The Business Drivers for Data Center Excellence An Executive Briefi ng Series on Maximizing the Business Potential from the Dynamic Data Center Executive Summary The Data Center Excellence Executive Leadership Report Series provides executives with an approach to align the investment and support of their data centers into the organization s overall strategic goals and objectives. This approach ties the operational aspects associated with building, running, and growing the data center with the organizational aspects of supporting the business. This series of executive level reports will be delivered in this foundation document and an ongoing set of pillar documents that will provide organizations with: A clear understanding of the business ramifi cations associated with the changing data center landscape, A framework from which executives can drive greater value from data center investments, and A concise set of valuable reports written for the executive reader who has limited time.
Series Overview Information technology (IT) has evolved over time to become not only a critical aspect of a business s support processes, but also a major competitive differentiator for many organizations through new or improved operations and/or services that translate directly into savings or increased revenue. Forward thinking and savvy executives understand the true advantage IT can bring within their industry and have begun to integrate IT as a central component in their strategic planning. The data center is at the core of any organization s strategic IT plan and can deliver the greatest value if properly leveraged. From enterprises of all sizes, government agencies, to carriers, each has had its share of tragedies and success when it has come to building and operating data centers. In many cases, the data center has not only become a large sink hole of expenses that seems to have an ever growing appetite, but even worse, it is now a source of fear and late night worries. Complexity plays a key role. CIOs and their staff realize their organizations have become signifi cantly burdened by a number of legacy systems, varying management platforms, and a scattering of the latest technologies that makes it necessary to focus the majority of their resources on putting out fi res and just keeping their current environment operational. This, combined with a seemingly endless number of wires and ever-growing space, power and cooling issues, has created a scenario where the only apparent course of action is to keep feeding the beast. Underneath it all, it is clear, the most critical step necessary to making IT a business driver is to take control of the data center. This document is the fi rst in an executive series of reports that are written to provide a clear understanding of the business ramifi cations associated with the changing data center landscape. The focus of these reports will be to provide the executive readers with a clear and concise set of issues, solutions, and benefi ts they can leverage to create Data Center Excellence within their organizations to drive greater value and performance from their IT infrastructure. The reports are written with senior executives in mind and concentrate on the business of technology, not on the underlying technical issues. Why Data Center Excellence? Data Center Excellence is the core concept where the technical and operational aspects of the data center intersect with the business drivers of the organization and its mission. Businesses and government agencies alike have had the challenge of converting their mission, goals, and objectives into actionable technical requirements and approach that not only meet today s needs, but also provide the agility necessary to react to the ever-changing competitive climate and technology ecosystem. Data Center Excellence can be boiled down to the approach that embodies the philosophy and processes that align the operational aspects associated with building, running, and developing the data center with the organizational aspects of supporting the business. The fi gure on the next page shows how these distinct aspects come together to create the basis for Data Center Excellence. 2
Taking Control of the Data Center The Dynamic Data Center is the evolutionary path of the data center where advanced technologies and operational capabilities are incorporated into an environment to meet the dynamic needs and mission of the organization in an agile and cost-effective manner. Where Data Center Excellence is the concept that brings the technical and business approaches together in an intelligible framework, the Dynamic Data Center is the actual realization of the Data Center Excellence solution set. It is important not to be fooled by the title Dynamic Data Center and believe it is something that cannot provide a positive short-term impact to the organization, because it can. The Dynamic Data Center is less about specifi c future technologies and more about the agility of an organization s data center to quickly change to meet new business requirements, and its ability to continually incorporate new technologies in a cost effective manner that allows an organization to continually differentiate itself in the marketplace. Gap Analysis: Identify gaps between To Be and As Is Architecture and prioritize. Technology: Core aspect of the data center which includes all of the hardware (storage, processor, memory, network, etc.) and software to support the agile implementation of organizational requirements. Management: Ability to centrally control all aspects of the data center from one location on-site or remotely. Design: Layout of the data center to maximize effi ciency and scalability. Security: combinations of physical and electronic measures to protect the equipment, people and data. People: Skilled staff to provide end-to-end data enter operations and management. Location: Geographic site requirements based on organizational, connectivity, power, environmental, etc. requirements Processes: Policy and procedures to effi ciently operate the data center in a fl exible and agile environment. Environment: Effi cient and scalable power and cooling systems necessary to minimize cost today and support future growth. 3
