Datacentre space dries up
London, UK 16 August 2007 – London has been hit by another building space shortage as many City banks continue to pile more hardware into already overcrowded datacentres. To overcome space and power limitations, many financial institutions are considering adopting a modular datacentre design to split critical trading applications with back office systems. But doing this could be near impossible without the proper tools in place, explains Richard Muirhead, Founder and CEO, Tideway Systems:
“Lack of datacentre space is a very real problem for City banks. Splitting datacentres between those hosting business critical applications requiring very low latency and those hosting back office solutions relocated further afield poses a viable solution to overcrowding and power consumption limitations. But, the key challenge is unravelling the supporting infrastructure.
A datacentre environment is hugely complex with IT managers assigned the crucial task of maintaining very low-latency response times for financial trading applications while running back office systems, such as settlements systems, off the same infrastructure.
The rise in the popularity of virtualisation as a way to pool computing resources between servers suggests it may be an alternative approach to saving data centre space, especially replacing older equipment that is costly to maintain, inefficient and environmentally damaging. While virtualisation offers short-term benefits, improving hardware and hence data centre utilisation, it is not a panacea. It adds yet another layer of complexity, therefore the costs of managing the virtualised infrastructure are often higher than managing the equivalent physical environment. In addition, server virtualisation is not suitable for all business applications, especially front office, due to the additional latency it can introduce.
Finding a safe way to untangle these applications with minimal cost, impact and risk to businesses will be vital to the success of adopting a modular datacentre design. Specialist software such as application dependency mapping (ADM) enables datacentre managers to identify what software and hardware exists in an IT environment, how it relates to business applications and what the dependencies are. It is only by mapping applications that financial institutions can plan effectively for a successful data centre migration with low cost and minimal risk to the business.
As financial institutions continue to roll out more technology to deal with business demands, space shortages and power consumption have become more than a concern. If these problems are ignored, City banks may find themselves without breathing space that no amount of investment will solve.”
About Tideway Systems
Tideway Systems™ is the independent leader in Application Dependency Mapping for enterprises. Tideway’s flagship product, Foundation, provides essential transparency of data centre configuration and dependencies, makes configuration management as simple as search and counts among its customers British American Tobacco, British Telecom (BT), BSkyB, Co-operative Bank, Dimension Data, Dresdner Kleinwort, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), ING, JCB, Linklaters, LogicaCMG, and Mizuho Bank Ltd. Tideway Systems is a privately held company with offices in the UK, USA, Denmark and Germany. See www.tideway.com for further information.
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Kate Hamilton
Hotwire
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