Federal Data Center Consolidation Playbook

WHITE PAPER Federal Data Center Consolidation Playbook A Resource For FDCCI Planning and Execution

FEDERAL DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATION PLAYBOOK Introduction: Adopting a Strategic Approach to Data Center Consolidation Traditionally, federal government computing resources have been deployed at geographically distributed headquarters, data centers, and field offices to ensure end user performance and meet SLAs. The downsides are the inefficient use of energy and computing resources, as well as the expense and the difficulty of managing a large number of data centers. Information technology (IT) consolidation projects allow civilian, military and intelligence organizations to reduce the number of data centers to cut costs, promote green IT, increase security posture, shift IT funds to more efficient computing platforms, and boost productivity. The challenge is to consolidate without impeding performance for government employees and war-fighters. The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) calls for the elimination of 800 data centers by 2015. In order to meet this requirement, federal organizations must think holistically about their data center strategy. This paper outlines a framework and specific solutions for consolidating data center facilities that are intended to efficiently use available resources and provide strategic, multifunctional value. As a result, this paper addresses a number of key topics outlined by the FDCCI Task Force, including: Tools for Mapping Applications Tools for Tracking and Managing Inventory Migration Planning, and Execution Preparing the Receiving Data Center for Consolidation Leveraging Cloud Services Problems & Goals Not unlike businesses in the private sector, government organizations have three basic goals: 1) increase productivity and deliver new civilian services, 2) reduce costs, and 3) manage risk. IT continually works to support these goals, but there are often conflicts and trade-offs: highly secure and protected systems are expensive and can hamper user productivity; and new, initiatives often bring new costs and management challenges, etc. A successful approach to data center consolidation can help IT address all three goals simultaneously. Increase productivity and deliver new civilian services IT is challenged to support an agile infrastructure. The capital costs and procedural bureaucracy of new application development in IT organizations inhibit innovation, which is essential to military preparedness and delivering new civilian services. Meanwhile, those new applications and services require seamless delivery in order to maximize user productivity. By consolidating data center facilities and leveraging cloud services, organizations can minimize or eliminate the capital costs to develop new applications and services, in support of more modular development. Key enabling technologies, such as WAN optimization, network Key Enabling Technologies for Data Center Consolidation Ø WAN Optimization controllers provide asymmetrical solutions to improve the performance, efficiency, deployment and security of a wide range of applications. Ø Network Performance Management consists of measuring and monitoring networks to ensure that they carry traffic with the speed, reliability, and capacity that is appropriate for deployed applications. Applicationaware network performance management tools can also streamline application discovery and dependency mapping. Ø Application Delivery Controllers, often described as next generation load balancers, provide asymmetrical solutions to improve the performance, efficiency, deployment and security of a wide range of applications Ø Cloud Storage Gateways are network appliances or servers which reside at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs (such as SOAP or REST) to block-based storage protocols (such as iscsi or Fibre Channel) or file-based interfaces (such as NFS or CIFS), thereby enabling organizations to quickly adopt cost-efficient cloud storage. performance management, and application delivery controllers (ADC) ensure consolidated applications perform without inhibiting user productivity. Reduce costs IT procurement has driven over-capacity buying for three primary reasons: 1) to support a distributed, underutilized infrastructure that meets performance requirements; 2) to support peak demand for resources, and; 3) to adequately protect systems with many layers of redundancy. Consolidating data center facilities and leveraging cloud services drive out underutilization inefficiencies of a distributed environment; enable efficient, on-demand provisioning of resources, reducing the need for redundant, pre-provisioned capacity. Manage risk Unprotected systems and mismanaged, distributed architectures increase the risk of a negative impact on an organization s mission from data loss and system failures. Consolidating data center facilities and leveraging cloud services support securely 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 1

