In the last five years, as JetBlue Airways Corp. grew from zero to $1.3 billion in revenue, users at the upstart budget airline kept asking for more applications. And the IT department kept deploying more servers to run them. The result was 400 servers sprawled across too much data center space, eating up too much electricity, air conditioning and management overhead.

Now, data center operations manager Brad Nickel and his team in Forest Hills, N.Y., are designing a new 10,000-square-foot data center to replace two 2,000-square-foot facilities that support most of the airline's operations. Inside the new data center, virtualization software, which allows more than one operating system to run on a single server, will be used to consolidate 75 single-application servers into five.

Nickel will also use more blade servers, which are circuit boards with built-in microprocessors, memory and network connections that can be mounted on a rack with other blades. They can provide more computing power per square foot than the previous-generation of servers. (Blade servers are also noted for being easier to manage than rack-mounted systems, and they allow users to plug in new processors as needed without having to take applications down.)

Less Is More

Rich Ryder has an unusual approach to data center consolidation: Get rid of as much stuff as you can. Ryder was brought into Roseburg Forest Products Co. two years ago to "clean up the network and the data center." Since then, Ryder, who is systems group manager at the $1 billion Roseburg, Ore., woods products company, has been on a consolidation tear. But he hasn't done it by combining data centers. Instead, Ryder has ruthlessly eliminated any extra applications, servers, storage or management utilities. "The more technology you can get rid of, the smoother it runs," he says simply. When Ryder arrived, the company was running 212 servers and spending about 50% more than it should have been to manage its servers and storage. By eliminating redundant applications and providing dedicated or clustered servers only to the most mission-critical applications, he cut the number of servers to 107. Ryder also centralized application storage on a storage area network which allowed him to eliminate multiple backup packages and reduce his purchases of dedicated storage. One place the consolidation had to stop was at the company's plants' LANs because users need those if the corporate network goes down. However, by standardizing on key platforms (Dell servers, Microsoft SQL Server databases, Cisco networking gear), Ryder now says the equipment for each plant "isn't so much a data center as a half rack, preconfigured 'LAN in a can'" that may not even need a raised floor -- just good power and air conditioning. Ryder has built growth potential into his main data center with two 11-ton air conditioning units that he estimates can handle almost double the current heat load. By consolidating servers and moving to smaller rack-mounted units, "we gained a lot of real estate (in the data center) that's probably the most expensive real estate in the company." But he doesn't plan on giving up any of that beautiful empty space before he has to. -- R.L.S.

The move will save the airline about $20,000 per year in utilities, rent and network switches since multiple blade servers can share a single network connection. Lower management costs will bring further savings, Nickel says.

With the effort, JetBlue joins the pack of midmarket companies where CIOs are responding to executive calls for more computing services at lower cost. Largely, this translates into consolidating data centers and servers -- that is, shutting down remote computer facilities and centralizing their functions, as well as moving more applications onto fewer, more powerful servers within existing data centers.

Some IT managers are also cutting costs by eliminating unneeded applications and servers (see "Less is More," at right). In a spring 2004 survey of 480 data center managers, Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm IDC found that 80% were in the process of such consolidation.

But this tightly packed equipment needs to be specially cooled and powered, and this means midmarket CIOs must learn new disciplines, such as how to space blade servers so they don't create hot spots. They also need to study new technologies, such as cool enclosures for blade servers and virtualization software.

In an April 2005 report, Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. predicted that 70% of data center facilities will require "some level of renovation, expansion or relocation" by 2009 because of new technologies such as blade servers. Those technologies are the best way for some firms to control hardware and software costs and manage growth.

Neustar Inc., a Sterling, Va.-based provider of shared services for telecommunications companies, needed to upgrade the computing power in its two primary data centers to accommodate its growth from $68 million in sales in 2000 to $165 million in 2004. So it installed about 400 IBM eServer BladeCenter servers. They require only a quarter of the space that rack-mounted servers do and allowed Neustar to avoid the cost of new data center space, says Jerry Chen, senior director of enterprise services.

Raymond DeCrescente Jr., chief technology officer of Capital Region Orthopaedic Group in Albany, N.Y., deployed ProLiant blade servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. when he built a data center two years ago to run new imaging applications. Blades not only saved space and reduced his need for network ports, but gave him greater redundancy than rack-mounted servers and let him hot-swap failed servers without bringing down applications.

Keeping Cool
Yet this improved efficiency can come at a price. In a January 2005 survey of 161 members of AFCOM, an Orange, Calif.-based association of data center managers, 59% of respondents were worried that their employers were buying new equipment such as blade servers without sufficient concern for power and cooling. And 49% were concerned with the power densities of these servers and switches.

Servers, storage and networking hardware rarely get so hot that they burst into flames, but excessive heat makes them slow down or even crash.

A rack with a single rack-mounted server typically consumes about 1.5 to 3 kW of electricity, but a rack loaded with blade servers can consume as much as 24 kW. That's eight times the power consumption and eight times the heat to remove than with older data center technology, says Rick Sawyer, director of data center technology for American Power Conversion Corp. (APC), a West Kingston, R.I., manufacturer of rack, cooling and other physical infrastructure products.

Research firm Gartner recommends designing data centers and placing equipment so the need for power, and thus cooling, is limited to an average of 4 kW per rack. Methods for achieving this include calculating cooling needs on a per-rack basis and alternating high-density with low-density racks to avoid hot spots. Michael Bell, a research vice president at Gartner, also recommends alternating rows of cool and hot aisles, with the backs of the servers exhausting air into the hot aisles and the fronts drawing in air from the cool aisles.

One hospital found cooling space in floors and ceilings. When the 2,600 employee, 295-bed Concord Hospital in Concord, N.H., upgraded from a 1,000 to 2,500 square foot data center last winter, it left the space under the raised floor and above the false ceiling as plenums, or open areas through which air can circulate. The hospital's chief technology officer, Gary Light, says this means he just has to install new air vents rather than ductwork when moving servers. Another approach is to raise floors by three or even four feet (compared with the current two-foot standard) to meet cooling needs, says Will Fisher, vice president of Longden Company Inc., a data center contractor in Hudson, Mass.

Gartner's Bell recommends working with an expert or using specialized software such as Flovent from Flomerics Group PLC to analyze airflow to avoid hot spots and to determine where to place servers or ducts. Bell also recommends building data centers larger than 1,000 square feet in industrial rather than office space. Not only does industrial space cost 50% to 60% less than office space, he says, but its windowless walls make data centers more secure, and its high ceilings let heat rise further from the computing equipment.

Not everyone agrees that using blade servers requires a data center redesign. Neustar's Chen says IBM's blade servers dissipate heat so effectively that he didn't even have to change server placement when deploying them. An IBM spokesman says BladeCenter servers are designed to produce 40% more processing power than rack-mounted servers without producing more heat.