slowdown.

Energy efficiency has been an ongoing debate in the data centre and a driver of best practice. One chief requirement is the need to keep the data centre running as the costs of service interruption can be significant. The Ponemon Institute calculates the average cost of interruption to be around $7,000 per minute, although that will depend on the data centre – the downtime that hit the Amazon data centre in Virginia, which lasted less than an hour, is estimated to have cost Amazon as much as $5million.

Improving the energy efficiency of data centres is one of the options for reducing energy consumption. In a world that is increasingly IT dependent, the cost of not being able to meet the demands placed on the data centre may be greater than the cost of energy. Some successful data centre cities – Singapore, Amsterdam, Zurich, Dublin, Frankfurt – have high power prices but offer an operational and service environment that data centre operators can trust. Global industry association The Green Grid has developed metrics to measure the efficiency of energy use – principally PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) which measures the amount of power going to the IT systems.

Energy efficiency has been achieved in several ways, including the promotion of industry standards. ASHRAE, a building technology body which recommends standards for sectors including IT, has recommended raising the temperatures at which IT equipment can operate thereby reducing the energy spent cooling it.

To date, the focus of efficiency has largely been on components such as cooling infrastructure, power distribution and protection equipment. Future efficiency

Estimated data centre power consumption 2007-2014* *Includes facilities 25kW and greater Source: DCD Intelligence, estimates from census and survey data

50 40 30

0

40

2012

2013

18

19

2007

2008

gains will come from improving energy use by, for example, reducing the practice of servers and their support systems being left running regardless of whether they are performing any useful work.

Just as IT is the source of the problem, so the capacity of IT to create new architectures and pathways is (in part) the solution. The digital world has created a new virtual plane of Facebook friends, coin- and note-free currencies and transactions, created worlds for gaming, email “addresses” and digital signatures. It is also able to create a similar virtual plane for itself which relies less on real energy.

Virtualisation, software-defined utilities and the use of cloud technologies enable energy efficiency by reducing dependence on physical servers or networks. In 2014, six in 10 server racks were physical and located within an enterprise’s own data centres.

A further 15 per cent were physical but located within a shared or co-location data centre. The remaining quarter is virtualised or located in the cloud.

This does not mean the disappearance of the physical data centre – cloud and virtualised environments still need siting in these. But it will reduce the number of centres and servers required. The future of data centre efficiency will include: • Reducing energy loss through siting data centres closer to energy sources • Locating data centres in regions offering sustainable energy sources, whether hydro-electric, geothermal, solar or tidal.

An example is Facebook’s data centre at Lulea close to the Arctic Circle in Sweden.

• Continued improvements to thermal management, especially through using

23

25

2009

2010

2011

in eliminating hazardous chemicals from products, but more work needs to be done.”

With sales of smartphones, tablets and laptops set to grow by 6.5 per cent this year, Hatton believes reducing the industry’s carbon footprint still has some way to go, both in terms of the energy consumed in

2014

How do data centres use energy?

IT load

(representation only)

Cooling

8%

5%

Distribution losses

2%

30%

Lighting, security

50%

Other

Estimated location of data centre IT footprint globally 2014 Physical racks located in-house Virtualised or cloud located on premises

15%

Physical racks located in third-party facility Virtualised or cloud located externally

outside air to cool the IT load and heat generated to warm adjacent buildings.

• More adept management through analytic and planning systems.

• I mproved use of servers in suitable computing environments.

Central to the debate is the principle that the demand for internet and IT services needs to be balanced against the availability of data centres and their energy supply. At some stage the focus may move to demand.

If so, data efficiency measures will, at least in the short term, help maintain the internet as a right rather than as a privilege.

the production cycle and the hazardous materials used in the devices themselves.

“We would like to see manufacturers helping to drive change by direct investments in renewables,” he says. “That is something Apple has set the standard in. I know it is planning on making the first 100 per cent renewable factory that will

10%

15%

Tech industry urged to reduce e-wastage TOXIC e-waste is predicted to grow to 65.4 million metric tons by 2017, according to environmental campaginers – but the industry is taking steps to tackle the issue.

Andrew Hatton (right), head of IT at Greenpeace, says: “There has been a fair amount of progress over the last decade

43

31

20 10

38

make iPhone screens, which is a very positive thing.”

But the greater challenge lies in reducing plants’ reliance on energy from dirty coal instead of renewables.

“It is absolutely essential companies power these factories from renewable energy,” says Hatton.

“Otherwise we are putting ourselves into trouble.”

60%

3

Making workers more energy aware is key to efficiency INCREASING awareness of how IT systems use energy can help improve data centre efficiency, says an expert.

Steve Bowes-Phipps, data centre manager at the University of Hertfordshire, says: “Education is a big thing, awareness not just within the IT folk but throughout the organisation as a whole.

“It is about understanding how effective your systems are. There is an app you can get that displays on your desktop, for instance, how much carbon you are using – people can see what their footprint is and reduce it.”

Bowes-Phipps explains it is not only about making staff aware about switching off their PCs to reduce their carbon footprint, but also educating people who work in the data centre. He believes this should start at the early stages of building a system, with those doing the coding.

But Bowes-Phipps warns that without a strong operational process even the most efficient operation can fall apart. “You can build a new state-of-the-art data centre but without strong change management within a year or two it will look like every other data centre, with a poor PUE and poor performance,” he says. “You need to have good operational process to maintain that level of efficiency.”

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Efficient IT

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Knowledge is power in the global data centre industry D ata centres are behind most things that we do. Most of the time, they work silently in the background, unnoticed by the majority of people. However, if the ATM machine stops working, or those important files that are stored in the cloud suddenly become inaccessible, we instantly notice.

The inconvenience is huge and the cost to the economy can run into millions.

So if downtime is so costly, why does it happen? It is a fact that 73 per cent of all downtime is attributed to human error. Indeed, this figure has been high over many years; clearly the roots of these errors are not being addressed.

Research shows that there are gaps in technical and management skills.

However, with the financial cost of these skills gaps, it is striking that there are no universally recognised education standards for those working within the data centre industry. There are many training programmes, but it is increasingly difficult to guarantee quality, relevance and value, and hard for recruiters to judge the merits of the courses listed on a CV. However, this is changing. Led by CNet Training, a framework has emerged that develops skills and knowledge,

starting at entry-level technical skills and culminating with a masters degree in data centre leadership and management.