centralizing, replicating and automating systems management for reduced risk of unavailability, while also improving the cost and efficiency of broader system protection. Case Study: Headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, the US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) is responsible for working with the defense industry to ensure that systems, supplies and services are delivered on time, at project costs, and to the satisfaction of performance requirements of the Department of Defense. With operations spread across 50 offices, DCMA manages over 300,000 active contracts valued at more than $1.5 trillion. Prior to the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, DCMA had already been proactively undergoing an IT infrastructure consolidation effort in the US, reducing 17 data centers to two primary data centers. Notably, the consolidated applications included Microsoft Windows remote file access (Common Internet File System [CIFS]), Exchange (Messaging Application Programming Interface [MAPI]), and Secure Sockets Layer [SSL]-encrypted Web applications. In order to deliver similar levels of performance for end-users accessing these applications over a wide-area-network (WAN), DCMA upgraded its WAN bandwidth. However, application performance was poor, with slow response time from remote sites. Given DCMA s challenge of not meeting the end user performance objective by increasing bandwidth they identified the need for a WAN optimization solution. This needed to be quickly deployed to resolve the end user issue so DCMA compared the performance of the three solution providers and the performance of Riverbed stood out from the others particularly with e-mail (MAPI) traffic. Also, Riverbed had other important differentiators, such as ease of installation, scalability and the ability to fail to pass-through, to reduce risk. DCMA deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in over 50 sites, both in the continental US and internationally. Their former CIO, Mike Williams, is quoted as saying If we had it to do over again, we d install WAN optimizers before starting the consolidation. The key result achieved was meeting the objectives: LAN like performance for the end user even at remote locations. Actionable steps and lessons learned If we had it to do over again, we d install WAN optimizers before starting the consolidation. -Mike Williams, former CIO, Defense Contracts Management Agency Mapping Applications: Automating the dependency mapping process for data center migrations eliminates the issues that plague manual discovery processes, enabling more effective planning and decision making. Using an application-aware network performance management tool, such as Riverbed Cascade, organizations like DCMA can map application dependencies within hours and understand which users are accessing which application instances, as well as measure the latency between users and the existing and projected application deployments. Tracking and Managing Inventory: With the number of offices and data centers in the DCMA s environment, automating the asset discovery process and use of real-time management dashboards is far more efficient for tracking and managing IT inventory. Cascade enables IT managers to quickly identify network assets and their locations without requiring agents, scans, or credentials. Migration Planning, and Execution: DCMA rightly anticipated performance challenges from migrating applications as part of its data center consolidation efforts. However, the decision to upgrade WAN bandwidth failed to address the latency challenges associated with protocol inefficiencies. In addition to inventorying assets and their dependencies, it is important to have an understanding of current application performance and user expectations for performance. Cascade can baseline application performance before and after an IT change event, allowing IT to anticipate latency performance challenges, as well as monitor and troubleshoot ongoing network and application issues. WAN optimization ultimately enabled DCMA to execute its consolidation efforts to the satisfaction of end-users and plan objectives. Preparing the Receiving Data Center for Consolidation: Consolidating data centers moves applications from many to fewer locations, but end-users are not consolidated, leaving the distance between users and their applications greater as the result of consolidation. DCMA solved this challenge with Riverbed Steelhead appliances, the leading WAN optimization technology. By implementing a WAN optimization solution (between the data centers and field offices) before migrating applications, organizations can accelerate the migration of data and applications to the new location, as well as ensure that end-users continue to experience consistent levels of performance. Approach, Rationale, Results & Timeline Riverbed assumes a holistic approach to data center consolidation, which encompasses using tools for mapping applications and tracking and managing inventory to identify service dependencies and targets for consolidation; understanding current and future 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 2

