Elements of Design: How the Data Center of Today Can

Be the Data Center for Tomorrow

Specialist Converged Infrastructure

Time for a Change by Brandon Harris, Logicalis vice president of HP

Solutions (page 3)

Soul of a New Machine by Brett Anderson, Logicalis director of HP

Servers and Networking (page 5)

From the Ground Up by Bob Mobach, Logicalis practice director of

Data Center Infrastructure (page 9)

Additional Resources (page 12)

Table of Contents

“A strategic approach

to incremental

changes in the

data center can

propagate benefi ts

that extend from IT

throughout your entire

organization.”

– Brandon Harris, VP, HP

Solutions, Logicalis

Security and compliance are built in instead of bolted on, and the upgrade path is evolutionary instead of disruptive.

As attractive as that image may be, it can seem frustratingly out of reach to a CIO or IT manager standing in a data center that occupies the same space that once housed the company’s mainframes and has been retrofi tted several times during the past 15 years as mainframes were replaced by minis, which were replaced by Wintel servers, which are now being replaced by blades.

Meanwhile, pressures are mounting. Mergers and acquisitions are jamming more technology into tighter spaces. Increasing computational demands create crowded equipment racks. Staggering power and cooling requirements cripple budgets. In general, a high percentage of data centers are reaching the end of their life cycles and becoming increasingly expensive to maintain.

Faced with escalating levels of demand on their data centers in virtually all industries, more IT directors and CIOs—not to mention CEOs and CFOs—are realizing it might be time to do something with the data center.

Companies that confront their data center issues instead of avoiding them are fi nding signifi cant opportunities to rationalize, consolidate and optimize data centers that better serve their needs.

Payback

A strategic approach to incremental changes in the data center can propagate benefi ts that extend from IT throughout your entire organization. Those benefi ts include: Reduced costs: Consolidating data centers slashes operating costs and dramatically reduces energy consumption. Centralized control: Having one place to look for everything facilitates management and compliance, and ensures security. Automated operations: Automation tools free IT staff to focus on business initiatives. Increased performance: Advances in servers, storage and networking combine to catapult performance ahead of business needs.Mitigated risk: Implementing high availability and disaster recovery technologies minimize downtime and effectively eliminate disaster. Quicker response: Flexible, scalable data center technology empowers your business to pursue opportunities wherever they lead.

Time for a ChangeYou’ve seen it. Appearing on the horizon is an image of a dynamic data center environment consisting of pools of high-performing computing resources that can be centrally managed, readily automated and effi ciently maintained.

By Brandon Harris

Creative Destruction

If the incentives are not enough to make you receptive to change, consider the alternatives...

There are none.

Information technology is caught in a convergence of trends that has unleashed the kind of “creative destruction” in the IT department that the IT department has been unleashing on everyone else in the modern organization for decades. Now it’s IT’s turn to change.

The role of IT within an organization is at a tipping point. It has been IT’s role to use technology to support an organization. That’s no longer enough. Today IT is being asked to provide business value, not just support. That is a fundamental shift.

The conventional data center has been the traditional vehicle for supporting the business. Ironically, while technology liberated organizations from the bricks and mortar that once defi ned and contained them, the data

center remained behind like a fi xed point in space and time. The new model for a data center is less tied to a physical plant and more integrated into the very fabric of an organization. It still has technology inside with blinking lights and wiring closets, but it also extends outward to the point where the business interacts with customers and partners. Technology today is the environment in which business does business. Full Participation

This eBook offers a wide-angle view of what you need to do to start building the data center in your future today. It focuses on technology, but implicit in every technical initiative is the emergence of an expanded role for IT that involves moving beyond a supporting role into full participation as an active player in the life of an organization.

In “Soul of a New Machine,” Brett Anderson looks at what needs to go on inside your data center and how you can develop a sustainable, incremental strategy that aligns your short-term projects to long-term goals. In “From the Ground Up,” Bob Mobach addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with data center infrastructure and provides a list of “10 Best Practices” you can use to guide your development of the data center in your future.

Okay. You may not want cloud. You may not even need cloud. But don’t think that there won’t be changes ahead for your data center regardless.

Ironically, hidden in the admittedly squishy term “business transformation” are the exact kinds of changes that would lead to a data center environment that isn’t going to self-destruct on a regular basis. Behind the rhetoric are some realistic goals which fi t under the general heading of fl exibility and include scalability, effi ciency, resilience, security and centralized management.