By backing up their programmes with internationally recognised qualifications and official certifications, CNet Training is providing a global suite of programmes that come with the security of being independently verified.

This is a huge step forward for the data centre industry. By participating in CNet Training’s Global Data Centre and Network Infrastructure Education Framework, an individual is able to clearly demonstrate that their training not only reflects the latest technological advances, but also meets the required standards expected by the industry.

Sitting at the top of this qualifications framework is the new Masters Degree in Data Centre Leadership and Management, delivered by the Lord Ashcroft International Business School at Anglia Ruskin University. The Masters Degree is a global first for the data centre industry and is set to help leaders and senior managers working in data centre facilities to transform their careers by achieving a prestigious accolade and ultimately form the elite global group of data centre professionals.

The course will be delivered online, with optional bootcamps at Anglia Ruskin’s campus in Cambridge.

As people’s careers develop, it is important that they have opportunities to gain qualifications that not only recognise their achievement, but also provide a platform to take their careers to the next level. One exciting aspect of CNet’s framework is that it encompasses the technical and leadership elements that are essential in any business.

Data centre professionals with industry recognised qualifications and professional certifications will

certainly help to pave a more reliable way forward for the industry, while helping to reduce the amount of downtime and the substantial costs associated with this. For people holding these qualifications, their greater credentials are likely to be in demand across the world. In the data centre industry, knowledge really is power. +44 (0)1284 767100 info@cnet-training.com www.cnet-training.com Source: Gartner, United Airlines

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Putting F1 technology in the hands of everyone EXCLUSIVE Pat Symonds, chief technical officer at Williams Martini Racing F1 team, on the importance of compromise Matt Smith at Silverstone

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THINK ALL engineering is compromise, and the best engineer is the one who makes the best compromises,” reflects Pat Symonds, chief technical officer at the Williams Martini Racing Formula One team. “You often have conflicting requirements. We need to apply intelligence to decide on the right compromises.”

We’re sitting on top of the team’s new motor home, looking out across the Silverstone paddock towards the circuit’s famous Wing structure. Members of the Williams crew are relaxing around us, having a drink and taking a break from preparing Valtteri Bottas’s and Felipe Massa’s cars for the British Grand Prix weekend. Two weeks earlier in Austria the drivers finished third and fourth respectively, and hopes are high for the team’s home race.

Formula One is a constantly evolving sport. Symonds tells me that when he joined in the 1980s teams had to comply with just 30 pages of regulations – now they must adhere to 300 pages. The compromises he mentions often revolve around adapting to these rules. The teams themselves have grown from around 20 people when he started to between 500 and 550 today.

The technology behind the engineering has also improved. Symonds says that in the Eighties things were “much more basic”, and calculations were done by hand with calculators, whereas modern-day teams use advanced computer modelling to test different set-ups. The glamour and cutting-edge technology attracts talented workers, and Symonds says the level of engineering in the sport today is only equalled in the aerospace industry.

For the 2014 season the sport’s governing body, the FIA, moved to make Formula One more efficient. The biggest regulation reforms included a switch from 2.4-litre V8 engines to 1.6-litre V6 turbo engines and a 100kg-perrace fuel cap (Williams previously used around 160kg). There were also changes to the cars’ Energy Recovery Systems (ERS), which generate power under braking and from waste engine heat to provide an extra 160bhp for around 33 seconds each lap.

“It has a lot to do with efficiency,” explains Finnish driver Valtteri Bottas. “[It’s about] how to get

Above: Pat Symonds says F1 serves as an engineering testing bed for many other industries; below: Felipe Massa spins out of the Canadian Grand Prix earlier this year; right: his teammate, Finnish driver Valtteri Bottas

from the start of the race to the end of the race as efficiently as possible, mainly in a fuel consumption way but also to save the tyres and brakes and avoid malfunctions.”

While Symonds admits it was “quite a challenge” to produce the same race performance on less than two thirds of the fuel, he says he finds the rule changes interesting and that they provide the teams with a chance to reset.

“I would say 2014 is one of the biggest challenges I have faced because there were so many changes that came together,” he says. “It was tough to find the right compromises but I think we have done it successfully.”

It certainly seems that way out on track – Williams Martini is currently six places higher than its 2013 finishing position in the World Constructors’ Championship ahead of major competitors including Ferrari – but the FIA is also keen to promote the benefits of Formula One technologies for use in street cars.

The day before I meet Symonds, Silverstone hosted a conference encouraging the network of 3,000 small engineering companies around the circuit, known as Motorsport Valley, to work with other industries to put F1 technology to use outside of the sport. Symonds says that teams’ approaches are just as valuable to these sectors as any piece of kit.

“I think that the interest is much more general,” he says. “Techniques and processes we develop find their way through… In racing we do it because we want efficiency and want power, and now the road car manufacturers want it to reduce CO2 and fuel consumption.”

Symonds himself recently worked with a US car manufacturer to reduce its vehicles’ drag. He managed to exceed its 10 per cent target, but says the firm paid just as much attention to the way he worked to solve the problem. “They were interested in the approach we took to achieving our results,” he says. “It’s a way of thinking and a way of applying those technologies.”

Developments from Formula One have applications in street cars, trains, buses and aircraft, and Symonds believes the sport should continue to push in terms of efficiency to benefit these other industries. “I think that we in Formula One should contribute to that and I think we are,” he says. “I would be very happy

if next year or the year after that we were racing on 90kg of fuel.”

Sa fet y i s a not her a r ea t hat ha s i mpr oved d ra st ica l ly i n For mu la O ne i n r ecent yea r s.

O n t he f i n a l lap of Ju ne’s C a n ad ia n Gra nd Prix one of Williams Martini Racing’s drivers, Felipe Massa, hit a tyre wall with a force of 27Gs, but the car’s safety mechanisms meant that he could walk away from the wreck. “Our driver just got out, swore at the other driver, and carried on,” Symonds says.

Bottas says the safety technology in Formula One is a step up from his time in GP3 and Formula Three. “You do

feel much safer in a Formula One car,” he explains. “It’s quite a bit thicker carbon fibre and the sides are quite a bit higher. It limits your visibility a bit but you do feel safe.”