The Data Center Business Landscape The economic model and importance of the data center has changed considerably over the past thirty years, as IT has become a critical factor in the survival and growth for most organizations. The data center has grown from a closet or a collection of otherwise unused rooms with a couple of servers sitting on a desk to one of the greatest line items in the organization. In most cases, not even the executive suites within a multi-national corporation compare on a per square foot basis with the costs of building, equipping, and operating the data centers. While CIOs have traditionally performed well with the limited budgets given them, IT has normally not been perceived as a strategic asset within an organization. It has always been viewed as a necessary expense to achieve some level of improved productivity or to launch a new product or service. Thus, as data centers transitioned from a molehill into a mountain, they did so always from a tactical basis, with the focus on quickly rolling out the next application to support a new initiative or to extinguish the fi re of the day. Even when the data center has made it onto the strategic plan, it has almost always been with a milestone once achieved, it would be pushed into the background. Now most organizations are in the situation where they are focused on keeping the status quo running without incident, and need to keep pumping in more money to support the current data center environment that is not equipped to provide the agility and fl exibility necessary to support that organization s changing demands. Many organizations understand the need to transform to a service-oriented environment and have either considered or started moving towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The concept of Data Center Excellence can help organizations not only move more quickly to a SOA, but also implement a more advantageous and effective solution that meets a broader range of the organization s requirements and fi ts into the longer term strategic objectives. Although the data center is typically viewed as an organizational money pit, the good news is that it can evolve into a strategic differentiator that can provide the organization with a positive return on investment (ROI) and help position it for future success. In order to achieve this, executives must understand the basic business drivers and challenges they are facing in achieving Data Center Excellence within their organizations. Challenges in Data Center Evolution While many organizations will face their own unique issues, most organizations will experience a common set of challenges as they evolve their data centers. It is clear the most costly aspect of IT and data centers today are not in the technology, but in the management and operation of the data center. The issue many organizations face is that most new technologies are introduced in a piece-meal fashion to solve an immediate problem and corresponding legacy systems are not phased out. This creates layers of generational systems that in many cases provide overlapping functionality. Thus, the management costs and requirements multiply and the savings promised by the new technology are never realized. 4
1. Sunk Costs: The operational life cycle of many IT systems has become shorter and shorter and organizations must be ready to roll off of existing systems even prior to their expected life cycle if the business case supports the early transition to a new technology. This appears to be somewhat counter intuitive and a source of aggravation to many executives who have a natural tendency to try and drain every last drop of value out of a system. But it is critical that an impartial analysis is made to determine if in the long run it costs more to continue with an existing system than to move to the next that offers a better solution. While it is important to understand the limited life cycle of existing IT investments, it is also critical to evaluate new technologies on the basis of taking advantage of your existing systems. 2. Existing Business Processes: One of the greatest barriers to effective technology transition is the ability for organizations to migrate and evolve their internal business processes to maximize the benefi t of the new technology. There have been numerous examples where new technologies have been deployed to try and automate or provide some level of improvement to existing business processes when the simple truth is that organizations can achieve orders of magnitude improvements if they step back and are willing to discover better ways to run their business. 3. Training: With the constant infl ux of new technologies and processes, it is critical for organizations to ensure their staffs are trained on an ongoing basis to effectively use and operate the technology. Training, introduction of new technologies, and better ways to do business should be a core value of an organization s IT culture. This will encourage organizations to think about and accept new solutions as opposed to being fearful that introducing new technologies will leave them exposed to being displaced by new hires. 4. Technology Availability: Business requirements and needs should always drive technology purchases and in many cases will be determined in advance of new technologies being ready for operational prime time. This challenge provides the best example where marketing and sales teams need to closely collaborate with the IT organization. This will not only allow the business side of the house to articulate their requirements, but also allow the technology side of the house to speak about new capabilities that are being developed in the industry that can be utilized to drive differentiation and value for the end customer. 5. Vendor Relationships: A major challenge many organizations will face is looking beyond the relationships of their existing vendor base to ensure they are obtaining the best solutions for their needs. The Dynamic Data Center requires a truly heterogeneous environment that allows solution sets for numerous vendors to take advantage of the best solution sets and reduce overall risk. Data Center Business Drivers Understanding the core business drivers of an organization is one of the most critical steps to understanding the true requirements for its IT infrastructure. While engineers and technologists think in terms of technical requirements to solve problems, the executive understands that the business drivers are the genesis for all requirements within the organization, and a requirement that cannot be mapped back to a business driver is not a real requirement. 5