Notice I haven’t said “cloud” yet. The goal of business transformation from a technology perspective is to be able to provide IT as a service. Cloud computing is just one of the options you have available. Although there are those who have claimed it, cloud computing isn’t the answer to everything. You are. Building Blocks

The key is to start out solving your own problems in a systematic way. By taking a building block approach, you can set in motion a process that will take you toward a dynamic data center consisting of pools of high-performing computing resources that can be centrally managed, readily automated and effi ciently maintained. If leveraging cloud computing becomes appropriate at some point, you will be ready.

The central challenge in establishing a sustainable strategy is tearing down the silos that exist around the specialties within most IT departments. You’ll need all your specialists. But they all need to start working together for a change. If they will, they have the potential to not just implement technology more effectively but also to fundamentally change the way IT interacts with the business in the process. Achieving that level of cooperation, however, could require signifi cant cultural changes in some organizations.

Here’s a look at the critical components of an effective data center strategy. The key to a strategy that works for your organization is aligning short-term projects within each component with the long-term objectives that they all share. You can focus on specifi c aspects of your IT environment at any given time, as need and resources dictate, but to be successful, they all have to advance in a manner that is consistent with your defi ned roadmap.

Virtualization

Most IT departments have realized some level of virtualization in their data centers. Wherever you are in this process, keep going. Virtualization really is the game changer that will make it easier for you to handle

Soul of a New MachineTo the IT department in a typical data center that is spending as much as 80 percent of its time just keeping the lights blinking and putting out fi res, mounting pressure from executive management to focus on “business transformation” is about as well received as being asked to smile on a very bad day. By Brett Anderson

“The key to a strategy

that works for your

organization is

aligning short-term

projects within each

component with the

long-term objectives

that they all share.”

– Brett Anderson, Director,

HP Servers and Networking,

Logicalis

all the challenges ahead. But, don’t fall into the trap of thinking virtualization is just about servers. Think about virtualizing storage, networks and applications. Following the thread of virtualization can lead to a truly converged infrastructure that is more effi cient, adaptable to changing business requirements and easier to maintain and support.

Servers

The standalone x86 servers that replaced the mini computers you once had in your data center have all the fl exibility of a stake in the ground. Pull that stake. Blade enclosure deployments accommodate the ebb and fl ow of virtualized workloads. If more capacity is needed, more blades can be non-disruptively added to the enclosure removing much of the hassle of reorganizing a non-optimized rack of servers, and, more importantly, completely eliminating the risk of accidently unplugging a cable connecting a mission-critical server to the power grid, network or SAN infrastructure. Your investment in blade chassis and intelligent racks also gives you the fl exibility to scale up or down without starting over, unlike money spent on maintaining older technology for which there is no roadmap to the future.

Storage

The concept of multi-tenancy and shared resources has been around since the early days of storage area networks (SANs). Despite having a head start on shared resources, the prevailing tendency in most organizations

has been to buy more storage than you need—“just to be sure.” Predictably, the tendency to over-buy has fi lled many data centers with a variety of storage devices all performing at a small percentage of their designed performance—kind of like where servers were before virtualization when the rule of thumb was a server for every application. You don’t have to overbuy storage anymore. There are many options to right-size storage. An HP 3PAR solution, for example, can be centralized into a single multi-tenant, high-performance and high-availability system, allocating resources up or down to meet demands based on actual—as opposed to perceived—needs.

Let your current and future storage needs guide your decision. If you don’t know what they are, start there with a detailed analysis of your current consumption, effi ciency rate and projected storage growth requirements to begin to know what you don’t know.

Networks

It’s been years since the IT industry stopped battling over who was the fi rst one to say “The network is the computer.” Regardless of who coined it, the phrase is still true and it’s going to continue on into the future. If your organization still has separate LAN traffi c and a PBX with twisted pair copper wire, this would be a good place to start connecting your network to the present, if not the future. Even if you are not ready to implement VoIP, the next time you upgrade your data network, you should consider switches that support power over Ethernet (PoE) so that when you have the budget and resources to add voice, the infrastructure will be there to support it. HP’s Virtual Connect technology is a good example of the convergence of server and network technology, and an even better example of how technology convergence can facilitate the teaming of your IT specialists.