As well transferring the materials and devices that protect drivers in accidents to road cars, teams are also sharing their simulation technologies to help train road drivers and prevent incidents from happening in the first place. In 2012, for example, Williams Advanced Engineering opened the Middle East’s most advanced road safety simulator in Qatar.

With F1 regulations pushing green technologies and a new Formula E electric series launched in September, efficiency is certainly on the agenda. While the shiny, fine-tuned cars racing around circuits like Silverstone may seem a world away from the one parked in your driveway, Symonds says that the approaches and technologies applied to both efficiency and safety are more relevant than you might think. “The reality is that the engineering is exactly the same in Formula One as it is on a bus on Clapham High Street,” says Symonds.

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The big interview Pat Gelsinger Making the most out of your IT infrastructure is all about learning from the past and preparing for the future, according to the CEO of virtualisation firm VMWare

Technology can transform lives. I take great pleasure that the things I work on can have such a global impact Joanne Frearson in Barcelona

P

AT GELSINGER, CEO at VMware, is a farm boy at heart. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania and still likes eggs every morning for breakfast, but when he first touched a computer he knew that was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

When I meet him in Barcelona at VMworld, where he has just spent the morning presenting a keynote speech to a crowd of 9,000 people about the future of streamlining IT and virtualisation, his passion for technology is evident. He relays a story to me about how he studied technology full time at Santa Clara University while he was working (also full time) as a technician at Intel.

“It was a crazy schedule,” says Gelsinger, “but I was taking the computer architecture class and I was way excited about it. So I got the text ahead of time, I read every chapter and I had finished every problem of the entire textbook on day one of the class.

“It was a new tech book and the professor had not read past chapter one yet. My notes became the notes for the entire class.”

But the main reason Gelsinger is so attracted to technology, he says, is “because it can transform every aspect of a person’s life. I take great pleasure that the things I work on can have such a global impact.”

The work he is doing at VMware is certainly having a global impact. VMware, the firm that invented the virtual machine in 2004, has global alliances all over the world, including partnerships with big industry players such as Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel.

He says: “When they use virtualisation, CEOs and CIOs are looking for cost savings in capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expense (OPEX). Budgets are flat, yet CEOs and CIOs need to do more. The basic idea of virtualisation is that 10 servers become one, with virtual servers running on that hardware.

“Essentially, you can do that with a few clicks of the mouse. Then, boom, you have a new virtual server which gives you great operational efficiency. We are doing that now for networks and storage too.

“CEOs and CIOs want business agility. Maybe a competitor comes into the market with a new

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Segregating the personal and professional makes total sense Keil Hubert

method for a mobile device to deliver a service or capability. It is being able to respond very quickly, where a company’s infrastructure does not limit their reach.

“Maybe in the old model I would have had to build my own data centre and hire my own people. But now I can go to a cloud service and reach a new market without building my own infrastructure.”

Major institutions are using VMware to help them become more efficient. Oxford University is using its virtualisation tools to help them manage data for all 40,000 of its users. It has increased efficiency by eliminating the need to build databases on an individual basis and reduce the provisioning of towers and desktop machines across the university.

Motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson is also using its software to increase efficiency in its data centre and reduce costs. It has given it the ability to increase its scaling capacity when they have expanded their dealerships.

Gelsinger explains what can really help companies become more efficient is automating IT systems. He tells me about a joke they have in the industry: that a modern cloud data centre should be operated by a man and a dog – the dog being there to bite the man if he tries to touch anything.

“The analogy is somewhat crude, but a layer of automation is necessary because no human could possible keep up with everything that is going on,” says Gelsinger. “There might be thousands of servers and different traffic and application systems being dynamically created and spun down.”

According to Gelsinger, when things go wrong being able to automatically identify the problem is important – maybe a certain switch or router is broken, but automation can assist in showing staff what went wrong, what action has been taken and what action to take.

Gelsinger says: “Management or automation software is really is cross-section of efficiency on the one hand and scalability on the other hand.”

When it comes to efficient IT systems, Gelsinger believes we are only at the beginning stages. He says: “In many ways we are still in the early innings. Data shows that less than 10 per cent of IT is in the cloud today and by 2020 it will still be less than 25 per cent. This just emphasises that the infrastructure takes a while to evolve forward.

“We invented the virtual machine in 2004 and it was only in 2010 that we crossed 50 per cent.

Above and right: organisations using VMWare’s technology include Oxford University and Harley-Davidson Motorcycles

So it took us six years until half of workloads took advantage of it.

We just rolled out virtual networking a year ago, and this year, virtual storage. It is going to take a number of years until applications and users take full advantage of those capabilities.”

Gelsinger believes it is important for CEOs to be able to create as many options as possible when it comes to planning technology because the future is so uncertain.

He says: “CEOs are looking around the table.

They have their head of sales, their head of marketing and their head of operations and looking at how do they navigate into this future.

“Companies are redefining who they are in the context of cloud and mobile devices, so when CEOs are looking around the table to navigate to this future, they are usually looking at the smartest tech person, which is usually the CIO. “A part of what we are trying to do is to create as much agility as possible for an unknown future. The things we are building are being built to comprehend the problems of today as best we understand them.

“Competitors now can emerge from anywhere in the world. They can be changing the terms of competition very quickly. It is about creating as much agility to be in the underlying infrastructure as possible.

“But with all of the dynamic and creativity that we bring to our customers, even we have not figured it all out. We know that things are going to emerge and we are responding to those things quickly. That is a huge piece of our strategy as well – to be open and flexible and have this rich set of partners that can move very quickly.”

Gelsinger believes the CEOs that are brave, can take a calculated risk and put plans in place to prepare for the future will be the winners. He may still eat eggs for breakfast and be a farm boy at heart, but his passion for technology has helped transform companies IT systems over the world to be more efficient.

There’s an old industry joke that a data centre should be operated by a man and a dog – the dog being there to bite the man if he tries to touch anything

I

RECENTLY met an old friend of mine and a half-dozen of his employees for drinks after work. Over the course of the evening, I got to confirm my suspicious about how smartphone designers are letting us down. Before the evening was over, I watched every single member of the gathering respond to texts, emails, calls, and alerts on not one but two smartphones each. I was the odd man out with only one device. Everyone else at the gathering carried one work phone and one identical personal phone. Several people used colourcoded cases to tell them apart.

One had set up customer alert noises and ringtones. Another fellow kept forgetting which of his phones was which.

