Networked IT has been a major engine of global productivity growth – driving financial services, global trade and e-commerce as well as national networked solutions for security, health service provision and so on. Global spending on IT is in the region of £8.9tr each year, and a high proportion of this is spent on servers, which are housed in data centres.
The world of IT continues to evolve at a mind-boggling speed. Processing power doubles every 18 months. As a result, a pound spent in 2006 on processing power delivered 27 times more performance than in 2000. These improvements have been achieved by the design of faster chipsets and the increase of chip density in individual servers. The design of data centres has not evolved as quickly. This is an increasing problem, as a consequence of the increase in IT performance and capability is the growth in energy and cooling loads. This is resulting in a fundamental shift in the balance of the overall costs of IT from the costs of the equipment to the costs of building and running the data centres that house it. For the first time in the evolution of IT systems, cost and availability of energy has become a drag on the ability to increase computing power, which is likely to lead to some radical data centre design solutions in due course, potentially involving wider use of more efficient water or CO2-based cooling in technical spaces. ITmanufacturers are developing low-energy kit, and the developers and operators are beginning to respond with low-energy data centre developments.
The way in which IT is delivered is also changing. While corporate applications are typically run on centralised systems, much computer processing still takes place on desktop machines. “Cloud-based” computing, where processing is carried out centrally is a new approach being driven to introduce a “pay per use” revenue model. Its adoption will lead to further growth in server farms, and investment in cloud computing infrastructure is now worth £120bn a year.
On the basis of the continuing evolution of server-based solutions, a focus on the utilisation and energy efficiency of data centres will be a key issue not only in connection with the sustainability agenda but also with regard to cost-effective IT delivery.