For example, if your server guy decides to use Virtual Connect within a BladeSystem environment to enable a more granular presentation of network interfaces to the server OS, that decision impacts the networks—fortunately, in a positive way: Virtual Connect converges up to four network interface cards (NICs) over a 10 Gb server connection. Bandwidth limits can be dynamically confi gured on the fl y on each NIC, and the number of blade interconnect modules required can be reduced by as much as 75 percent. Applications

Although virtualization was unleashed by hypervisor software, most of the emphasis has been placed on the impact of virtualization on the hardware infrastructure. The full potential of virtualization, however, will only be realized through advances in lean and agile development of applications.

Unless you are a startup or have the means to start over, your application inventory includes a diverse collection of last generation and older applications that you still depend on. As part of your overall data center strategy, you need to systematically evaluate your apps and determine which can be virtualized and which cannot; which have nothing to do with your core competency—i.e., email—that you could toss over the fence to a cloud provider; and which need to be

left exactly where they are, at least for now. It should go without saying that hoping your legacy apps keep running just a little longer is not an effective long-term IT strategy.

One of the biggest challenges in developing new applications for your increasingly virtualized environment is the disconnect that exists in most IT departments between the application developers, virtualization experts and the infrastructure team. Venn diagrams of their skill sets rarely overlap. That’s where the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices and the development of an effective IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy come in.

ITIL and ITSM

Every CIO already knows about ITIL best practices. But they may not know how to begin applying all those good ideas to develop an effective ITSM strategy in their own IT environments. The lack of an effective ITSM plan, in fact, has caught many IT departments at the point where push comes to shove. They can’t afford to stay where they are, but they can’t take advantage of outsourcing or cloud computing options their CEOs and CFOs want without what looks—realistically in some cases—like losing control. ITSM based on ITIL best practices makes it possible for IT departments to move into the future without taking a leap of faith. If you don’t have any ITIL practices in place, start by building a service catalog and follow ITIL from there.

People and Processes

In many ways, the technology is the easy part. Business transformation isn’t accomplished just by building a new data center and putting lots of new technology inside. Every technology initiative has to have embedded within it the processes that link it directly to business goals and objectives. The data center of the future isn’t just the house that technology lives in. It is the people and processes and goals and ambitions of the entire organization.

And it isn’t ever going to actually get done. In this age of business agility, business transformation is becoming business as usual. It is and will be a continual process, a never-ending evolution. Realize that your vision of the data center in your future, as a result, depends as much on interdepartmental communication and business processes as it does on technology. By making communications a goal of every technical initiative, you ensure that everyone is progressing toward the same shared goal.

It’s a moving target. Data centers used

to be built to last. Now they have to be

built to change.

Without a high degree of self-knowledge, it’s too easy to be swept away by the sheer volume of considerations that lie ahead of you when you enter the murky gap between where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow.

The good news is that, whatever your current and projected needs are, you have lots of options for your data center strategy. This means that you can be a creative visionary satisfying multiple needs. The bad news, however, is that there is no one right option and there are so many options to consider that just keeping track of them all would require a whole team of specialists.

For example: You need to make decisions about upgrading and consolidating your data center infrastructure, but before you can make those decisions with confi dence, you need to know how much more virtualization you can achieve, and if you achieve more virtualization, how much more of your IT environment could be consolidated. Should you build a private cloud, or a public cloud or a combination? What about colocation—running your systems in someone else’s data center. Or maybe you could park a data center pod behind your current data center and just plug it in.

Questions within Questions

That’s just at a high level. Dig a little deeper into any of those questions, and you encounter a maze of questions within questions. No wonder so many IT directors would rather battle short-term fi res every day than turn and face the enormity of a data center decision.

Organizations that set off on their own to develop a data center infrastructure plan often go fi rst to a fi rm that specializes in mechanical, electrical and plumbing – where they are met by a perfectly capable electrical or mechanical engineer who knows very little about IT.

A better approach is to get your facilities staff and your IT operations staff around the table at the same time. You’ll probably have to do a round of introductions because only a few of these people will have ever met.

Oh, and you’ll want your CFO in the room because he or she is apt to have some strong feelings about how much this is all going to cost and what can be allocated to the opex budget as opposed to capex. Most CFOs today want to get as much into the pay-as-you-go opex column as possible.

From the Ground UpWhatever vision you may have of the data center in your future, the single most important point of reference as you go forward is who you are and what you want to be able to do.

By Bob Mobach

“Your data center

strategy needs to

become a way of life

that can grow and

adapt as the needs

and ambitions of your

organization change.”

