I’m not the most radical person on the planet.

After some consideration, I’ve come to the realization that in an effort to drive energy efficiencies into the data center, we may have inadvertently changed how users view the relationship between the critical utility infrastructure and the hardware and systems they power and cool. While this will not be an overnight change. The fact is that rendering any portion of the operation more generic while maintaining application availability will undoubtedly and eventually gain the attention of IT users everywhere.

I do believe that data center utility architecture has taken a tectonic turn for the better. The crux of my arguement is that users are now looking at the physical infrastructure from the backplane or the hardware level up, where in the past, we have stopped at the input to the server or drive bay. Nothing bad can come of this, aside from the discomfort of change for a better way of business.

Much of the current state of affairs is the habit and indictment of the user, engineer, builder and manufacturer to conceive, provide or build facilities that they are comfortable with when operating in a very risk-adverse environment. Users are now finding that they may customize their platforms to their applications in a very profound way. And I don’t mean from whom or where they are buying their servers from – it means that the servers themselves are bespoke for what is processed on them.

When I mentioned tectonic before, I also believe that the change will be slow. Facility, platform and application adoption are rarely synchronized, and that is one of the key elements in making this kind of leap. That being said, facilities will follow what the hardware is doing and the hardware will follow what the application is doing – that age-old chestnut will never change.


Stay tuned for a multi-part blog and white paper on where this may have started, where this is today, where all of this is going and how the relationships between all stake holders in the IT service train will change.

Tags: data center, data centers, modular power, power distribution, PUE, UPS power