New at Disney: It's a Data Center World After All

CIO — Visitors to Disney's Epcot Center in Orlando can walk around the world, stopping at pavilions that aim to give them a taste of other countries. Now, Disney and IBM (IBM) hope to give visitors a unique look at the information technology that delivers the modern world's everyday necessities as well.

Last week, the two companies unveiled the latest revision of their collaboration—the Smarter Planet—an exhibit on how technology can save energy and Earth's resources. Based on concepts espoused in IBM's 14-month-old marketing push of the same name, Smarter Planet allows guests to explore the impact of various technologies, such as using mobile phones for banking.

Visitors at IBM's new Smarter Planet exhibit create avatars for Runtime, a customized game experience that lets players run, jump and dance through computing history. The exhibit's modular data center also stars.

The exhibit also takes people inside the data center—a part of the modern computing world that many people never see. Unlike the Wizard of Oz model, the servers powering the exhibit will not be behind a curtain but on full display.

Based on IBM's scalable modular data center (SMDC) designs, the data center at the I Innoventions Pavilion at Epcot shows some of the ways that modernizing IT facilities can save companies money.

"Data centers have gotten bigger and denser and more heavily utilized," says Merv Adrian, an analyst with IT Market Strategies. "We have steadily consumed more and more energy, and these facilities were not designed with energy efficiency top of mind."

Modern data center designs, such as the scalable modular data center (SMDC), are far more efficient than those of a decade ago, says Jody Cefola, chief marketing officer for site and facilities group at IBM's Global Technology Services.

"Data centers are still energy hogs," says Cefola. "Per square foot they take up to 30 to 80 times more energy than a typical office building."

The collection of servers and infrastructure powering the Smarter Planet exhibit, for example, has a data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) of 70 percent, meaning that 70 cents of IT productivity is delivered for every dollar spent on the data center, Cefola says. Most companies have efficiencies far below that. Among IBM's clients, initial benchmarking found that corporate data centers have a DCiE of 43 percent on average.

"The worst we saw 28 percent, but we won't say which company that was," Cefola says.

Visitors to the exhibit can create an avatar and play a game, called Runtime, created by Disney, to allow guests to explore the history and uses of computers. The exhibition also demonstrates that, whether supporting digital personas in virtual worlds or resources in the real world, the demands on information technology are soaring, says Charles King, principal analyst with PundIT.

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