Why Data Centers are Slow to Improve

Since I wrote my last post about the need to improve solution adoption rates in the data center I've had a little bit of an epiphany. While I still believe that my comments were largely correct, I potentially left out the biggest reason we can't easily effect change in the data center and it's because the majority of data centers don't have a dedicated "owner".

When I think of an application owner I think of someone who is responsible for ensuring their application is well cared for at a number of levels.

When I think of a typical system administrator I think of someone who is responsible for the server and it's tools and operating system.

But what do most of us think of when we think of the data center manager. I would venture a guess that it's the man/woman who generally ensures that there's a safe, secure, and available environment for the company's important applications to live in. But what about the "Facilities" manager, isn't s/he responsible for the "Data Center"? It seems we have a conundrum! Who actually owns the data center? No one is the correct and unfortunate answer, and that's not the end of it. In many companies there's not an IT or Facilities person tasked with actually "owning" and "understanding" the data center. How could this be? Don't we know how much money is spent on these facilities, the unfortunate answer is no, in many cases we don't, precisely because we don't have a knowledgeable & empowered owner.

In many small to mid sized companies there isn't the recognition of the overall cost and opportunity associated with running a data center. As such, these companies often don't have anyone looking to improve the system that is the Data Center.

It's my assumption that the breakdown of data centers by size & volume looks something like this pyramid:

Without a dedicated resource in charge of ensuring the data center is all it can be, how can we expect the environment to improve? Without a dedicated resource there's no one going to Data Center conferences, taking classes on data center management or working with data center peers. In this environment the data center is relegated to being a "special" room. This special room creates a huge but relatively silent sucking sound as it sucks the financial life out of the company and that's not even the bad part! The bad part is that the rest of the world suffers as a result of our general mismanagement of this power and water intensive environment.

Until we get to the point where IT & Executive management agree on supporting the data center as the critical "system" that it is, we will forever be plagued by the same problems. We (the royal we) leave a tremendous amount of opportunity on the table when we ignore the data center. If we're not going to justify the appropriate support for it, we should outsource to someone who will.

Next time more about the "Data Center as a System"