1. Increased Demand: The demand placed on data centers is exponentially increasing not only in terms of servers, CPU cycles, memory and bandwidth, but also in the number and types of applications and services necessary to be supported. As organizations grow and IT becomes increasingly more sophisticated, greater needs for specialized solutions are required which results in the introduction of new applications and services. Unfortunately, new hardware and support processes are normally introduced as well to support these new capabilities. This unintentionally compounds the increase in demand; as the average utilization of resources remains low, while new resources are continually introduced that eat up valuable floor space, utilities, and management cycles. 2. Consolidation: As complexity of data centers grows it is necessary to maintain greater operational control and configuration management through the consolidation of data centers and the types of hardware and software technology utilized. This becomes increasingly difficult as data center sprawl exponentially increases over time, leading to a lack of configuration management and a loss of true understanding of what each piece of equipment is supporting. But it is absolutely necessary to standardize on a limited set of equipment, applications, and processes that can be adequately and cost effectively managed to meet critical service level agreements. It is also necessary for organizations to right-size the number and locations of their data centers to maximize business continuity, while minimizing cost and resource issues. 3. Business Continuity: As IT has become a core part of an organization s very ability to operate and survive, data centers are being required not only to support continuous business operations, but also to overcome catastrophic events. While this is an absolute requirement for most commercial and government organizations, many of the solution sets developed call for fail over sites that duplicate existing solutions and are used as hot standbys. This approach is contrary to many of the other drivers identified in this section as it significantly increases costs and operational issues and lowers overall utilization of resources. Some organizations have coupled their business continuity requirements with a host of other requirements, such as workforce mobility, to develop highly utilized solutions that provide load sharing and dynamic continuity even in the face of major disasters. 4. Cost: The need to not only control, but also truly understand the costs associated with operating and providing greater capabilities within the data center is critical. For many organizations, the driving cost factor within the data center has moved from capital expenses to the operational resources necessary to maintain and manage the IT infrastructure. In addition to operational costs, many organizations are looking toward green approaches to help maintain their operational costs. With energy sources becoming limited and expensive, reducing power consumption and finding alternative sources of energy has become a much greater priority. Many organizations take a simplified approach to their IT budgets and the data center and do not always apply well-understood business principles. As IT and the data center become more strategically aligned in the organization, cost and ROI need to be developed based on overall impacts and not just on dollars spent. In some cases it may be difficult to translate greater agility and capability into the bottom line, but it is necessary to quantify the true value. 6
5. Differentiation: Data centers have become a signifi cant investment and a core asset for many organizations and thus are being required to provide the ability to differentiate through advanced capabilities, services, agility, and reliability that will directly help impact the bottom line of the business. This is the very core of the Data Center Excellence concept in that it will help an organization align the development of its Dynamic Data Center to truly provide the differentiation that will deliver a signifi cant ROI. 6. Regulation: Every type of organization must endure some form of government regulation, especially federal agencies. Organizations must consider government requirements for business continuity, customer privacy, archiving, data integrity, and data survivability, as well as many others. New requirements and best practices focused on green computing are driving vast differences in the way organizations build and operate their data centers. Not only are businesses encouraged to be more environmentally friendly; they may soon be penalized if they are not. The federal government, as well as some state and local governments, are changing acquisition regulations to focus on solutions that require green computing. While this may not immediately impact the entire business community, it could eventually cause a supply chain cascading effect that will drive the unprepared company into quick and costly solutions. 7. Technology Advancement: Technology advancement in IT and related areas continue at an extraordinary rate and the impact must be understood and incorporated into the advancement of data centers. While business requirements drive the introduction of new technologies, organizations must continually understand new technology and how it may be applied in developing new and improved solutions. Thus, it becomes a cyclical process where new business requirements will drive technology while new technology will drive new business requirements. Planning for one or a set of new technologies is not enough. An organization must embrace a technology transition philosophy by which they are building their internal processes to support an ongoing stream of technology insertions, or risk having a legacy architecture from day one. This should lead organizations to consider technologies that provide basic infrastructure capabilities that can be incrementally improved over time, as needed, and with the latest technologies. This is particularly important for large commercial and government organizations that may need to transition to new technologies outside their normal life cycle management approach. 7
