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Executive Summary
The Challenge
The data processing capability of data centres is continuing to increase, along with requirements to provide highly resilient solutions with 99.999% uptime, flexibility to provide new business services and to drive down costs.
Server hardware is still rapidly changing to provide additional processing capabilities and the new systems are power-hungry with exceptionally high power and heat densities compared to just 5 years ago. The latest blade based server systems are still in an early adopter phase and the majority of data centres are running a mix of servers.
With the processing requirements increasing and the latest space-saving server designs requiring careful power and air conditioning planning, which is limiting adoption, there is pressure to either expand, to become more efficient with the current systems or to adopt a hybrid of both solutions.

Impact of Virtualization
Virtualization within the data centre saves space and reduces the power and air conditioning requirements to provide the same level of service. Taken on its own, it would not be unreasonable to attribute an overall 20% saving of both space and power attributable to the use of virtualization.
As with all technologies and solutions, the use of virtualization within a practical data centre environment needs to be considered in relation to how virtualization can be deployed and the pressures on the data centre to provide highly resilient services, additional flexible data processing services, cycle hardware and improve cost-effectiveness. The use of virtualization helps with all these pressure points and more, however the overall practical impact of virtualization is likely to be that of controlling growth.
With the latest high-density blade and multi-processor servers providing very high data processing levels and being optimized for virtualization, there will be a significant overall reduction in the space required to provide current processing levels. The achievement of this will be predominantly through the use of new hardware, however virtualization technologies are a key enabler in assisting these gains to be made.
Efficient use of existing, or new, hardware with virtualization will have an impact on the overall power and heat density within data centres and if processing levels were to remain static there would be an overall reduction in total power and air conditioning requirements through efficiency savings and hardware redundancy enabled by virtualization.
However, in practice, there is still a firm requirement for additional processing capability within data centres which will drive an overall requirement for additional power and air-conditioning.
Given that it unlikely that all applications will migrate to a virtualised environment, our overriding conclusion is that the average impact on data centre design is that space and power/cooling savings are likely to be in the order of 15%, to provide the same processing provision, as the technology becomes widely adopted.
Overall, given that processing demands continue to increase, it is unlikely that this technology will materially affect the design, space and services provision for data centres.

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