I pulled a pair of lads aside and asked about the duplication; without hesitating, they both admitted that it was a simple security measure. They didn’t want any personal data to accidentally wind up on a device that their employer had the rights to monitor, and they didn’t want to receive sensitive company information on a personal device (and didn’t want to be blamed if company data accidentally got leaked).

That tactic – segregating your personal life from your professional life – makes perfect sense, and I’ve practised it myself. When I was a head of IT, I drafted policy where we strongly encouraged our employees to keep their personal content safely away from the systems that my security team was required to monitor. The convenience gained by collapsing one’s entire life onto a single PC, tablet, or phone usually wasn’t worth the potential for embarrassment (or, worse, termination for cause!).

That being said, I submit that we should have mitigated this problem by now. We’ve managed over the last decade to fully virtualise our data centres and (for the enterprise) our desktop PC fleets. The

technology exists to run two or more fully virtualised instances of a smartphone operating system on a single piece of mobile hardware.

Why, I argue, are we not putting it to practical use in the field?

Consider the efficiency advantages: we’d gain all the convenience and cost-savings of carrying only one physical device, but we could swipe back and forth between two completely abstracted virtual phones. With a little clever programming, we could ensure that data couldn’t leak between them.

We might even be able to set up different security settings (such as storage encryption and session authentication) between the two virtual machines. In the end, what’s mine stays mine (as the saying goes), and what’s the company’s stays the company’s.

Yes, there would be time-sharing problems with a phone’s radios to overcome, making it somewhat difficult (if not cumbersome) to contend with two different voice calls at the same time. I suspect that this problem is controllable in software. I would actually prefer it if I could set my work phone to always take priority for calls during work hours, sending personal calls straight to voicemail without interrupting my active business call – and to automatically reverse that policy outside normal business hours.

The current generation of smartphones has likely reached the required level of engineering sophistication to make this idea both feasible and relatively painless.

I appreciate that there may need to be some additional tweaks made to the hardware to accommodate this, but it’s not a moonshot project. The odds are, there’s a boffin in a quiet cubicle somewhere experimenting with this exact idea. This is probably the next big thing coming out of R&D – probably for government and defence users first, and the rest of us thereafter. keil.hubert@gmail.com

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EXCLUSIVE

T

Joanne Frearson

HE WORLD Wide Web has been hailed as one of the greatest inventions of mankind. Developed 25 years ago

by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while he was a software engineer at CERN, it has changed every aspect of the way we communicate in modern-day life, from the way we do business to how we educate ourselves, collaborate, share information and tackle problems.

His vision – to build a system that would enable millions of computers to talk freely to each other around the world – has not only made life more efficient, it has helped empower people all over the world.

The sentiment expressed by Sir Tim’s famous tweet during the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games in 2012 – “This is for everyone” – is precisely what the World Wide Web has become: something for e ve r yone t h at i s connecting, enabling and uniting the world.

I meet Sir Tim at the Open Data Institute (ODI) summit, where he tells me how he expects another cultural shift to take place over the next 25 years, through the evolution of open data. Sir Tim cofounded the ODI with Sir Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton, to help develop this change, and the summit represents a key milestone for what the ODI has achieved in so far.

He says: “When you look at open data it is tremendously useful. It is tremendously enabling. Typically, if data is introduced by government, unless it is personal data by individuals, it has been produced with money from the taxpayer which is a service to the people. It is reasonable to think of it being public, for open use.

“There are lots of reasons for making data open; people focus on the transparency, the fact you can see what the government is doing. It is about making life more efficient, particularly for businesses. Businesses run on data.

“It is helping solve lots of issues. It is about understanding the state of the country, understanding the economy and understanding the products of your suppliers, but also the financial climate.

This can help people make more effective decisions.

“There is also lot of environmental data, weather data and temperature data. A lot of companies need to plan their work as a function of the weather and the environment.”

Quick-witted and inspiring, Sir Tim certainly comes across as a man for the people. He was drawn to the field of technology by his love

25 years ago, Sir Tim Ber invented the the World W which has transformed t today. Over the next 25 y expects another cultural place through the evolut of mathematics.

Both his parents were mathematicians and were involved in building the first computers. T h is evolved into electronics later, following a fascination for trains.

Sitting next to me in the Green Room at the summit, he tells me there is still a lot more that is needed to be achieved when it comes to governments and organisations using open data.

“The ODI has been going for two years,” says Sir Tim. “It is all new, which is exciting.

But it should not be new. The web has been around for 25 years, computers have been around for longer. Why has it taken so long to get around to doing open data?

“In the UK, we do not have a very good story about geospatial data and maps.

That is really important, because there are a huge number of things you need maps for.”

Sir Tim believes all levels of the government, from Westminster to local town councils, should be making their data more open. He tells me how even the generation of data on things such as potholes can provide important information which will be of benefit to society.

“They will go, okay, you have got your pothole data,” he says. “Now we want to see whether our potholes are worse than the next town’s. Then definitions will emerge of what are potholes and what are not.

“Communities will get together and make a pothole standard. Then you will get people looking at UK pothole distribution and realising and being able to predict where the potholes are going to come, based on the weather, or predict how potholes will impact house prices. There will be all types of interesting ways the data gets connected.

“It will make governance easy and people will be able to govern themselves collaboratively.

People and governments will work together to improve the country. It will make everything much easier if open data about the state of the country is made available.

“When you release government data, everything runs better. As a government, you

There are lots of reasons for making data open; people focus on the transparency, the fact you can see what the government is doing. It is about making life more efficient, particularly for businesses. Businesses run on data

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work better in your job managing the country, the town or the city in collaboration with the citizens. It is just a whole lot easier, and you will find the citizens are a whole lot happier. The job of keeping data quality gets a whole lot easier.”

Sir Tim believes there will eventually be a shift towards open data becoming the default. The ODI is seeing lots of demand from organisations to be trained in this area – in the last 18 months it has trained more than 700 people.

He says: “If you are producing a spread sheet

for the government, it will become automatic to put the spreadsheet on a public server rather than a private server. In 25 years’ time everything will be much more efficient – people will not only have done open data, they will be congratulated for having it up. Then they will want to compare it with everyone else’s data of the same thing.”