Requirements for the Dynamic Data Center Although the Dynamic Data Center is a concept that has many similar attributes across most organizations, the specifi c implementation of a Dynamic Data Center should be as unique to an organization as its business plan. In order to understand the road map to get to its Dynamic Data Center, an organization will need to leverage the Data Center Excellence approach to fully understand its requirements and then identify the gaps from where it is today to where it needs to be, and when. As organizations reach out to vendors and service providers to support their future data center needs, specifi c requirements should be included to ensure the ability to achieve the Dynamic Data Center vision. As a starting point, the following areas should be considered as organizations plan for their Dynamic Data Center. Resource Pooling Computing & Communication Convergence Management Tools The ability to effi ciently allocate resources on demand is necessary at both a software and hardware level. Virtualization is quickly being leveraged by numerous organizations and has already shown a positive ROI. But most virtualization solutions today stop at the operating system (OS) level and do not reach down to the underlying physical infrastructure. Dynamic Data Centers will go beyond OS level virtualization and will pool resources all the way down to the CPU, memory, storage and port; thus creating a true resource sharing environment that will provide organizations an unprecedented level of control and agility in their data centers. Convergence has occurred both in the communication and computing environments. While communications systems have migrated almost completely to the Internet Protocol (IP), the next generation of systems will converge communications platforms and computing platforms into a single pool of resources that can be virtually allocated based on need. As Dynamic Data Centers provide the ability to setup, modify, and tear down virtual environments at will, it will be impossible to have the computing and communication environments isolated from each other. The instantaneous deployment of servers, applications, routers, fi rewall, and other devices will occur through online environments that will then be implemented across a suite of heterogeneous platforms. This capability, tied with several others, will provide for a service-oriented infrastructure that will drive the ability to meet organization s SOA requirements. This will also allow data center operators to provide greater multi-tenant capabilities and services to meet the needs of organizations that want to outsource their data center requirements, but have concerns about security, spoof detection, and fraud. Management of data centers in today s environment is challenging enough, but will become signifi cantly more challenging as advanced technologies are layered into the Dynamic Data Center. Virtualization has become a core solution set within most data centers and while it has many advantages, it does not necessarily simplify the management of the data center. Organizations are already fi nding it a nightmare to manage the current level of virtualization they have in place. While most virtualization solutions make it easy to pool resources across 8
many servers, many organizations have lost track of their confi guration management and now fi nd it almost impossible to determine which servers are supporting which applications. Thus, IT staff fall into the trap of not being able to retire older hardware, as they do not know if it is supporting a critical application or not. Management tools for the Dynamic Data Center will need to provide a centralized point of control across the entire Dynamic Data Center and not just for specifi c vendors or solutions. Reducing the administrative costs through simplifi ed and comprehensive management tools that provide a full view of computing, network, and storage technologies and how they interrelate is the key to achieving the goals of the Dynamic Data Center. Equipment Footprint & Density Environmental Impacts Data center space is at a premium, which is driving the need to acquire computing platforms that provide for a much greater density in a smaller footprint. While technologies such as blade servers provide for greater densities, they still have a number of limitations. In essence, they apply the same physical server paradigm but in a smaller form factor. In addition to traditional servers and blade servers, other modular computing and communications technologies that leverage higher performance backplanes should be explored. This can provide not only greater density, but may also provide relief from other issues such as power and wiring. Power and cooling requirements have become major factors in the sustainment and growth of data centers. With rack density multiplying and the overall number of devices exponentially increasing, the power and cooling requirements per square foot have increased over ten fold in recent years. While this level of density applied on a sizeable data center causes enormous problems with cooling, UPS, and backup power generation, many organizations are beginning to have trouble obtaining suffi cient power from their local utility companies. This is not to mention issues with moving toward green computing. Thus, these requirements must be taken into consideration. Organizations will want to explore laying out the data center with hot zones that provide signifi cantly greater power and cooling density for a segment of racks to meet the increased demands. 9
Pillars of Data Center Excellence The pillars of Data Center Excellence are core concepts or technologies that are fundamental to the development and implementation of a Dynamic Data Center. Where this document provides for the basic understanding of Data Center Excellence, the pillars provide a greater understanding of the underlying concepts, technologies, and processes organizations need to grapple with as they evolve their data centers. A set of pillar reports will be released on a regular basis to provide an ongoing source of education to better understand Data Center Excellence. The follow-on pillar documents approach this from an executive level as a summarization of the most important aspects organizational leaders need to know and understand. The format of the following pillar documents will include: Introduction - What is the pillar? Drivers - Why the pillar is important? Benefi ts - What advantages can your organization achieve? Next Steps - How to move forward? The pillar topics in the following releases will be broken into the following major classes: Data Center Types: The core understanding of what constitutes a data center will continue to expand and incorporate many new defi nitions to meet organizational requirements. Examples include mobile data centers, ship based data centers, and virtual data centers. Technologies: This class includes discussions of various next generation technologies that organizations should explore and from which they can obtain substantial benefi ts by integrating it into their Dynamic Data Center strategy. Processes: This class covers various operational topics that must be further considered when tying Data Center Excellence to the concepts with building, operating, and expanding Dynamic Data Centers. Examples of Pillars While there are many different pillars associated with Data Center Excellence, this section provides a brief introduction to a few pillars that will be expanded upon in future releases. Virtualization: Virtualization provides for the ability not only to pool computing and communications resources at a software level, but also resources can be pooled at the hardware level as well. This can provide signifi cant advantages for creating an agile Dynamic Data Center that will provide greater fl exibility to the organization. Green Computing: The rush to deploy new technologies faster has almost always led to the overconsumption of power and cooling resources. Given the signifi cant rise in energy costs and 10
