Canary Wharf, Fat Twins, and 2012

Posted by Chris Howard

I've been spending a lot of time in the UK recently, and usually get to visit clients at Canary Wharf when I'm there. So when my friends at Eskenzi PR forwarded an article on London's looming data crisis, it piqued my interest.

When I first visited London in the early 1980's, Canary Wharf was just beginning the transition from the heavily industrial West India Docks to a gentrified (and tax incentive-driven) location for growing businesses.In the past 25 years, the area has come to symbolize wealth and power with London's highest skyscrapers (e.g., One Canada Square) occupied by leading global companies (esp. financial services). It rivals the traditional banks area of the City, where the famous Gherkin is rooted next to the Lloyds exoskeleton . It serves as a private sector antipole to the bronze glow of Westminster upriver.

With the growth of Canary Wharf has come increased demand for power and data center facilities. Canary Wharf serves as poster child for those issues, which plague London in general. From Heathrow to the East End, London is dense with data centers running critical transactions and storing exabytes of data for many of the world's companies. As government clamps down on carbon dioxide emissions, available space decreases, and power consumption maxes out, those companies need to get creative about data center consolidation. London's powerhouses of business and government must get leaner, because right now, they look like the famous fat twins of the 1970's Guinness World Records: there's only so much more weight those motorcycles can hold.

Getting leaner has multiple dimensions. Like physical fitness, the right way to tone up and lose weight is to mix strength training with aerobics, working different muscles and building stamina. If all we do in the data center is consolidate through server and storage virtualization, we've just made more room for "fat" to collect. We haven't solved the root problem.Certainly, virtualization is a natural first step: the technologies are stable, and they provide quick return. We must get more serious about data management, though, if we're going to solve the issue of bloated data centers. Why does data proliferate? Some of it is driven by regulatory demands. Much of it is superfluous, however. We recreate content, for example, without knowing it already exists. Why? We couldn't find it. We create copy after copy of data because it wasn't meeting our needs in its original form or location. Without deduplication, that data expands geometrically to fill all available space...at least until we buy more storage. Perhaps we store too much, but we are afraid to delete anything.

Data management issues aside, Canary Wharf and the City are (excuse the pun) in a pickle. They must consider external hosting alternatives for at least part of their primary data centers because they are running out of local options. Cloud computing seems to offer a potential solution, especially if cloud-based hosting can be transparently combined with company-managed hosting. Even better, resources should be allocated dynamically as needed. The truth is that most companies haven't tiptoed into the dynamic allocation stream yet: they've spent their time and resources attacking the consolidation (i.e. space) issue first. To move fully into the cloud will require a shift in thinking for most organizations, especially banks, who feel the need to be close to their data for risk management purposes. And, as we've written before on this blog and elsewhere, the cloud may not be ready to fully address those risky propositions.

In 2012, London hosts the Olympics. What does this have to do with Canary Wharf? The Games, which will take place primarily in and around the Docklands(where venue construction has commenced), are putting increased pressure on power consumption. As David Glaton-Fenzi indicates in the Eskenzi article, "in the run-up to 2012, it is expected that the power demand in the Docklands area alone will rise by around 90 per cent".

So, some of the intelligent minds housed in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf must be hard at work architecting options to get them out of the power and space squeeze. Burton Group can help. Our Data Center, Data Management, Content and Collaboration, Security and Risk Management, and Enterprise Architecture teams offer practical advice on  data center consolidation, the effective streamlining of data, and approaches to content management. Furthermore,  we provide strategic direction on advanced virtualization and cloud computing architectures, including dynamic resource allocation. Our Executive Advisory team is working with technology leaders around the world as they grapple with London-like issues, helping them understand industry trends and bottom line impact.

Keep your eyes on the Data Center blog, the Content and Collaboration blog, the Security and Risk Management blog, and the Data Management blog for additional coverage of these issues.