Why having the best product solution isn't always enough…

Written by Matthew Larbey, Product Strategy Director, VIRTUS Published 2015-05-22 08:00:00

I was interested to see the results of our recent research study, highlighting attitudes and understanding around High Performance Computing and the requirements for data centres to offer high density solutions.

For anyone interested who has not seen these yet, you can find the results <a href="http://bit.ly/1FA9B6j"><span style="color: #00af41;">here</span></a>.

While great efforts have been made to design our LONDON2 facility so that it delivers high and ultra-high density capability - supporting 40kW and beyond in a rack without supplemental equipment or the giving up or charging of additional space for cooling - it would appear that general industry knowledge and understanding of what is achievable, and at what price, is mixed.

The research also shows that despite the industry's need to innovate, traditional cooling models still dominate the data centre landscape. Furthermore, it also revealed that attitudes have become fixed when it comes to industry practitioners' understanding of what is achievable and the associated costs involved.

As a result, the findings have made it abundantly clear that more effort is needed when it comes to educating the industry around the benefits and costs of High Performance Computing and the role high density solutions play in achieving this cost effectively.

Furthermore, it's up to innovative and disruptive providers, like ourselves, to encourage businesses to change this approach. At VIRTUS we already do this by incentivising customers to increase their IT rack footprint density and saving on their ongoing cost of service as a result.

Indeed, a couple of recent customer projects have seen a 30 per cent or more cost of service saving on the ongoing element and have also managed to realise 30-40 per cent savings on the customer's upfront capital investment in High Performance Computing IT hardware, rack enclosures, cabling and associated ancillaries, with one such project shrinking from 45 racks to just six in the process.

Leading High Performance Computing platforms from HP, Dell, Lenovo and others can help bring some of the basic hyper-scale principles enjoyed by the few mega Internet companies to the masses, but only when they are combined with data centres that welcome them with open arms, rather than treating them as a challenge to be solved.

Therefore, the responsibility falls upon our industry to help continue to push the boundaries and educate so that IT leaders can reap the benefits that next generation of intelligent data centres, like VIRTUS' LONDON2, can bring.