GovDC Reboot - Where Moore means less

As a child growing up in 1970’s England, I always remember hiding behind the sofa when Dr Who came on the TV with its haunting electronic theme tune originally written by an Australian Ron Grainer. The show has endured due to the ability of the main character to regenerate into a new form, a beneficial trait of being a Time Lord. The Doctors I grew up with were John Pertwee and Tom Baker. His mode of transport for time travel was the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) and it appeared as a blue police public call box, a throwback to when the show first aired in 1963 on the BBC with William Hartnell as the first Doctor.

The quirky thing about the TARDIS was that its appearance on the outside had no bearing to its capacity on the inside. In short, it was a lot bigger on the inside that it appeared from outside. Storage issues seem to be a perennial issue for us all as we collect more items as time goes by. My children’s cupboards are testimony to that. We can use the laws of physics to assist us in fitting more things in the same space such as use of vacuum packs for clothes when our wardrobes are creaking at the seams and using the same concept for vacuum packed foods to avoid buying that additional fridge/freezer.

Within a couple of years that the TARDIS emerged onto British TV, Gordon Moore from Intel released an article in 1965; Tracking the evolution of integrated circuit to date, Moore predicted the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would grow exponentially; From the release of the first transistor, performance has increased 3,500 times, energy efficiency 90,000 times, and the price per transistor is 60,000 times cheaper. 50 Years of Moore's Law

Moving from integrated circuits to integrated systems (hyperconverged), we see that Moore’s law has enabled the rise of architecture that builds the intelligence into software rather than hardware. This has resulted in the humble X86 servers becoming the foundational platforms of the software-defined movement underpinning all public clouds and is known as web-scale architecture due to its ability to scale exponentially.  

I think everyone would agree that the GovDC initiative has had its critics, and potentially justifiably so. The idea of consolidating 130 data centres into two purpose built data centres based upon a predicted 18MW of power consumption certainly raised eyebrows on whether this was a good use of tax payers money! With the Q4 2017 deadline fast approaching, CIOs are still hedging their bets between their own GovDC data hall commitments, the GovDC Marketplace and the Public Cloud. It is somewhat ironic that the pace with which Government's move has paradoxically worked to its advantage.

Suddenly, the cloud economics that was only available to Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft Azure and other public cloud providers is now available to everyone. Compared to traditional three tier architectures of compute, storage and networking, the software-defined architectures collapse down to 2RU X86 appliances and can reduce power consumption by 85% and rack space by 10:1. Adopting this architectural approach could enable every Department and Agency that committed their KW usage to secure their data hall footprint in the GovDC facilities, to free up significant physical capacity as soon as they migrate. This is probably a good thing as projected commitments have now exceeded 90% of physical capacity. Two options now present themselves. Invest millions of dollars on new data halls, or implement web-scale architectures and use the existing data halls to house at least ten times as much compute and storage needs of the State.

Taking the TARDIS analogy one step further, we can see that the physical boundaries of the NSW Government Data Centres no longer inhibit the migration of all of NSW Data Centre space, as web-scale architecture and software-defined data centre technologies will enable all of the existing data centre footprint across the state to fit within the data halls originally contracted. Removing the need to expand data halls will save NSW Government millions of dollars that can be re-used to deliver better services to the citizens of New South Wales.