DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATION AND RATIONALIZATION FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Transcription

1 DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATION AND RATIONALIZATION FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT Eliminate Risk and Shorten Project Time

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary The Consolidation Imperative...4 Application Rationalization Challenges...5 Data: The Biggest Constraint Delphix Modernization Engine...7 Case Study

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Today there is an ever-increasing focus on IT modernization initiatives within the federal government. In a budget-constrained environment, agencies are exploring new and innovative ways to make their IT efforts more efficient and less expensive, while successfully meeting their missions. Agencies looking to modernize their IT operations face many challenges, including poorly utilized applications and legacy infrastructure. In addition to budget reductions, rising hardware, software and labor costs have compounded the problem. As a result, new projects and innovation often suffer. With a proposed $2 billion or more decrease in technology spending in the FY15 budget, agencies need to maximize funding, especially in terms of data center consolidation and optimization, cloud transitions and information-sharing environments. They also are under pressure to meet several key federal drivers including the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act and Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative. Application rationalization and modernization programs not only significantly reduce ongoing operational expenses but also unlock the ability to innovate faster all within required IT security controls enabling agencies to reinvest these savings in support of other mission-critical or citizen-centric programs. Delphix helps mitigate the risks inherent in modernizing legacy systems and applications by providing instant access to critical data in preserved states, offering full application functionality and reporting. Our data center consolidation solution transforms the economics and risk profile of application rationalization and modernization initiatives, enabling agencies to significantly shrink their data center footprint, migrate to the cloud or facilitate getting the right information to the right people. By virtualizing the entire application stack, Delphix quickly delivers full environments and enables automatic, efficient data transfers, providing agencies the confidence to modernize in a time-sensitive, budget-conscious environment. In addition, the archive feature addresses one of the biggest objections and risks inherent in application projects: meeting current and future legal and regulatory compliance requirements (e.g. FISMA, PCI, HIPAA, etc.). Some of the largest, leading organizations across more than 50 industries have accelerated application transformation projects by up to 50% with Delphix. 3

4 THE CONSOLIDATION IMPERATIVE Reducing costs and improving efficiencies are major goals of government agencies contributing to why modernization is playing such a significant role in current initiatives. It is also a big reason why agencies are embracing the concept of data virtualization and self-service data provisioning. However, aging hardware-defined data centers built on poorly integrated, proprietary infrastructure fundamentally lack the utilization, efficiency or elasticity to deliver on that demand in a cost effective and timely manner. The consequences for IT teams are significant from a cost, risk and agility standpoint. Aging and unsupported application stacks limit the ability to upgrade software packages. An Accenture report suggests that 70% of global transactions still run on legacy applications. The need for specialized labor to support legacy applications drive up operational costs, while premium maintenance costs, power and cooling costs are exorbitantly high. Invariably, operational budgets pay the legacy tax by taking away from innovation. Meanwhile unpatched security holes introduce non-compliance risks. Slow change management processes cripple service agreements and in turn infrastructure has to be overprovisioned with poor utilization outcomes. By modernizing and migrating applications onto private or public clouds and software-defined infrastructure, IT organizations gain greater elasticity, efficiency, and utilization enabling faster innovation. In the process of IT modernization, agencies also have an opportunity to retire obsolete and redundant applications, optimize staffing levels and reduce costs associated with physical facilities. By providing a near real-time return on investment an average of four-month payback, application rationalization and modernization programs not only reduce ongoing operational expenses but also unlock the ability to innovate faster. The trend towards application transformation isn t surprising when you consider the benefits, including: 80% of IT spend is dead money that keeps the lights on but doesn t contribute to mission delivery. The OMB estimates that the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) will yield $3 billion in annual savings. These savings are the result of significant improvements in core data center economics. For example, FDCCI expects server utilization to increase from 15% to over 60%. A Gartner report suggests modernized data centers can: Support 300% capacity growth in 60% less space. Reduce operating expenses up to 40%. The capital and operational cost benefit of modernization is staggering for any IT organization. Successful projects enable agencies to deliver projects in half the time and at higher quality while giving them power over their data, providing actionable intelligence and enhanced analytic capabilities. 4

