The reality in today's data center stands in stark contrast to enterprise growth and transformation needs. Near-term capacity problems, constrained supply, and rising prices are impeding needs at data centers throughout the world. While one can order new server, storage, networking and related equipment without issue, vendor backlogs are not in alignment with business timeframes and are forcing hard decisions. The majority of vendors with whom RFG is speaking are reporting delivery times that may extend to six, nine, or even 18 months out for their most popular hardware and continued challenges related to availability sourcing, manufacturing, and shipping are intensifying. Similarly, energy scarcity and rising costs related to demand growth, carbon-neutral and net-zero environmental initiatives, and global tensions, obstruct data centers power demands. Enterprises will need to balance existing hardware and limited new hardware acquisition capabilities with limited power supply to best enable strategic growth requirements. This then begs the question: what actions can IT take to utilize existing resources more efficiently to the point where it satisfies the planned business demand?
While the issue is posed presents itself primarily in the context of growth and capacity, sustainability initiatives imposed by regulatory bodies, CEOs, internal ESG organizations, and corporate stakeholders advocating for environmental accountability must also be considered. Supply chain constraints will likely remain for at least the next 18-24 months for hardware and potentially far longer for energy supply, which has seen user costs increase between 30 percent and 400 percent in some particularly confined geographies. Discussions incorporating the board, C-level executives, line of business executive, and IT executives must deal with these new realities, prioritize desired and essential outcomes, and look to find ways to solve their business issues and satisfy their ESG commitments simultaneously more efficiently. PUE and other energy-consumption, efficiency-oriented metrics need to be added to the price/performance evaluation criteria. Holistic examination incorporating key metrics encompassing facilities, IT hardware, and power and cooling strategies must be evaluated, planned for, addressed, and routinely measured and improved upon to maximize efficiencies to accommodate shortages.
The panel and participants will discuss the following business growth/supply constraint issues: