The Director for the Central and North East Africa region  at APC by Schneider Electric Jonathan Duncan has  warned  that companies should not oversize their data centers unnecessarily  even with the additional pressures brought on by cloud computing.

Applications, he said  must be available at all times, meaning that a company’s data centre infrastructure must be exceptionally reliable and supported by vital power and cooling measures.

“Oversizing has become the single largest avoidable cost associated with the typical data centre and network room infrastructure, driving capital and maintenance expenses to excessive levels,” he explains. “In fact, most data centres use less than 50 percent of their physical and power infrastructure. This unused capacity represents not only an avoidable capital cost, but preventable operating and maintenance expenses too.” he said.

This wastage, according to him  does not come cheaply. “Oversizing the data centre can be costly and expenses can be split into capital and operating costs. Capital costs include the costs of the excess power and cooling equipment, as well as capitalized design and installation costs, including wiring and duct work” he added.

On the side of operating costs, Johnson said that there is the cost of operating the facility, including maintenance contracts, consumables and electricity.

“Since oversizing gives rise to under utilized equipment that must be maintained, a large fraction of the maintenance cost is also wasted” he added.

For Duncan, Excess electricity costs are significant when data centres are oversized. “The idling loss of a data centre is approximately five percent of the power rating. When the cooling costs are factored in, this figure doubles to 10 percent” he explained.

Hence, for an oversized 100kW data centre, he said that the wasted electricity over a 10-year span is roughly 600,000kWh.

“Instead of building a data centre in advance, businesses should rather implement a solution that can track the actual load requirement and constantly adapt to changing requirements. An architecture, like APC’s InfraStruXure is ideal as it provides pre-engineered modular building blocks that can be grown or reduced as needed and also eliminates special site preparations, such as raised floors, wiring, drilling and cutting.

“When it comes to moving into the cloud, it is critical to remember that this type of technology requires the same infrastructure as a traditional data centre setup.