Sir Tim concedes it is not likely all data will become open. He says: “You should wonder whether some data should be open or closed. For example, should you reveal to people stock levels

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© CERN

rners-Lee Wide Web, the way we live years, Sir Tim l shift to take tion of open data

Efficient IT

Berners-Lee at CERN in 1994

that will help them deal with you? Or maybe you would feel your competition would use the data.

Some people can argue about it.

“There is some data though, like data about your products, anything you sell, which should definitely be public. If you look at the data which is embedded in web pages [such as] schema.org, which is run by a bunch of companies including Google, it is form of linked data in your web page.

“It will take your product and put it in a list of products for sale – so when someone is searching

for products, instead of giving a list of web pages, the search engine will be aware of its meaning and know what you are searching for.”

As more and more organisations and governments make their data open it will make the way we do things more efficient. Like the World Wide Web, open data will help transform and empower the world and tackle modern challenges such as population growth and housing, extreme weather, disability and transport. As Sir Tim says, this is for everyone.

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Building a world-class data centre executive search firm Andrew Loram explains why Clifford Baines International is causing a stir in recruitment

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ith a clear focus of building a world class executive search firm dedicated to the Technology, Media & Telecoms sector (TMT), Clifford Baines International managing director Andrew Loram (below) is confident their data centre, managed hosting and cloud divisions will continue to experience significant growth due to the hype wrapped around the cloud.

The company was formed in 2009 and built on solid foundations, employing people from within the industry who then wanted to develop their career further in executive search. “This approach paid immediate dividends as we quickly on-boarded numerous clients within TMT,” says Loram. “Our headhunters have

credibility and act as strategic advisers to our clients at director, VP and board level. We believe our consultants have the perfect balance of search experience combined with industry expertise. We are passionate about search and pride ourselves on delivering excellence in client and candidate services.”

As a company, Clifford Baines operates globally and provides a diverse range of recruitment services which include executive search, advertising search and selection, and interim management. The business specialises in appointing talented leaders for clients across the world in markets like fixed line carriers, mobile operators, data centres, cloud providers, managed hosting, IT, management consulting, digital media and broadcast.

“There are many advantages of using our executive search services and the headlines consist of the client owning the data collated from a deep dive headhunting campaign. The client will visibly see the market mapped out, what the competition is doing and most importantly competitor salary information. Within this process clients receive consultative reports and recommendations after our interviews. We have an enviable track record at appointing all levels from manager, director, VP and

C-level throughout EMEA, Asia-Pac and the Americas.” Loram adds: “Clifford Baines has caused a stir in the market, being retained on numerous high-profile data centre searches where we successfully appointed CEOs, CFOs, MDs and COOs.” Moving forward, it is well known that data centres are enabling the cloud.

However, they still need to remain competitive and offer customers both scalable and on-demand cloud services from different cloud providers, as well as access to various hybrid solutions of private and public cloud. As the market realises the potential growth in cloud services, the challenge will be in attracting top-tier talent into the data centre sector. Competition for these candidates with skills in engineering,

product development, business development and marketing will be fierce.

“At Clifford Baines we have built dedicated teams across cloud and other ecosystems such as digital media, financial services, enterprise and connectivity to support our clients’ data centre growth,” says Loram. “So we now have a global network of talent which is constantly expanding through headhunting on searches, referrals, media advertising and attending networking events. These actions provide Clifford Baines with accurate and current market information. Our clients and candidates profit greatly from this data.” andrew.loram@cliffordbaines.com www.cliffordbaines.com

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Inspector Dogberry Dogberry is excited to hear that the UK Green Investment Bank (GIB) is backing its first project in the financial sector, providing finance for a UK data centre owned by global bank Citi.

Through the project Citi plans to cut energy use by 10 per cent at its London data centre.

This will involve installing a Combined Cooling and Power (CCP) system

together with energy-efficient cooling units and efficiency improvements to the building’s a/c system. The investment is being made by GIB’s fund manager, Sustainable Development Capital.

Shaun Kingsbury, GIB CEO, says: “The IT industry is one of the most energyintensive sectors globally, second only to aviation. Energy can represent up to 80 per cent of the cost of running a data centre,

If there’s one thing we dogs don’t like it’s excessive heat, so the Inspector is glad to report that the EU is on track to meet its 2020 climate target. A progress report shows that in in 2013, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions fell by around 1.8 per cent compared with 2012, keeping the EU on track to meet its 20 per cent target by 2020.

Connie Hedegaard, EU Climate Action Commissioner, says: “Delivering on 2020 climate goals shows that Europe is ready to step up its act.

And, better still, it shows that the EU is delivering substantial cuts. The policies work.”

The EU’s ambition is to reach its target of at least 40 per cent by 2030. It is encouraging member states to use their current EU Emission Trading System (ETS) revenues to invest in climate and energy to cut carbon emissions.

so they provide an important opportunity for energy efficiency measures.

“This project makes financial sense, reducing Citi’s energy costs, and makes environmental sense, reducing the data centre’s greenhouse gas emissions. And because of the investment model, it will involve no upfront expenditure for Citi as the cost will be paid for out of the energy cost savings achieved.”

Nokia has undertaken trials to make smartphone browsing 20 per cent faster, while reducing power consumption by 40 per cent.

In its first live network trial, it found the Nokia High Speed Cell FACH cut network signaling by up to 80 per cent and boosted response time by up to 65 per cent. Thorsten Robrecht, VP Mobile Broadband portfolio management, says: “By 2018, smartphone penetration in some developed markets is expected to exceed 90 per cent.

It is important to be able to improve network efficiency under high signaling load.”

The government is planning a new £97m supercomputer for the Met Office that will be 13 times more powerful than the current system and will have 120,000 times more memory than a top-end smartphone.

The supercomputer will enable forecast updates every hour and will have the ability to provide very high detail weather information for precise geographical areas. The supercomputer will also be able to help the UK predict disruptive weather events such as flooding, strong winds, fog and heavy snowfall more effectively.

By Matt Smith, web editor

Energy Saving Trust www.energysavingtrust. org.uk/blog As an organisation that specialises in helping businesses and householders to reduce waste, the Energy Saving Trust’s blog has plenty of practical tips for cutting your business’s energy use as well – including how to source greener electricity and ways to make your buildings more efficient.

