Inside dynamic workload management

Dynamic workflow management -- the ability to sense changes in demand and automatically invoke requisite application and server resources to meet new workloads -- is quickly becoming a fundamental requirement in the new data center. Besides increasing compute efficiencies, the technology helps overcome the shortage of critical data center resources such as floor space and available cooling and power capacity.

Resource scarcity stems in no small part from a long-standing principle of data center design: Achieving high power densities has always been a primary goal based on the expectation that overall costs should be proportional to floor space. Naturally this led to the construction of relatively modest-sized data centers.

Slideshow: Data center power by the numbers

But even those built with generous amounts of overhead have been stretched to the extreme in the face of prevailing trends:

* Business process automation and exploitation of Web technologies has led the average business to grow its total server count by 10% per year over the past decade.

* Data center consolidation and resource centralization are being pursued to reduce operating costs, ease compliance and improve security.

* Power and cooling requirements for servers have steadily risen in response to demand for systems with higher performance.

And on top of everything else, energy prices are increasing approximately 5% per year.

Consequently, many organizations are scrambling to build new data centers and/or to take advantage of progress being made on several fronts, including better measurement and monitoring techniques; improved design principles; and high efficiency networking, cooling and power conversion equipment.

There is little doubt that maximizing efficiency and thoroughly optimizing a data center is best achieved by taking a comprehensive approach. IT management should pursue improvements in everything from governance to cooling systems, power distribution and conversion, geographic location, physical layout and materials of construction, IT equipment and operational management.

The problem, however, is that for some companies the issues of data center cost and capacity limitations are already critical. They simply have nothing left; there's no more space and no more power.

For these shops, taking 12 to 36 months to implement strategic, long-term solutions is not sufficient. They need relatively quick, low-cost fixes that deliver meaningful gains and, ideally, remain applicable for future data centers the organization builds as well. Dynamic workload management has the potential to be such a fix.

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