network and application performance; preparing data centers and field offices with WAN optimization solutions to ensure seamless migration and ongoing application performance; and, finally, leveraging cloud services to further consolidate infrastructure. The result is accelerated application performance, more efficient use of existing bandwidth, reduced risk of application migrations, and reduced project timelines from automation and use of existing infrastructure. Approach and Rationale to Consolidation Initiatives: Identify service dependencies and targets for consolidation. Major IT projects such as IT consolidation and cloud deployments have one thing in common: the need to discover what s running on the network, and who is using it. The discovery phase of IT projects has historically been time-consuming, expensive and error-prone, with several months spent scanning the network, finding dependencies and updating asset lists. Riverbed Cascade products automatically map IT environments networkwide to reduce risk of data center migrations and network outages by highlighting application dependencies. This speeds up data center consolidation efforts, arming organizations with a current and accurate view of infrastructure inventory. Importantly, using a single tool for application mapping and asset discovery and performance monitoring eliminates wasteful spending on low-value point products in favor of high-value, multifunctional tools that solve immediate and ongoing project needs. Tools for Mapping Applications: Regardless of whether the plan is consolidating a few orphaned servers or rationalizing entire data centers, Riverbed can help accelerate the project, achieve planned savings sooner and reduce the risk of outages and failed cutovers. Within a few hours, Riverbed Cascade can discover all systems, identify server and client dependencies and locations, and show the information in a graphical, interactive format. Understanding not only which applications are codependent, but which users are accessing these applications, provides valuable context to administrators to better anticipate which users may be affected as applications are moved from local to remote data centers. Tools for Tracking Inventory: Organizations can leverage the same application-aware network performance management tool to discover assets on the network. In addition to minimizing the number of tools required, application-aware NPM tools like Cascade provide valuable user and application context to the inventory of assets. Importantly, because Cascade uses flow data collected from existing network devices and augments it with user and application data, Cascade enables IT managers to quickly identify network assets and their locations without requiring agents, scans, or credentials. Executivelevel dashboards provide ongoing monitoring and facilitate sustained performance analysis. Optimize the number and cost of data centers. After mapping applications, the next set of challenges are successfully migrate data and applications, as well as ensuring access to those resources. With Riverbed solutions agencies can reduce the number of distributed data centers and relocate distributed IT infrastructure like file and email servers, disk and tapes to more efficient centralized data centers while preserving performance and increasing the security posture. The Steelhead product family makes this possible by reducing network traffic by up to 95% and speeding applications to near LAN-like speeds of up to 100x. The Riverbed Zeus Traffic Manager further enables consolidation by driving greater efficiency from web server infrastructure and increasing the availability of applications through monitoring and load-balancing. Migration Planning, and Execution: Migrating workloads from local to centralized data centers, as well as to public cloud facilities, is challenged by network latency, cost, and network contention all of which can be addressed by a WAN optimization solution. Riverbed s Steelhead family of WAN optimization products use data, transport, and application streamlining to eliminate redundant WAN traffic by de-duplicating data, improve the performance of all TCP-based applications, and decrease the effects of latency by reducing the number of application-level round trips across the WAN. Integrated quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities provide administrators with the control over allocating network bandwidth and the ability to prioritize latency-sensitive applications. In order to maximize consolidation and wring-out inefficiencies, Riverbed offers application delivery controller capabilities to offload significant web server functionality and drive greater user density per server. Preparing the Receiving Data Center for Consolidation: In addition to deploying sufficient storage and memory-rich servers (which may or may not be available to repurpose from legacy data centers) in order to support a greater number of virtual workloads, it is critical to address networking capacity, as well as application architecture. Optimizing network infrastructure to compensate for problems that will be induced by chatty protocols operating over long distances before data centers are consolidated can prevent application performance problems and avoid end-user complaints and objections to the initiatives. As applications are virtualized and consolidated onto fewer servers, application delivery controllers ensure application availability by monitoring server health and intelligently routing requests to available servers. It s worth noting that virtual ADCs eliminate the limitation of relying on a fixed point for ADC services, enabling applications to migrate more freely within a virtualized pool of resources. Leverage public cloud infrastructure: Reducing the number of data centers requires increasing the efficiency of existing resources. Virtualization is critical to consolidating servers and increasing the efficiency of server hardware; however, offloading entire applications and workloads to cloud service providers allows organizations to consolidate resources further by eliminating 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 3