Microsoft Green Blog http://blogs.msdn. com/b/microsoft-green

Whether the weather The supercomputer’s sophisticated forecasts are anticipated to deliver £2billion of socio-economic benefits to the UK by enabling better advance preparation and contingency plans to protect peoples’ homes and businesses.

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Run by the technology giant’s environmental sustainability team, the Microsoft Green Blog reports on the firm’s initiatives that aim to make its products and activities more efficient, as well as its work with entrepreneurs and inventors looking to make information technology greener.

EcoGeek http://ecogeek.org From award-winning inventions to the most efficient consumer products, entrepreneur Hank Green’s EcoGeek blog celebrates technologies that work for the good of the planet. Recent posts include a look at LED lighting that could reduce power demands, fuel-free plastics manufacturing and a project that produces liquid fuel from seawater.

Rebooting Computing http://rebootingcomputingieee.blogspot.co.uk

Battery Doctor (Free – Android)

Make your smartphone more efficient with this app, which can identify power-draining processes and shut them down, saving your battery life.

Opera Max (Free – Android)

This data manager will make your mobile data allowance last longer by monitoring different apps’ usage and compressing your downloads.

This blog is run by the IEEE, an association specialising in the future of technology. The site is a place for experts to exchange ideas and discuss the different ways in which computers could evolve in the future to become more powerful but also more efficient and less power-hungry.

IndustryVIEW

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INSIDE TRACK Helping you cut costs and increase capability

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Why a modular data centre is your flexible friend C

ertainly, when it comes to data centres, spending significant sums of money on technology that might never be used is, at best, misguided and, at worst, commercially unviable.

Based on the hope that a facility will be “grown into”, too many organisations are falling foul of this line of thinking at a time when dense computing means that an increasing number of data centres are in fact shrinking in size. Those that have made this mistake have also found that downsizing a data centre is just as expensive as adding more capacity. Power and cooling systems still need to be maintained even if they are not being used, and redundant space should be partitioned off to reduce waste, leading to refurbishment costs.

These factors and others have contributed to the popularity of the modular data centre, and it is a sector that companies and market research estimates will be worth $40.4billion by 2018.

The modular data centre goes back to 2006, when a 20-foot standard shipping container was used and the company built in all the racks, cabling and equipment

required for it to become a data centre, so that all it needed to function was external power, chiller units and a network link.

The idea caught on and, rather than size being considered a restriction, it was turned into an advantage, as units were introduced that could simply be bolted together and even stacked on top of each other to create a larger facility.

The drivers for adopting the modular approach tend to vary between organisations, but the most common is cost. Coming in at a fraction of the price of a traditional data centre, there are the additional advantages of no planning permission, no building costs, no need to acquire an existing facility, no decommissioning or reconfiguration costs as the business demand changes, and no business rates on the use of a building. Speed is also a key factor, as a modular data centre can be designed, built and installed just weeks from the order being placed, and companies can quickly downsize or move from older and larger systems to smaller and more efficient ones.

As the international leader in innovative containment systems,

Cannon Technologies has led the way in the provision of modular data centres, and we offer a range of options under our award-winning T4 Modular Data Centre range. Our solutions are built to suit the specific needs of our customers and can be deployed almost anywhere, from underground car parks and hangars to warehouses and even roofs and areas with significant seismic activity.

Scaled to suit almost any requirement and available in a multitude of configurations, the use of cutting-edge technology, standard components and no wet trades means they can be manually assembled on-site using hand tools, therefore negating the use of machinery and vastly reducing levels of dust, noise and disruption.

Modular data centres enable investors to limit significant up front expenditure by aligning investment with need and available space. This removes the financially damaging implications of expensively equipped but underused data centre space – a scenario that should always be avoided.

Matt Goulding (left) is managing director of Cannon Technologies +44 (0)1425 638148 www.cannontech.co.uk

o increase IT agility and capability with lower cost, global enterprises including Amazon, Google and IBM are increasingly using Linux-based solutions.

Linux/open source is proven to deliver real business value. To get more from their infrastructure, most organisations start by wanting to replace proprietary Unix, achieve more performance than Microsoft on older hardware, or replace unsupported Linux that fails compliance requirements.

IT leaders know that the majority of enterprise software runs best on Linux. What surprises many is that enterprise Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Canonical’s Ubuntu, come with virtualisation built in.

Virtualisation management systems, such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, provide a GUI to manage virtual instances across multiple host computers. The Quru RVSR for DR migration, SEP for back-up and Nagios or GroundWork for monitoring, all deliver data-centre capabilities at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions and with enterpriselevel functionality.

High availability can be provided at the application layer – EnterpriseDB offers enterprise-level support and tools on PostgreSQL for the database – or at the OS, Red Hat HA provides clusters of two or more server nodes and Linbit delivers block level mirroring. Software-defined storage can be replicated across multiple x86 servers

distributed across different continents, something that specialist storage vendors struggle to do.

The big solution today is OpenStack, which provides infrastructure on demand and offer virtualisation, containerisation and the ability to expand out to the cloud to meet demand peaks.

We work with large computeintensive organisations, both private sector and in government, and see demand for OpenStack rising fast.

Quru is an open-source solution provider helping organisations extract more from their infrastructure investments. With so many robust Linux solution offerings available, now is the time to look at alternatives to traditional proprietary technologies. info@quru.com http://quru.com

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Heat is a natural-born killer for IT systems and a sign of inefficiency. It is a ‘waste’ product that has to be managed by local cooling solutions. One way to reduce this problem is to review data centre support systems including cooling and uninterruptible power supplies.

Replacing traditional UPS can generate

energy savings and reduce the load on local cooling systems. Old transformer-based and transformerless UPS may have low operational efficiencies, over a small load profile and be heat generators themselves.

“We are often asked to review existing data centre installations and comment on resilience and efficiency,” said Nick Watkins,

MD, Thamesgate. “The latest replacement high-efficiency modular UPS and cooling systems mean that we can offer impressive payback periods and energy savings.”

Modern in-row and complete facility cooling systems (air- or water-chilled) can be up to 25 per-cent more efficient than traditional systems. A modular in-row cooling approach can benefit in terms of server use, with intelligent algorithms controlling the cooling modules and responding to their heat output.

In modular UPS systems automated

right-sizing is a major energy saving feature.

Unused modules can hibernate to increase the load on those remaining.

These then operate at peak efficiency. When server load increases, “sleeping” modules are activated.

