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In recent years, there has been an explosion of imploding data centers. Crushed by demands for increased services — and flattened by greatly increasing operational costs — data centers are collapsing under their own weight. Information systems labor costs can now represent up to 70% of an information technology (IT) operations budget; power and cooling costs are now 8X greater than a dozen years ago; and pressing security and compliance demands have drained resources and the funding needed for new projects. Innovation is at a stand-still. The reasons for this implosion are related to aging data center infrastructure and operations models. Data centers that use outdated models for program-to-program interaction and data sharing are unable to adapt to constantly changing service demands due to application interoperability and data sharing problems. Data centers that have not been consolidated and virtualized have become operational sinkholes from a management and resource utilization perspective. Aging data centers are broken and need to be transformed. More specifically: 1) service management has to be incorporated as part of the underpinning to ensure quality service delivery; 2) data center operational costs need to be reduced through consolidation/virtualization; and, 3) data center infrastructure needs to be restructured to be more dynamic in order to more readily adapt to constantly changing service demands. The remainder of this Commentary examines the “whys” and “hows” of data center transformation. Clabby Analytics (that’s me) explores the market trends that are driving enterprises to transform their data centers. In this report, I compare and contrast the current data center model to a “dynamic and service oriented” data center model. I also describe the phased approach that enterprises are taking as they transform their data centers — and provide background component blueprints that can be used as a basis for architecting the service oriented data centers. Finally, I provide my perspective on why I believe IBM is better suited than HP, Sun, Dell or Cisco to help enterprises design and deploy the enterprise data centers of tomorrow.
Why Transform Your Data Center?
There are four forces that are driving the move to a new enterprise data center model:
1. Operational challenges (cost, security, resiliency, and environmental factors);
2. Business initiatives/imperatives (the need to innovate); and,
3. New technology drivers (Web 2.0, mash-ups, cloud computing, etc.).
4. The need to rapidly deliver quality service.
The first major reason to transform your data center is to reduce out-of-control operating costs. Human-related management costs are now the single largest expense in the data center. Energy costs are soaring as global competition for energy resources drives power and cooling costs through the roof. Enterprises across the globe are being compelled to comply with standardized financial and operational practices (compliance). Businesses have a financial, legal, and moral responsibility to protect employee, customer, and partner data (adding additional cost for security and data retention). Thanks to the ever-increasing amount of data, the growing number of connections to that data, and the expanding number and variety of devices being used to access that data — data management has become a major operating expense. These costs need to be brought back under control.
The keys to reducing data center operational costs are “simplicity” and “efficiency”. By adopting a dynamic and service oriented model and architecture, enterprises can simplify their information systems infrastructure (this, in turn, can lead to greatly reduced human-related management costs as well as greatly improved service levels). And, by consolidating systems, servers storage and networks — and further, by creating large virtualized pools of logical and physical resources — enterprises can significantly reduce IT operational costs (consolidation and virtualization lead to improved systems/storage utilization rates; lower systems/storage management costs; and simplified systems failover, testing, and quality assurance).
The key to driving simplicity, agility and efficiency in the data center is service management (management services that provide businesses the ability to see their operations/businesses, control risks and manage compliance, as well as leveraging automation).
Business Initiatives/Imperatives
The second major reason to transform your data center is to free-up funding for innovation. In order to respond quickly to changing marketplace conditions, to gain competitive edge, to serve customers better, and to streamline supply chain interaction, enterprises constantly need to innovate. Innovation usually involves process change, often involves exploiting new technologies — and almost always requires funding for new application code.
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