the necessary infrastructure to support those applications. However, similar to consolidating data centers, while applications and data can be migrated to more efficient cloud platforms, the end-users remain in their various locations and can experience a negative impact to the performance of applications running in the cloud. Leveraging Cloud Services: Riverbed solutions enable the adoption of public cloud computing alternatives to offload data center space, increase energy efficiency, and reduce operational and capital expenditures. Where security and operational requirements permit, Riverbed products reduce data transfer costs, minimize latency challenges, and accelerate performance of cloud applications, servers and storage. It s worth noting here that another valuable function of Riverbed Cascade is in identifying which applications are strong candidates to move to a public cloud service. For those cloud-ready candidates, Cloud Steelhead applies the same data, transport and application streamlining technologies found in the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS ) to optimize the performance of applications for end-users. For migrating backup storage to the cloud, Riverbed Whitewater integrates with most backup software platforms and de-duplicates, encrypts, and accelerates the transport of data to selected cloud service providers. Results and Timelines Enhancing consolidation results With RiOS technology, enterprises can consolidate data centers and leverage cloud services without negatively impacting their distributed workforce. The components of RiOS can be broken into four major groups, each with a different, but complimentary goal: Technology Description Result Data Streamlining Data deduplication to optimize WAN bandwidth utilization WAN bandwidth utilization reduced by up to 60% to 95% Prioritize applications by bandwidth and latency Transport Streamlining Eliminate transport protocol inefficiencies Applications accelerated by up to 100x Application Streamlining Optimize application protocol performance on WANs Up to 98% reduction in packet roundtrips Management Streamlining Enable transparent deployment, centralized management, and virtualized branch office services Fewer IT resources required for deployment and management. Simplify branch office infrastructure by virtualizing core services. Applying these performance results to consolidated and centralized applications is critical to meeting end-user requirements postconsolidation, but also support the migration effort itself. Reducing timelines and risk Using Cascade to plan and troubleshoot data center consolidations or migrations significantly minimizes risk by automating and improving the planning process thereby minimizing disruption before, during, and after implementation. As a result, Cascade provides significant return on investment (ROI), enabling organizations to: Shorten project timelines and budgets by accelerating the discovery and mapping process from months (compared to teh time required to install agents or run scans) to days; Accelerate end state savings by achieving the desired benefits of consolidation projects sooner. Given the time required to augment bandwidth availability, WAN optimization solutions can also reduce consolidation project timelines by immediately increasing the capacity of available bandwidth. 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 4

Conclusion With the goal of FDCCI to reduce the number of federal data centers by 40%, organizations are challenged to find an approach to planning and executing migrations and consolidation that is broadly applicable, easily repeatable, and extensible to ongoing cloud efforts. The Riverbed playbook to successful data center consolidation leverages application aware network performance management and WAN optimization solutions to build a holistic approach to consolidation: 1. Understand: By using application-aware network performance management, organizations can quickly and efficiently understand what s running on the network and map application dependencies reduce the risk and timeline for migrating applications between data centers, as well as discovery, monitor, and troubleshoot performance issues before, during and after consolidation. 2. Optimize: By optimizing existing WAN connections, organizations not only maximize the utility of existing bandwidth investments, but they ensure applications continue to perform acceptably when they are migrated away from user locations and into consolidated data centers. This is critical for preparing the target data center and realizing migration plans. 3. Consolidate: Once applications are understood and network infrastructure is optimized, organizations can make more efficient use of existing capacity. Customers like the DCMA have successfully realized their consolidation plans with Riverbed solutions. About Riverbed Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com. Riverbed Technology, Inc. 199 Fremont Street San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: (415) 247-8800 www.riverbed.com Riverbed Technology Ltd. One Thames Valley Wokingham Road, Level 2 Bracknell. RG42 1NG United Kingdom Tel: +44 1344 31 7100 Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd. 391A Orchard Road #22-06/10 Ngee Ann City Tower A Singapore 238873 Tel: +65 6508-7400 Riverbed Technology K.K. Shiba-Koen Plaza Building 9F 3-6-9, Shiba, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan 105-0014 Tel: +81 3 5419 1990 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 5