Coping with Data Centers in Crisis

Surging Internet traffic and rising energy costs are forcing companies to overhaul the way they design and run computer facilities

by Peter Burrows

Dec. 18 will be a landmark day at FedEx (FDX). That's when yuletide business is expected to peak, reaching a record 9.8 million deliveries. Company computers not only have to process those transactions but they'll also need to handle an expected 1,000 online inquiries per second from gift buyers and recipients at certain periods during the day.

That's on top of keeping up with the company's everyday operating needs. "We call it a dim-the-lights day," says FedEx Chief Information Officer Rob Carter, because the thousands of servers in FedEx.com's data centers need every bit of power just to keep up with the workload.

Such is the massive increase in the amount of digital traffic now coursing over the Internet. Everyone from governments to major corporations to your Great Aunt Edna now relies on a vast, growing list of services—be it parents sharing pictures of their kids in Halloween garb or corporate salespeople recording deals on an online software tool operated by Salesforce.com (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/17/06, "The On-Demand Software Scrum"). Indeed, the world just got its 100 millionth Web site, according to NetCraft, and many of the existing ones are seeing traffic far beyond anyone's expectations just years ago.

All this surging traffic is forcing many companies to rethink the way they manage Net offerings, and in some cases completely overhaul information technology strategies. The locus of much of the transformation: the data center, packed to the rafters with the servers that run Web sites and corporate networks.

Goal: Utility Computing

Most companies first created these facilities in decades past to run mainframes, the high-level multipurpose number-crunchers that remain the heart of information technology systems at many companies. But in the years since, companies have added armies of cheaper servers, storage banks, and other devices, creating computing environments that are mind-numbingly powerful, complex, and energy-sapping (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/12/06, "Servers as High as an Elephant's Eye").

That's largely because much of this hardware was purchased by one department, to do one particular job. As a result, much of it ends up operating at just 10% to 20% of its capability. But even while sitting idle, the hardware remains on and consuming electricity—one reason (along with spiking energy prices) that the power bill is now the largest operating expense for many CIOs.

"We see a lot of creaking at the seams—companies that are having to kill future projects because they can't manage the ones they already have," says Cameron Purdy, CEO of TangoSol, a software startup that is trying to simplify elements of the mess.

To cope, many companies are scrambling for ways to harmonize the cacophony of servers and storage and networking gear so that it works in concert to adapt quickly to whatever needs doing at a given moment—whether it's processing a surge in online orders or running a data-mining program to figure out how to get those customers to buy more tomorrow. This digital nirvana, dubbed utility computing, has been held out as a possibility for years and remains an elusive vision. But thanks to advances in key technologies and customers' increased need for new ways of operating, analysts say it's now within reach.

Data Processing on Demand

Indeed, radical new views of the future of computing are already coming into focus. Sun Microsystems (SUNW), for example, has lately been showing off prototypes of a Project Blackbox. It's a portable data center within a shipping container for companies that need massive amounts of computing power but don't want the massive headache of creating it from scratch. "This is going to reinvent the way people think about delivering capacity for Internet applications," promises Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos.