I read a great article in The Register this week regarding a data center strategy that is potentially being followed by Microsoft. The concept of putting loads[1] of servers into a metal box and shipping it to a data center park may seem odd to some, but I think it really has legs as a concept. You only have to drive down Route I95 in New Jersey to see that containers are pretty good at being stacked and ideal for international shipping.

What really grabbed me in the article was the concept of four generations of data centers with a focus on uptime, energy efficiency, modularity and mobility as the key characteristics of each generation—with the new model mentioned above being the fourth generation. I think that this is an interesting model to use when talking with clients but two things really struck me.

First is that the number of organizations that actually need this fourth generation are few and far between. Basically we are talking about organizations that want to play aggressively in the cloud-computing space and, as already suggested, I think that there will be massive amounts of consolidation in this market until we get down to around four or five main providers. Still, with the mobility at least M&A activity becomes easier.

My second concern was that nowhere in the article did it mention anything to do with supportability. Someone reading the article may believe that simply by changing data-center strategy to one built around these containers that his operational costs would disappear overnight. At Accenture, we have been talking to our clients for the last few years about the next-generation data center (NGDC) concept—where the development key generations have really been built around operation, standardization, virtualization, orchestration and now automation. These changes are based around the idea that organizations typically have enough computing capability but just need to find better ways of using it while maintaining, or potentially even reducing, operational costs.

While the container data center clearly meets the second concept of our NGDC ethos in becoming highly standardized, significant changes to the operational processes of the environment and application space will be required to realize the other four concepts. Without focus on these ideas, costs for the data center environment could escalate as the need for more and more computers leads to less and less control.

[1] A load being a unit of measurement used within the IT space to mean “more than can be supported by a junior administrator.”

By Andrew Skinner, UK Data Center Technology & Operations