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Special Report

Breaking the cycle of consumption with efficient Software



Graham Perkins, Principal Consultant at Sybase UK, explains how new generation software can dramatically reduce the energy consumption of data storage hardware, helping both the environment and cutting costs.
 
Business analysts, suppliers of IT, most employees within IT departments right up to the CIO will all tell you how valuable data is to the success of a organisation.
 
In the current economic climate your ability to systematically improve operational efficiency and increase client satisfaction & understanding by making faster, better informed decisions is fundamental to efficient service delivery and essential for maintaining / improving levels of service
 
However, the burden of ever-increasing data grows over time and it is a smart organisation indeed that is able to continually meet these growing demands, without substantial increases in resources. 
 
This strain has been somewhat magnified during the past few years due to the introduction of legaslitive and compliance initiatives requiring yet further storage requirements (ex. ISPs to hold emails, etc. for one year) – not to mention the massive innovations that we have all witnessed around various new techniques in how organisations collect information & communicate, such as the internet, instant messaging, VoIP and via mobile devices.
 
Every new IT system generates further data that has to be recorded and requires further & larger systems to analyse that data in order to derive the promised business value. 
 
This in turn creates a vicious circle as organisations struggle to keep apace with the required needs and continue to buy bigger systems in an effort to somehow cope.  However the ability to quickly transform organisational data into economic value is what now determines the winners from the losers in the worldwide marketplace.
 
It is a never ending, upwards spiralling pattern which locks in small and large business alike.  
 
Faster than the capacity of technology can increase, the appetite is fuelled – easily outpacing Moore’s law.
 
For the giant IT suppliers this is heaven-sent, for only with aggressive replacement of old IT systems can they meet their ever aggressive targets and Wall Street expectations.
 
The ‘more for more’ argument is easy to sell.  All your suppliers are aligned to it – the hardware manufacturers, the software vendors and the consultancies or systems integration houses are all on the same upwards track. It makes easy sense, and doesn’t rock the boat. It will carry on forever. Or will it? Indeed, can it? 
 
In Canary Wharf, for instance, it certainly cannot.  The power supply network is already at its limit because of the enormous data appetite of London’s newest financial district, and as a result no new system can be deployed without decommissioning one first.
 
This issue exposes the ultimate problem for continued expansion of IT systems. The amount of electricity used to power the swelling ranks of servers, and, even more alarmingly, the power needed to cool them – which is at least as much again. 
 
When figures are quoted that the average data centre uses as much power as a medium-sized European city, and the largest require the local fire brigade to hose the buildings down on the hottest days of the summer, someone must call time on this practice.
 
So this creates a further problem – and one that is quickly gathering pace to become one of the top priorities on the management board’s agenda – corporate social responsibility, and in particular the environmental affects that organisations are having on the environment. 
 
Indeed, Lord Hunt, Minister for Sustainable Development and Energy Innovation, recently welcomed the launch of the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres.  Data centres are responsible for almost 3% of electricity use in the UK and this is expected to double by 2020.
 
The EU Code of Conduct was developed in close collaboration with the industry, including the British Computer Society (BCS).  
 
Signatories to the Code will be expected to:
* implement the Code of Conduct's energy efficiency best practice
* meet minimum procurement standards
* annually report energy consumption 
 
Over the next six years a successful implementation of the Code could allow UK businesses to save almost £700m in electricity costs.
 
In today’s world it is important that organisations somehow balance meeting data and compliance demands, whilst also reducing their impact on the environment, which is proving to be a difficult task.
 
One solution is to concentrate on the software rather than the hardware. By revisiting the software used to organise the data rather than merely installing new hardware for storage, it is possible to organise your data differently.   This in turn uses less storage and less processing power, yet still delivers higher performance and better business flexibility. 
 
That might sound hard to believe or easy to doubt, but it’s true. The analogy with old and new building practices is instructive.
 