Battery chargers can also be set to hibernate when the battery is charged.

0800 210 0088 www.ecopowersupplies.com

IndustryVIEW

Automated ‘right sizing’ reduces energy usage

Giving the right protection from power surges

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Experience engineering: software skills with creativity and business acumen

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ompanies are constantly seeking ways to significantly improve their products, operations and customer engagement.

And to achieve this, the most farsighted and ambitious organisations are embracing digital technologies in new and innovative ways.

We’re seeing enterprises starting to take advantage of new and innovative capabilities in big data, mobile technology, and the internet of things (IoT), for example.

The net effect of this digitisation is all businesses are becoming – whether they like it or not and regardless of their industry – technology businesses.

Great examples of this might be how an airline drives customer engagement through powerful, personalised passenger apps that enable an end-to-end, seamless travel experience. Or how an underground train network adopts ticketless systems to deliver on how its customers prefer the convenience of digital transactions.

The challenge for enterprises is that, traditionally, the building of IT capabilities has been an internalised process. CIOs and their teams know how to create and support apps for their own staff. An IT organisation is focused on ERP, supply chain management, CRM,

HCM, payroll, marketing automation, and other systems of record. The challenge is: most organisations’ mobile policies have evolved to things like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), not towards a deep development capability of mobile apps for external audiences. They need to deliver solutions built on state-of-the-art technologies optimised for external consumers and they’re struggling to achieve this effectively.

This backdrop means there’s an entirely new game afoot in the technology space. European businesses now need to wake up to how entire industries are being upended by the digital economy. From transportation (Uber), to commerce (eBay, Amazon), to recruiting (LinkedIn), to food service and hospitality (HomeAway) – no industry will be untouched.

To stay ahead of the digital economy and its highly competitive landscape, organisations must look to new business models as soon as possible to achieve efficient IT on their own, or pay the price.

There is no time to waste. New, more efficient ways of accelerating the development of customer-centric technologies need to be brought to market seamlessly integrated, built to the highest commercial grades of

performance and stability, and rigorously streamlined and automated to save costs and widen operational margins.

The solution lies in more and more organisations turning to a new breed of product engineering outsourcers that fill the gaps many enterprises have in terms of digital technology skills and experience.

Such organisations deliver the digital product R&D and lifecycle management expertise desperately required.

But, these skills alone aren’t enough to deliver the outcomes businesses expect. It requires a new, multi-disciplinary approach.

Known as “experience engineering”, this knits together in-depth, endto-end software engineering skills with creativity, business acumen and long-term relationships. It maps the technology to the customer journey that the organisation wants to support, drive and monetise.

This enables enterprises to create innovative new products and services, enter into new markets, win new customers, and streamline operations to radically reduce costs.

Peter Rogers is GM, EMEA, Ness SES +44 (0)773 0981750 www.ness-ses.com

t is no secret that system failures can be extremely costly and inconvenient for businesses which are reliant on an efficient IT infrastructure for continuous day-to-day operation. While downtime is relatively rare, it is naturally accepted as a part of enterprise life and, with increasing reports of power outages in the UK, is something which should be prepared for. Smart businesses get ready for these instances of downtime by having uninterruptible power supply (UPS) equipment in place. The UPS is a device which kicks in to provide emergency power when the mains power fails. But a UPS is much more than just a stop-gap for power outages because it also provides continuously clean power to a data centre, providing protection from power surges.

As with all IT equipment, regular maintenance is an essential part its life – and never more so than for a UPS, which needs regular replacement of consumable items such as batteries and fans. Essentially, how a UPS system is maintained will greatly affect its reliability, how it performs and the length of its useful life.

While planning in regular

maintenance inspections for equipment, it is important to consider who carries out these inspections. Within the market there are a number of third-party companies offering maintenance services on UPS equipment who claim to be trained and capable of working on critical power protection systems.

But in actual fact, many are not fully trained and some do not even have access to recommended spares.

To combat this problem, Riello UPS has created a comprehensive network of qualified service engineers designed to protect customers who require competitive third-party servicing and approved spares for their UPS. The Certified Engineers Programme enables customers to check if their chosen maintainers are fully trained and competent to carry out the work.

Schemes like this are vital to strive for the highest level of maintenance in industry, giving businesses the peace of mind that their IT infrastructure is safe no matter what.

Leo Craig (below) is general manager at Riello UPS 0800 269394 www.riello-ups.co.uk

IndustryVIEW

Business Zone

14 · Business Reporter · November 2014

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Data centre services integration reduces cost and risk

The future

Shifting priorities for data centres A s businesses continue to be ever more reliant on technology, the question of whether they could remain operational in the event of an IT failure is raising concerns.

Whereas there used to be an IT server located in every office, these have been replaced with one or two data centres to support the entire operations of multinational companies. This has raised the spectre of companies being forced to suspend operations if an IT failure were to occur, potentially costing them millions of pounds.

Businesses are investing heavily, trying to do everything possible to reduce the risk of incidents occurring, but the cost of investment is coming under increased scrutiny from both inside and outside the organisations.

In a survey of 1,000 data centre operators carried out two years ago by the Uptime Institute, a global data centre authority, more than half didn’t see energy efficiency as an urgent priority.

But now there is a growing recognition that the data centre is the biggest corporate energy consumer, putting efficiency back on the agenda.

The strategic outsourcing company Mitie Technical Facilities Management is leading the way in helping clients to balance optimum performance with improved efficiency, through its critical engineering service, Resilience. Among Mitie’s clients, including multinational banks and media organisations, it has built a reputation for maintaining fault-free data centres, while helping to reduce their operating cost.

Managing director Peter Mosley said: “The ultimate priority for our clients will

always be the uninterrupted performance of their data centres, and we’ve demonstrated that improving the energy efficiency can have a positive impact on its reliability, as well as having the added benefit of reducing running costs.

“However, there is always a balance to be struck between achieving efficiencies and managing the risks, and that’s why

you need the right people and processes in place to achieve it.

“Our Resilience approach to critical engineering is providing our clients with the highest level of expertise and delivering continuity in their data centres.” www.mitie.com/resilience

In focus: Is power your weakest link?