the ever-growing demand, green computing has moved from just a soft PR advantage to signifi cantly impact the bottom line of operational expenses. Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI): SOA has been a focus for many commercial and government organizations to provide a basis for delivering a vastly improved service delivery infrastructure. But while there has been a strong focus on implementing SOA from an IP, OS and application level, organizations have not focused on driving the same level of fl exibility all the way down to the hardware level. SOI allows for the modularization and the ability to link computing resources at an individual level on an as-needed basis. Total Cost of Ownership: Understanding the true costs associated with deploying and maintaining data center technology is essential in building the appropriate business case for the Dynamic Data Center. This requires not only building the hard cost model, but also converting soft costs, such as fl exibility, process improvements, etc. into quantifi able numbers that can be leveraged in the analysis. Mobile Data Centers: Advanced requirements in the government and commercial space are driving the need for mobile data centers that can operate with similar capabilities and effi ciencies to fi xed data centers. While government communities such as defense and law enforcement have strong requirements for this capability, other organizations that require large signifi cant computing and data resources to a mobile workforce will also benefi t from mobile data centers. Business Continuity: The continuous operation of business services is critical for most organizations. The Dynamic Data Center will play an ever-expanding role in keeping organizations operational throughout any situation. Not only can this capability be leveraged to survive natural and man-made disasters, but it can also be deployed to support greater fl exibility and mobile work forces on an everyday basis. 11
Top 5 Benefits of Data Center Excellence As organizations apply the concepts of Data Center Excellence to evolve their existing data centers into Dynamic Data Centers, they will realize a wide range of benefi ts. While these benefi ts will vary based on organizations and their unique requirements, many organizations will realize the following top 5 benefi ts. 1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): The Dynamic Data Center will provide organizations with a clear advantage in TCO compared with expanding their current operational models. The Data Center Excellence approach will help organizations implement Dynamic Data Centers designed to meet their current and future needs and be agile enough to shift as the business climate shifts. Organizations will experience greater overall value in various aspects of business operations, including: Management costs, Equipment costs, Application costs, Utility costs, and Real estate costs. 2. Greater Resources Utilization: Data Center Excellence will help organizations drive much greater resource utilization across the entire data center infrastructure that will lead to savings in space, management, and power. Not only will this be true as new technologies are introduced, but current platforms can be leveraged to support a variety of new capabilities to increase their overall utilization. Eventually, the data center will become alleyways of ultra-utilized equipment. 3. Quicker Reaction to Customer and Business Needs: Data Center Excellence will help organizations develop the ability to virtually control resources across the data center that will allow organizations to react more quickly to customer demands and eventually to automate many manual processes. Organizations will be able to roll out new services faster, solve problems more quickly, and provide for the continual integration of new technologies that will keep them in the forefront of their industry and provide the ongoing ability to differentiate in a highly competitive market. 4. Enhanced Protection: Dynamic Data Centers will be designed to provide greater physical and IT security for resources and data. Security is one of the most critical areas that every organization must focus on for its future success. Data Center Excellence will help organizations better understand and right size their requirements for security, and provide solution sets that will not hamper, but will help provide better products and services. The Data Center Excellence concept ties security in as a core element in its overall approach. It will also provide a greater basis for business continuity and the ability to quickly recover after a disaster. 12
5. Improved Management and Quality: The management tools in Dynamic Data Centers will provide greater accountability and fl exibility to data center operators and create the ability to layer more quality control aspects into much of the operation. Current data centers utilize a wide variety of control tools that only aggravate the number of systems an organization must support. Data Center Excellence focuses on reducing the overall operational requirements by leveraging management tools and processes that allow the IT group to spend less time on putting out fi res and more time on improving their operations. About Liquid Computing Liquid Computing makes data centers easy to manage by delivering an integrated solution, LiquidIQ, that makes complicated infrastructure changes dynamic and effortless. LiquidIQ allows the entire data center to be defi ned and managed in software, enabling new service offerings, an order of magnitude reduction in time to deployment of applications and dramatically reduced data center operating costs. To learn more about Liquid Computing, please visit www.liquidcomputing.com, email info@liquidcomputing.com or call 1-877-592-2666. 13