High-rise buildings that used to rely on a tower-block model of a central supporting pillar had limitations – the base of the pillar had to get wider and wider to support a taller building until no more floor space was added by adding a new floor. Compare this to today, where the tallest buildings are now architected with ‘exoskeletons’ to provide strength through structure, rather than just brute force.
 
Most large data analysis systems are still being constructed with the equivalent of the old-fashioned tower-block – an RDBMS. It is conventional wisdom that says you only have this one choice for supporting data warehousing and reporting systems. 
 
However the traditional transactional database explodes data storage and processing power demands so that smaller & smaller increments in performance and effectiveness are gained at greater & greater expense, not to mention air-conditioning and power supply demands. 
 
The RDBMS was the great mainstay of online transaction processing, enabling many users to edit & maintain individual customer or transaction records, but when it comes to deriving business value from the analysis of many millions of these records with rapidly changing questions, it just can’t do it efficiently, and the cost-performance curve hits a brick wall.
 
Much of the data warehousing technology industry has grown up around the need to circumnavigate the limitations of using a technology for a purpose it was never designed for. 
 
The result is an inefficient & cumbersome central store and a proliferation of data marts in an attempt to deliver some performance to the analysts. 
 
The costs, in terms of hardware & energy footprint, magnify in the process, and the final system is rigid & inflexible – functionality is under control of the technical team and access must be tightly controlled to prevent overload.
 
So where is the promised business value from this? Where is the agile enterprise which can understand its current business and hypothesize changes to its model? 
 
As the rate of change of business (and the rate of growth and failure of businesses) increases annually, an organisation requires flexible and adaptable IT systems to support it. If the answer is expansion of hardware – continually chasing its tail – then that is no answer at all, for any business, let alone one aware of its energy footprint.
 
One solution is Sybase IQ, a database engine purposely designed for business intelligence.
 
Compared to using an RDBMS, IQ can:
* reduce storage footprint by up to 90%
* increase load & reporting performance by 10 to 100 times
 
Unlike traditional databases, IQ is specifically architected for analytics and not transactions with a column based structure & indexing for data warehousing and reporting. 
 
Another solution is Teradata, a powerful solution for analytic work but one that uses a lot of hardware – a bit like stacking multiple engines in line to make a car go fast, compared to which the IQ solution is akin to installing a single jet engine.
 
Another data management provider, Netezza, uses some of the same design principles behind IQ, but is somewhat limited by its use of proprietary hardware.
 
Most organisations realise that in today’s world adhering to CSR requirements can also improve your business in many ways, from improving your service response times, enabling faster throughput of clients, improving employee morale and even bolstering the workforce in general. 
 
However, in an increasingly financially retrained environment, organisations are also under pressure to become more efficient - so implementing the correct solution (such as the latest software architecture that can offer that elusive ‘more for less’) must truly demonstrate a step change in flexibility, performance and a reduction of costs. 
 
Whatever the solution, power-consumption and cost efficiencies have come right to the forefront of data management as it has the organisation, and simply adding more hardware is not going to solve the problem or help the environment.
 
But, as with any disruptive technology, there is a rub.
 
The software has been produced which can deliver these promises, but to whose cost? Your hardware supplier and managed service partner whose business models are based on ever increasing numbers of servers will surely not be in vanguard of this impending revolution.
 
Disruptive technologies always produce losers as well as winners. 
 
A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that we are coming to a point where climate change could potentially become irreversible.
 
Perhaps with the recent rise of energy efficiency awareness across the world, the laggards of IT’s data warehouse industry will realise that they can no longer hold on to their outmoded business models and there is an impending need for them to address the necessary changes - before it is not simply a single loser, but us all.
 
Graham Perkins
 
Graham Perkins has over 30 years experience in the IT world and has specialised in the provisioning of Data Warehouse and business intelligence solutions for the last eight years across a wide range of industry sectors.  Graham is focused on the innovative column based analytic engine, Sybase IQ, helping customers gain substantial benefits in reduced storage and improved performance."

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