Video special

Expert-led debates featuring the latest business innovations, filmed at The Telegraph. http://businessreporter.co.uk/videos/ category/cloud

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ncreases in energy bills and consumption combined with the threat of blackouts by 2017 highlight the need for modern energy-efficient power solutions across an organisation. This, in turn, highlights the need for realtime power monitoring plans and comprehensive annual audits to understand and manage the challenges your business faces.

Energy efficiency improvements pay for themselves in a short space of time, and purchases of energy-saving products such as Voltage Optimisation & High Efficiency Cooling and UPS products will drive down your costs very quickly. Energy efficiency should also feature in any organisation’s plan, and is an integral part of ISO14001, ISO27031 and ISO27001.

“Replacing legacy power and cooling solutions with highefficiency solutions could save you over £50,000 on average over five years,” says Jason Koffler, managing director of Critical Power Supplies.

“Modern UPS such as the Eaton 93PM is an impressive 99 per cent efficient; the Riello UPS Multi Sentry range (30-100 kVA) is also listed on the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) Energy Technology List (ETL), which encourages businesses to invest in approved energy-saving technologies.”

By investing in UPS such as the Eaton 93PM and the Riello Multi Sentry, businesses can claim tax relief of more than £26,000 from the government’s enhanced capital allowance (ECA) scheme, set up by

the Carbon Trust to encourage the reduction of carbon emissions – effectively writing off some of the costs of their UPS investment.

Clients are advised to have an end-to-end site survey of all their power and cooling circuits to ensure maximum efficiency and availability.

Koffler adds: “Modernising power, heating and cooling circuits, either through outright purchase or leasing, makes it possible to save energy, save money and save emissions today.

“Try our Server Room and Data Centre Audit so we can show you just how much you would save.”

0800 978 8988 www.criticalpowerprojects.co.uk

All data centre (DC) operators are looking to use new technology to innovate their facilities for efficiency and resilience. DC infrastructure management, increasing the environmental ranges and energy/airflow management are just some of the approaches being implemented to achieve this.

Considering the time and money already invested, it’s surprising that some DC operators overlook an integrated operational model for information and communications technologies (ICT) and engineering operations, therefore missing out on the many benefits it can bring.

Industry leaders are joining the trend in combining these two areas of responsibility, to leverage these benefits.

This combination is proven to reduce risk, improve speed to market, provide flexibility, reduce costs and increase productivity through improved staff morale and knowledge and skill transfer.

Most now see the traditional approach of using multiple vendors to provide ICT support services and engineering operations as an antiquated and inefficient model.

Only a limited number of specialist companies have the combined skillsets, systems and qualifications or have the associated credentials to deliver this streamlined, integrated services approach.

CBRE Data Centre Solutions recently deployed and enabled integrated ICT and engineering operations across three continents for a well-known NASDAQ 100 technology company, substantially reducing their DC labour related operating costs by 15 to 20 per cent.

Additional reductions of up to 12 per cent in energy and indirect OpEx spends can also be achieved with an integrated services model.

020 7871 9318

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The debate How can investment in a data centre benefit your business?

Andrew Stevens

Matt Goulding

Steven Norris

Andrew Loram

CEO/managing director CNet Training

Managing director Cannon Technologies

President Data Centre Alliance

Managing director Clifford Baines International

Investment in a data centre usually concerns the physical equipment used to ensure the facility can function.

However, a substantial element that is often overlooked is the personnel that drive the components to work – in other words, the people that manage and maintain the facility. How can an employer be reassured that staff are doing their job to the appropriate quality levels?

A staggering 73 per cent of all data centre outages are attributed to human error, a figure that continues to remain high. This surely justifies a case for an investment in staff education, and there is a range of specialist programmes available, from technical to leadership. Professionally certified staff demonstrate enhanced knowledge, skills and an understanding of standards and codes of practice. This vital knowledge leads to considerable benefits. Educated staff show more commitment and provide ROI based on increased productivity, methodology and motivation – it’s not unusual to achieve ROI in excess of 500 per cent, making education a wise investment, to say the least.

The benefits can be substantial, and the concept of modularity has fundamentally altered the way that data centres are designed and engineered, to such an extent that they can be configured for virtually every budget.

Even a single rack can contain all of the same important attributes as a much larger facility, and the ability to pay as you grow has transformed the investment criteria. This is demonstrated by global heavyweights such as Google and Facebook, which have implemented large-scale facilities comprising many hundreds of racks, with multi-MW processing capacity.

The other significant benefits of modular data centres include low cost to entry, high levels of energy and operational efficiency, an easy growth path, and extreme reliability supported by state-ofthe-art remote monitoring and control.

Quite simply, it has never been easier or more beneficial to own your data centre than it is now. It’s a situation that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and it’s all thanks to modularity.

Large or small, today’s businesses are driven by data. Storing that data, being able to access it instantly and yet protect it from the most aggressive prying eyes needs to be a top priority for any undertaking. The risks of data not being available, being corrupted or, worst of all, lost, are at the top of every sensible corporate risk register.

So CEOs need to ensure their organisation’s IT is underpinned by an effective infrastructure.

Many businesses still park their servers in a small room – where, invariably, fans blow at them to overcome the building’s air conditioning. Energy alone accounts for 60 per cent of the total cost of ownership over a 10-year period. Data centres not only ensure that physical security is their first priority but also employ sophisticated cooling systems to ensure environmentally friendly and efficient management of servers. If you care about the long-term health of your business then contact a data centre near you to learn more.

For many companies, data centre management is not even a core function of their business, and the cost of investment in data centres is a significant limiting factor.

Just consider the real estate, infrastructure, regulations and human capital alone.

Investing in data centre operators will allow you to maintain your business focus and capitalise on huge economies of scale in terms of space, power, cooling and connectivity, as well as taking advantage of their 24/7/365 onsite trained professionals, qualified to ensure their customers data is secure, resilient and with 100 per cent uptime guaranteed.

The demand for talent across all functional practices within the data centre market is fierce. The industry recognises the pool of talent is small, ranging from critical environment managers right up to board-level appointments. Hence, businesses use industry-established headhunters. Clifford Baines International’s dedicated data centre team recruits in this market, consulting with leading players and key talent who are often not looking to make a career move.

+44 (0)1284 767100 www.cnet-training.com

01425 638148 www.cannontech.co.uk

0845 873 4587 www.datacentrealliance.org

andrew.loram@cliffordbaines.com www.cliffordbaines.com