Data Center 3.0: Efficiencies and Savings

Hope you all have been keeping well!

“Data Centers of the Future”, “DC 3.0”, and similar terms have been getting a lot of play lately. They remind me of the work Cisco has been doing to compare the benefits of building such data centers with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Unified Fabric versus “traditional” data centers.

For example, when considering a 10,000 square foot data center, we saw savings of:

• 40% for cabling
• 90% in service provisioning, and
• 47% in the number of racks used

(Incidentally, the UCS and Unified Fabric are both key components of the Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution.)

These findings mirror what I saw at VMWorld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in early September.

In the South Hall of the Moscone, there was a collection of equipment racks with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) running virtualization software from VMware. Supporting this collection of racks, was a presentation by VMware - on loop display - on a couple of large monitors on either end of the rack display. While the information that was being displayed is well-known to those of us working in this space on a day-to-day basis, the way this information was presented was unique and continues to be attention-grabbing.

For example, through the implementation of server consolidation leveraging virtualization and the Cisco Unified Computing System, the VMware loop display highlighted the following data center impact:

• 37,000+ physical servers to 776 physical servers
• 2400+ server racks to 28 server racks
• 154,000 sq. ft of DC space to 1,700 sq. ft. of DC space
• $92M+ total cost to build to $1M total cost to build a Tier II DC

You can take a look at the full presentation for additional details - it’s a quick read.

And as always, I welcome your thoughts and experiences. Can these results be replicated in your data center environment?

Posted by Simon Aspinall at 12:08PM PST

Ping this URL to post a trackback:
http://blogs.cisco.com/trackback/7900/ffRwRsTq/

Previous post:
Cisco Service Provider VP Malachy Moynihan on medianet at 2009 Intel Developer Forum

Next post:
Cisco Video Assurance Management Solution Wins CSI "Best Monitoring or Network Management Solution"

Recent posts:
November 2009 Archive