Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

As the delivery of IT as a service becomes more widespread, the option of outsourcing the data centre is regarded as increasingly attractive. With data centre managers having to deal with vast amounts of stored data and an explosion in the number of power-hungry servers, the simplification of the data centre infrastructure has become more of an imperative than an option.

Outsourcing the data centre has been a frequent consideration at Alstom, the engineering giant best known for building the power plants that generate around 20% of the world's electrical power, France's TGV trains and luxury cruise ships such as the Queen Mary II. But as Rob Jones, director of technology for Northern Europe at the French company, says, outsourcing has always been a case of never the right time or place.

"We run our IT services as an internal business and we've generated a service catalogue approach - very much like an outsourcer but on an internal basis," says Jones. On the other hand, the prospect of applying the emerging utility computing model to its data centre would enable Alstom to be more agile in terms of its ability to ramp up services and turn them off when no longer needed.

That kind of on-demand capability is appearing first in storage devices - although a lack of implemented standards is slowing its adoption. The European Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) is working to remedy that situation, making its mission "to ensure that storage networks become open, trusted and valued solutions across the IT community".

Paul Talbut, SNIA's European chairman, says the focus is now on delivering further standards on, for example, information lifecycle management (ILM) and data protection. "Information really is the lifeblood of any business, and many high-end enterprises are nervous about handing over the crown jewels," says Talbut. With information seen as the key to competitive advantage, a lot of service providers are waking up to the opportunity of managing the information infrastructure from within the bounds of the company organisation itself.

However, in the view of many IT managers and analysts, the storage sector has so far over-promised and under-delivered on utility storage. Above all, the key virtualisation component for viewing all storage on a network as a virtual pool of resources has received a lot of hype over the past five years but is only now becoming a reality - a problem which has damaged the technology's reputation somewhat, says Rob McCormick, CEO of IT infrastructure operator Savvis. The follow-on generation of virtualisation products is much improved, he says, and virtualisation is now being regarded as a viable model.

With exponential growth in the amount of data stored, analysts are predicting the pressure will be on for data centres to address head-on regulatory issues that demand the security, accessibility and integrity of that data. In the view of Paul Brandwood, business development director for Global Services at StorageTek (the storage specialist currently being acquired by Sun Microsystems) the future is all about managing that data so the right data is in the right place at the right time.

Outside of storage, the utility data centre model is being brought to market by outsourcing companies such as Savvis through the use of blade servers, dynamic provisioning and server virtualisation. By using such services, says McCormick, companies can be relieved of the vast capital asset burden of their data centre.

If that hints of a return to the data processing bureau era when mainframes dominated the data centre, then it is meant to. "The discipline and quality of service [that went with the mainframe] has definitely been lost, and we need to rediscover it," says Jones.

The utility data centre is still an incomplete jigsaw, though. The puzzle still has a big hole where software licensing should be, says Jones. He expects that to continue to be a major inhibitor for several years to come.