Data center sticker shock? Companies may be in for cost surprise

Released: 11/05/07

Phil Loftus, chief information officer and vice president of information systems for Aurora Health Care, can relate to some of the data center concerns being voiced across the country.

Aurora Health Care, which runs its own data center in Milwaukee, is grappling with higher costs for storage, energy usage and cooling. The not-for-profit healthcare provider has facilities along much of Wisconsin's eastern shore, including St. Luke's Medical Center, and its cost drivers include:

• Rapidly growing storage needs - about 25 percent per year - that include picture archiving and communication systems (PACs) to store medical images and their associated back-up and retrieval costs.
• Growth in the number of servers. With more than 300 in its Heil data center alone, and more being added constantly, the organization must keep adding cooling capacity to deal with the heat they generate.
• Mid- and high-end server capacity (mid-range and mainframe), both of which are growing at around 15 percent per year as the number of deployed systems, and the use of those systems, continues to increase.

"These are our key drivers," Loftus noted, "and they are clearly driving up our data center costs overall at more than 10 percent per year."

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