5 APPLICATION RATIONALIZATION CHALLENGES The inhibitor to application rationalization and modernization isn t the lack of technologies that support and enable the next generation data center. Virtualization and converged infrastructure have proven the benefits of modernization in both private and public clouds. The biggest obstacles lie in the transformation path itself. Risk: For most IT teams, upgrading even a single application is a high-risk project. The risk of failure and delays is far higher with modernization projects that necessitate widespread upgrades and platform changes. The actual migration to new data centers only compounds risk due to service interruptions. Application owners often pushback on project teams because they can t easily test and validate migration. The sheer scale and scope of modernization initiatives also puts a long list of other projects and their benefits on hold. Yet, the reality is that while applications can be retired, legacy data has to remain available for compliance. The lack of a cost effective way to retain legacy application data while maintaining accessibility only increases resistance from security and audit teams. Consequently, critical applications that would benefit the most from modernization are pushed to the back of the priority list making the benefits of modernization sub-optimal. Cost: Acquiring or building new data centers requires a massive capital investment. Applications running on unsupported software need to be upgraded before they can even run on newer hardware platforms. Similarly, legacy operating systems must be migrated to newer Linux-based, virtualization friendly platforms for compatibility with emerging IT architectures. The combination of upgrades, platform changes and the actual migration introduce huge test-bed infrastructure costs. The associated operational cost is equally significant, including additional services expenses incurred to execute projects. Risk Concurrent upgrades & platform migrations Migration validation Downtime Competing projects App retirement & legacy data retention Cost New data center build-out costs Application upgrades Hardware upgrades Migration testing CapEx Internal and third party OpEx 5

6 Quality: Extensive upgrades and platform changes invariably extend modernization project schedules. Huge fixed costs required for migration test infrastructure lead to compromises that impose serialization and limit the quality of migration testing and validation. Process overhead and wait times embedded in migration test bed setup and refresh complicate actual test times, extend timelines and erode quality further. Quality Inadequate test beds Process overhead Approval cycles Cross-team dependencies Serialization DATA: THE BIGGEST CONSTRAINT Data access is ironically both the impetus for application transformation as well as its biggest bottleneck. Consider an agency looking to rationalize and migrate its portfolio of 500 applications from a legacy data center to a new, modernized facility. Now, assume the production data footprint of these application stacks is roughly 500 TB in aggregate and that the project team needs three additional environments to effectively test and validate the migration. As is generally the case, existing development and test environments are needed for other ongoing projects so an incremental 1500 TB of tier-1 capacity would be needed just for the modernization initiative. Many agencies limit migration test environments to control project costs and instead serialize the migration with a smaller number of test beds. On the backend, these compromises manifest in the form of limited validation, higher project risk and limited support from application owners. Application transformation projects face an even bigger challenge when it comes to operational costs around test data management. Project teams need frequent and iterative access to the latest production application environments before a cutover can be made with a high level of confidence. Yet, each refresh of a test environment from its production source can take days to weeks of coordinated effort across third party integrators managing the migration project and production operations teams. Moreover, the constant movement of large data sets to test and validate migration also introduces the risk of saturating network links carrying critical traffic. When thousands of systems have to be migrated, network capacity alone can force serialization and introduce lengthy delays pushing out the benefits of modernization further while eroding potential returns. Agencies need a solution that can manage multiple development processes, testing, quality assurance, reporting and recovery, and still provide real-time access to the most current information without risk to the integrity of the data. Within application stacks, the constraints are particularly pronounced at the database tier. While next generation software defined data centers enable rapid provisioning of virtualized servers, large application data sets locked in databases continue to constrain availability and efficiency. Because databases and underlying data sets are inextricably linked, the reality is that utilization across application landscapes remains sub-optimal even in modernized data centers. Depending on their mission, agencies must have power over their data, providing actionable intelligence and enhanced analytic capabilities through synchronization, automatic version controls, self-service functionality and real-time data access. From tactical deployments to tax collection to border protection, agencies depend on information to make better, more informed decisions. 6

7 DELPHIX MODERNIZATION ENGINE The Delphix Modernization Engine accelerates data center and application rationalization projects by removing the biggest constraints and bottlenecks. Virtualization: Much like a hypervisor abstracts compute resources to create virtual machines, the Delphix Modernization Engine abstracts data from hardware and storage to create virtual databases, application instances and file sets. Through intelligent block mapping and sharing, Delphix eliminates the widespread redundancy across migration test beds. Delphix virtual application instances function just like full physical copies, but consume a fraction of the space and can be created in minutes. As a result, Delphix can eliminate over 90% of migration test bed storage and operational management costs. More importantly, if virtual environments are retained for their sustained benefits post-migration, Delphix can entirely eliminate the need to migrate non-production application stacks. Virtualizing non-production copies at the target data centers (after production is migrated) can eliminate the migration workload for over 50% of all systems in scope. Through cost effective migration test beds and V2P (virtual to physical) support, Delphix has a similar impact on production migration efforts as well. Efficient Synchronization: In data center migration projects, the constant movement of full backups from source to target data centers represents a huge tax on both the source system and WAN bandwidth. Often, migration tasks have to be scheduled during off hours to mitigate this impact, which often prolongs the project schedule. Delphix implements a foreverincremental technique to maintain continuous, efficient synchronization with source application stacks (application binaries, databases and configuration files), eliminating 95% of source and network load caused by full data extraction and movement. 7

