As companies of all sizes become more global in nature and tap into skills across the world, this mounting virtual workforce needs new tools to be effective. The 3D data centre allows experts to manage data centre resources regardless of where they are or when these resources need attention, giving both employees and corporations enhanced productivity and freedom. The globally-integrated enterprise can deliver enormous economic benefits to both developed and developing nations, and new technology like this one can help companies seamlessly operate in such a distributed model.

Implenia, a Swiss construction, building services and real estate company, used the IBM virtual data centre solutions to extend its existing virtual operations centre which was previously used mainly for the facilities management processes. Adding the data from data centre equipment allowed Implenia a finer control of the HVAC and security system. The virtual data centre is a tailored 3D replica of servers, racks, networking, power and cooling equipment that allows data centre managers to experience real-time enhanced awareness of their dispersed resources.

3D data centres are better able to consolidate the footprint of large numbers of machines only being used at, for instance, 10% capacity, to get rid of extraneous machines, and to monitor power and cooling, distribute workload between data centres, and even move processing to cooler sites when weather conditions are unfavourable.

"Viewing information about your data centre in 2D text - even in real time - only tells a data centre manager part of the story, because our brains are wired for sight and sound", stated IBM Researcher Michael Osias, who architected the 3D data centre service. "By actually seeing the operations of your data centre in 3D, even down to flames showing hotspots and visualizations of the utilization of servers allows for a clearer understanding of the enterprise resources, better informed decision-making and a higher level of interaction and collaboration."

A consolidated view gives operators insight into real physical issues such as how heat and energy flow through the data centre. It also provides an intuitive method for understanding the company's entire computing architecture.

Currently, Implenia manages eight pilot sites including a data centre that is managed by different tools and technologies. This challenged Implenia's management capability and affected its ability to control its customer properties and overall efficiency.

"Until working with IBM we only knew the state of our data centre from the information we got through the building automation system and our virtual worlds communications interface. We didn't know the state of the server and information that was readily available to us until it was made more accessible via the 3D visualizations that IBM built for us. We think that by combining this information with the information we had from the building automation side we can, from a building management standpoint, control the data much better and take action to be more efficient", stated Oliver Goh, Implenia IT Specialist.

The key element in the work for Implenia is linking IBM's virtual world integration middleware, Holographic Enterprise Interface (HEI), that links real-world data centre operations in cyberspace to their Building automation interface (VWCI). HEI has a modular and flexible design that allows clients to customize the desired interactions between real and virtual worlds. Each physical data centre linked through this technology has an HEI instance that will transmit messages over the private network using Internet standard protocols to the 3D virtual world server.

The virtual world platforms that render the 3D environment are based on the OpenSim Application Platform for 3D Virtual Worlds.

Most enterprises have data centres in different buildings, cities and possibly even countries. This is because data centre designs have often been dictated by a company's need to scale quickly to meet demand from company growth and the transfer of more business processes to IT. But the job of efficiently managing data centres in Beijing and Buenos Aires from an office in Madrid is not always an easy one.

Companies are increasingly dealing with this problem by relying on software that allows them to manage their far-flung data centres as if they were a single, centralized computing pool.

Since the IBM 3D data centre is a multi-user virtual world, complete with in-world instant messaging, multiple users can have a shared 3D experience about aspects of the data centre, either in simulation or live mode, and carry on active discussions in-world. This shared experience allows technical, business, and even partner personnel, to collaborate on elements of the enterprise data centre.

This type of collaboration provides much faster cycle times for analysis and decision making, by viewing operations in near real time, instead of exchanging messages and two-dimensional drawings via e-mail.

With the IBM 3D data centre, customers can not only monitor and manage live systems, but they can perform simulations and 'what if' scenarios about their enterprise.

Since the 3D assets are data driven, and there is no knowledge of the source of the data (only the structure of the message and its semantic meaning), the data centre can be driven with mock up or pre-recorded data.

The modelling and simulation capability can also be used for exercises in space, power, and cooling planning, training, and disaster recovery scenarios. Users can move assets, interact with them, and drive them with real or simulated data.

The 3D data centre is customizable according to the client's servers, applications and monitoring systems. Models of non-IBM equipment are also available.