Data Center Automation – A Vision for the Intelligent Technical (I.T.) Folk

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

 delicious  

  

Author: Dave Briand
Practice Lead for Virtualization

You’re allocating money, time, and resources in the wrong places, and will continue to do so if you aren’t building your IT infrastructure and policies towards a vision which includes data center automation.

If you’re reading this, I can speak about virtualization and other ITish topics because you have some inkling with what’s been going on with IT. Either you’re an admin, manager, director of IT, or CxO who somehow relies on technology. On the off chance that we effectively hired the Stephen Hawking of Search Engine Optimization and you got here via Google I hope you are one of those people…if not, good luck.

With that being said, here we go…

There have been some leaps and bounds in the last 2 years with respect to data center automation (DCA) – we can now provision server, network, and storage in a manner of minutes, an idea foreign to us 5 years ago. Think of what’s been accomplished over the last two years with disaster recovery solutions, data deduplication and replication, each one of these technologies has the ability to drastically affect how you can leverage IT to differentiate your business.

The odds are though that you’ve done what we in the services industry call “low-hanging virtualization” – basically you virtualized the easiest apps and haven’t gone further. There are various reasons for this:

• Scared of virtualization – you think it’s going to make your apps run like shit and the business will complain – pink slips to follow
• Don’t understand virtualization - you had a presentation years ago and don’t know what’s out there today
• Don’t have time – fighting fires is a bitch, but if you solve problems today the same way you did yesterday, I hope you’re prepared for the same fires tomorrow
• Don’t have money – it’s because you’re wasting it in the wrong places
• You don’t care – either you’re reading this because you actually do care, or because you’re bored at work, hopefully the former

Pretty much anything can be virtualized today. Applications that people would have never virtualized two years ago are now considered low hanging fruit - whether it’s on proprietary virtualization (Solaris-SPARC, AIX-Power, HP-UX-Itanium) or commodity virtualization (VMware, Microsoft, Xen – all on x86 hw). The main reason for this is the increase in compute power and memory speed.

The time and money required to do this isn’t as much of an obstacle and you think. By using sound financial modeling it can be shown pretty easily that by not going down this path you’re CAP/OPEX two and three years from now will be massive compared to a virtualized and consolidated model. This is where having a vision comes into play, and selling that vision into your organization.

You’ll be more successful introducing DCA by aligning IT to the business. Too often IT departments are viewed as cost centers and as obstacles whenever the business wants to introduce a new product, service, or customer to their existing infrastructure. I’ve seen cases where DCA has totally transformed a business’ go-to market strategy because of the reduction in provisioning times. Getting a product/service out the door faster than your competition is crucial to any company’s survival in today’s cut-throat market.

The majority of you will either be at Maturity Level 0 or 1, and a very simplified version of your process for adding server capacity is as follows (the same can be applied for adding network and storage as well):

What we see here is that there are pretty good benefits of introducing virtualization, as long as your employ a “virtualize first” server provisioning policy. Expect to get pushback from the business on this, since they are likely not in tune with what technology can do for them.

This flowchart assumes that you have enough capacity in your virtual infrastructure that you only need to provision virtual server, network, and storage. Which is more often than not the case.

Maturity Level 0 will take from two to three months to complete, Maturity Level 1 could take from a week to two months, depending on the capacity you have.

Regardless of where you are today, we can get you to Maturity Level X – true Data Center Automation to the point where you’ve adopted and employed the proper policies and procedures to offer IT as a Service – or the Internal/Enterprise Cloud.

The business provisions environments for itself, and adding capacity is a no brainer. This leaves your IT staff to focus on things they should be doing – investigating new technologies and methods to further differentiate your business.

This model is something that you should be laying the foundation for today. By acquiring storage, network, server, and software that have the ability to be integrated to an automated model will allow you to meet your vision of the automate data center.

If you’d like some help, send me an email and we start putting the plan together today.