8 TimeFlow: As part of its synchronization process, Delphix also synthesizes and records all changes. This information is used to build a time window or TimeFlow of changes that can be used to provision or refresh virtual test beds from any point in time down to the second or transaction boundary. TimeFlow enables migration test teams to setup and tear down test beds without relying on slow recovery from full, incremental backups and redo logs. This is particularly valuable for composite applications that require synchronized test beds to validate migration. With Delphix TimeFlow, recovery points are continuous and recovery time is a matter of minutes regardless of the application data footprint. TimeFlow also enables LiveArchive to address one of the biggest objections and risks inherent in application projects: meeting current and future legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Virtual secure database branches can be deployed in minutes Integrated Data Masking: Applications that store sensitive or regulated data require data masking across lifecycle copies. However, data masking introduces additional overhead to migration test bed provisioning and refresh tasks. In migration projects, data related risk is often the cause of pushback from security and audit teams. Delphix eliminates the overhead of data masking through seamless integration with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or agency-developed masking solutions. With Delphix, data can be masked once and all derived copies are automatically protected. Since virtual masked copies can be created, tracked or deleted centrally and on-demand, associated risk and resistance from data owners are significantly lowered. Cross-Platform Provisioning: Modernization initiatives often require porting legacy Unix operating systems to cloud friendly, x86 Linux platforms. However platform changes involve a lengthy, manual, error-prone process just to validate and ensure platform migration readiness. For some steps, source production systems have to be placed in read-only mode, which introduces service interruptions. To avoid this downtime, organizations create intermediate physical copies that consume additional storage and are still hard to keep synchronized with the source. These challenges around platform migration can add months to the broader modernization schedule for each application. By automating Unix to Linux migration steps (including endian conversion), Delphix eliminates 50-75% of the associated overhead. For composite applications, synchronized Delphix virtual copies enable fluid migration rehearsals without service interruptions or storage overhead. 8

9 Self-Service: Delphix provides an intuitive GUI that enables migration project teams to provision, refresh, rewind or branch migration test beds independently, without relying on production operations teams. With physical test beds, each task can introduce days to weeks of dead time to process approvals. By eliminating the CapEx and OpEx costs that trigger the need for lengthy approval cycles, Delphix selfservice improves productivity and efficiency and cuts project delivery time in half. Enterprise and Cloud Ready: The Delphix Modernization Engine is delivered as a virtual appliance to maximize deployment flexibility, scale, availability and cloud readiness enabling deployment to any private, public, or hybrid cloud environment in less than two days. Delphix also supports any hardware and storage, ensuring organizations can leverage existing infrastructure and avoid procurement delays. The solution also reduces vendor lock-in at all tiers. For example, Delphix can virtualize and migrate a Unix/NetApp legacy application stack to a Linux/flash- based converged stack in the modernized data center. For large migration initiatives, Delphix can be scaled vertically or horizontally. Delphix also supports hypervisor templates (like VMware vsphere) for quick, standardized rollouts. Bandwidth efficient replication to secondary Delphix engines provides high availability and disaster recovery for critical project environments and for the Delphix environment itself. The software appliance is delivered in lock-down mode to ensure compliance with stringent configuration standards such as the DISA STIGs. 9

10 CASE STUDY A large US government civilian agency was challenged by a very familiar situation - reduced budgets and increased user demands that prohibited them from delivering the required services and information required. They needed a way to reduce operational costs and increase delivery of new applications and services faster. In order to meet this challenge several vendors were evaluated. They focused on four operational issues during the evaluation: migration from Unix to Linux, the ability to improve data refresh capabilities, faster and more secure data recovery and data provisioning features. The Delphix Virtual Data Platform was evaluated, selected and implemented by the team over a two-week period. The Delphix virtual appliance sits between the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) and the storage tier, serving shared data blocks to all copies and managing the changes unique to each copy. The Delphix virtual appliance is responsible for filtering, orchestrating, and storing blocks as they traverse the network between the RDBMS and the storage tier. Due to its placement between the RDBMS and the storage tier, Delphix is 100% transparent to the end-user application. By using Delphix, the agency accomplished all of its objectives. Highlights of the results were: Migrated large legacy databases to Linux with the rapid transfer and refresh feature which enabled them to cut their hardware costs by 75% The synchronizing capabilities produced an additional 120 days per year of availability which resulted in huge labor productivity benefits They were able to drastically cut lost work that occurred during refresh and post processing 90% of the data footprint was eliminated They can now produce new databases in 10 minutes vs two weeks Delphix is now being evaluated in other departments due to the short time to implement and huge cost savings and productivity gains. For more information on how Delphix can help government agencies accelerate time to market and reduce costs, please contact government@delphix.com. 10

11 Application Rationalization and Modernization for the Federal Government July 2014 You can find the most up- to- date technical documentation at: The Delphix Website also provides the latest product updates. If you have comments about this documentation, submit your feedback to: Delphix Corp. 275 Middlefield Road, Suite 50 Menlo Park, CA Delphix Corp. All rights reserved. The Delphix logo and design are registered trademarks of Delphix Corp. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.