– Bob Mobach, Practice

Director of Data Center

Infrastructure, Logicalis

Then there are the business department heads. You’ll need to understand what their requirements are, and to understand that, you will need to understand what they actually do, what their processes are and how they can be enhanced by technology.

Everything You Do

You get the picture. Developing a comprehensive strategy for the data center you want to have in your future touches on no less than everything you do.

Because not every organization is the same, Logicalis offers a menu of data center infrastructure assessments:

The Logicalis Tactical Data Center Assessment focuses on your immediate situation and helps bridge the gap between IT and facility infrastructure.

The Logicalis Strategic Data Center Assessment takes a longer view and helps you develop a roadmap for ensuring mission-critial operations at a reasonable spend.

Our Global Data Center Assessment draws on the skills of three overlapping established practices (virtualization, cloud computing, managed services and data center infrastructure) to provide a technical analysis of IT requirements and options for meeting those requirements as well as a fi nancial analysis to help you make the right choices for your organization.

Our Private Cloud Infrastructure Assessment ties the actual processing needs and fl exible solutions that come with a cloud design into the supporting environment. This assessment establishes direct links to new compute designs for a more fl exible and modular data center that can, for example, monitor HVAC and virtual loads and automatically shift loads in case of critical data center failures.

Developing a data center strategy

isn’t a project that you can get

done by a certain time and it’s

over. Your data center strategy

needs to become a way of life that

can grow and adapt as the needs

and ambitions of your organization

change.

There is no right answer for the myriad decisions you will need to make other than to look at each through the lens of your own business goals and objectives.

Collaborate. Bring together all of the stakeholders early in the process. Developing and implementing a successful data center strategy depends on collaboration not only between IT and the facilities department but also the CFO’s offi ce.

Coordinate. Understand that specialists can do only what they know. Don’t ask your IT team about cooling systems or expect an MEP (mechanical, engineer, plumbing) fi rm to understand IT-specifi c needs.

Calibrate. Measure the power demands of different types of components in your data center and establish benchmarks and measurable standards to aid in ongoing power management. Before you can manage power use effectively, you have to know all of the variables.

Go Green. Advances in cooling design concepts, such as high-density cooling and heat rejection cooling, can save you a signifi cant expense and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time. If you live in a cool climate, take advantage of ambient air systems and let Mother Nature help your data center stay cool in the winter.

Rationalize. Decide what requirements the data center needs to meet and choose a small number of technologies and vendors to meet them. Lower technical complexity translates into lower operational overhead. Keep it simple.

Virtualize. Virtualization makes it possible to reduce the number of physical servers you need by an average of 15-to-1 and ensures that all of your servers are running at appropriate load levels. Run smart. Optimize. Make sure all of your data center systems are performing at their best. New applications and communications architectures, such as software as a service (SaaS) and unifi ed communications, require that everything in your data center not only works well by itself but also works well together with everything else.

Comply. Read and internalize EIA/TIA 942, the compilation of guidelines for everything about data centers. The more standardized you make your data center, the easier it will be to maintain and upgrade— avoiding having to retrofi t later.

Automate. Automating routine processes can reduce operational cost, free up valuable human resources and standardize procedures. The introduction of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), for example, provides access to controls, alarms, inventory and ITIL-based best practices through a single pane of glass.

Align. The data center, like the data contained within it, is a corporate asset. Designing, implementing, maintaining and paying for it should all be done in line with the overall corporate strategy. The data center doesn’t belong to the IT department or facilities department. It belongs to the corporation at large.

The following best practices are derived from the experiences of many organizations of different

sizes and in different industries and identifi es useful principles that can help guide your way to the

data center in your future.

10 Data Center Best Practices

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Download

A Practical Strategy for a Converged Infrastructure: Build a roadmap to the data center of the future that you can follow at your own pace.

Data Center Best Practices: Saving you money and treating your data with the respect it deserves.

Virtual Game Changer: Virtualization has changed the rules of IT. Here’s how to play to win.

Cloud Computing 2.0: How to shape your cloud strategy to fi t your changing needs.

HP Networking: HP’s Acquisition of 3Com Heats up Competition in the Networking Market. Alert Organizations Stand to Gain Across the Infrastructure.

The Logicalis eBook - Practical Tips for CIOs: The Converged Infrastructure In Your Future

Additional Resources

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HPN Microsite: Break the Rules of Networking with Converged Infrastructure Solutions from Logicalis

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Additional Resources

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