Transforming a data centre is a sheer necessity

There is certainly movement in the camp when it comes to data centre transformation (DCT) with the federal government and the NSW, Victorian and Queensland state governments each planning rationalisation of their data centres. Merri Mack reports on the steps in data centre transformation and what organisations should eventually aim for.

The NSW government will shortly let a tender for reducing its 130 data centres down to just two facilities while the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) long-awaited recommendations report on its data centre strategy is out but not in the public arena as yet. The New South Wales Commerce Minister, Jodi McKay, commented that the market for purpose-built data centres has matured considerably over the last few years as demand for these services has increased.

McKay said, “This is particularly relevant in today’s business world, where large enterprises, including a large number of financial institutions, are assessing their data centre strategies in response to the recent economic climate. By optimising data centre performance, companies are able to access options that allow them to reduce their IT budget, while also reducing greenhouse emissions.

Phil Sargeant, Managing Vice President, Gartner, puts ‘data centre transformation’ into perspective. It means a lot of things to a lot of people and can include such steps as consolidation, virtualisation, automation, etc to reduce costs and become more agile. Sargeant said what organisations should be aiming for is a real-time infrastructure which is really one that is required for organisations to be cloud providers both privately and publicly. And this is really the aim of the game.

“Unless they have transformed their data centre, similarly to the steps Gartner outline, they have little hope in becoming a cloud provider as the real-time infrastructure environment is really what is required in a cloud environment,” said Sargeant.

So what is a real-time infrastructure? Gartner says it is an IT infrastructure shared across customers, business units or applications where business policies and service-level agreements drive dynamic and automatic optimisation of the IT infrastructure. The result is reduced costs while increasing business agility and quality of service.

“The two biggest areas at this stage are consolidation and virtualisation and the more vendors in these areas the better the technology. When it comes to virtualising services, VMWare, Microsoft and Citrix lead the way, but this year will be a big year for desktop virtualisation with Citrix and VMWare leading the way. Gartner sees progressive steps towards real-time IT infrastructure being realised from this year through to 2020,” said Sargeant.

Rome wasn’t built in a day

Many large IT organisations will look to transform themselves to achieve service-aligned status to align IT with business priorities and deliver consistent and competitive IT services. A few will make it past that to become a business partner, focused on innovation and increasing the value of the entire business (not just IT service delivery), with benefit metrics focused at the business contribution level. Achieving IT infrastructure and Operations (I&O) maturity is a multi-year transformation, and the movement from one level to another is not evenly distributed in time and effort. Each level’s transition is likely to take multiple years, and each is likely to require sustained commitment. Lapses (for example, due to organisational changes or changes in priorities) can result in significant delays achieving the next level, or cause it to be unattained.

Gartner predicts that by year-end 2012, fewer than 14% of I&O organisations in large enterprises will have achieved service-aligned or above; this is up from fewer than 9% in 2000. Moreover, fewer than 2% of large enterprises will have achieved the business partnership level of maturity and the awareness level of I&O maturity will drop by a third.

Ramping up investment

Last month, Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, worldwide agreement to invest $250 million to deliver the next-generation data centre and application platform for customers.

This investment will support the joint roadmap development and engineering of application platform solutions, integrated systems management and virtualisation offerings. The companies plan to deliver new solutions that will: be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model; advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation; and eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower the overall costs.

Extreme Networks presented its data centre network vision at Gartner’s recent Data Centre Conference, providing a blueprint for the critical data centre transition ahead, migrating organisations from a physical network, to a virtual network, to location-independent cloud networks. Extreme recognises the challenge in today’s data centre infrastructure consists of transitioning to a virtualised environment while leveraging existing network investments. The migration of the data centre to a virtualised infrastructure means bringing visibility of virtual machines (VMs) to the network level and solving the department divide between switches and server staffs that has been introduced with virtualisation. Finally, organisations seek to avoid approaches that isolate their assets and tie them to proprietary architectures.

Rod Brown, Practice Lead for Data Centre Transformation, HP South Pacific, has laid out the steps to a successful data centre transformation.

Brown and the HP team are in demand with more organisations reaching the limit in their current data centres. Globally, HP has gone through a data centre consolidation going from 800 data centres down to six.

Phil Sampson, Chief Technologist, Enterprise Storage and Servers, Hewlett-Packard Australia, was responsible for transforming the data centre in the Australian headquarters at Rhodes. Sampson said, “You need instrumentation to be able to measure everything in a data centre including software.

“There are many aspects to consider and not the least being getting local council approval for the design, health and safety regulations, working with the purchasing department, facility logistics and forming strong partnering relationships with vendors such as Liebert Emerson for power.”

Take out waste and improve everything that is left is a principle that Sampson adhered to and a further principle he used is ‘Design it first, design it right’. The transformation of the Australian data centre took 16 months and is one of the six global data centres.

Brown said embarking on a DCT project can be a challenging journey, but it is one that can provide significant returns to the organisation. With good planning and a clear view of the end game, a CIO can achieve higher service levels, improved agility to meet changing business demands and significant IT cost reductions.

“Typically, the triggers for a DCT are ageing facilities, inadequate infrastructure, disaster recovery capabilities, energy-efficiency issues, legacy technologies and the need to reduce costs.

Steps to a successful DCT

• Realise the scope, scale and all critical success factors for your DCT project.
• Identify quick wins that generate momentum within the first 6-9 months.
• Gain stakeholder buy-in within the board and across the business to gain traction for the data centre consolidation project.
• Leverage best practices in consolidation, virtualisation, automation, facilities and operations through partners with the right expertise.
• Lay out your next steps in a roadmap.

Project plan should include:

1. Setting the goals - Identify the corporate vision and benefits you are seeking. Which results do you want to achieve, and when? What will success look like?
2. Governance - IT governance is the formal process of defining the strategy of the DCT and overseeing its execution. Identify your governance processes, key stakeholders and who controls the decisions about your data centre facilities, infrastructure, applications.
3. Transformation journey - Complete an inventory of all the assets in your data centres and their relationships and dependencies. Create a defined plan of how to achieve your vision and the related benefits.
4. Program Management - DCT can include complex dependencies so identify the key DCT program management success factors. Ensure adherence to schedules and achievement of milestones across many projects. Look for best practices for risk mitigation and handling escalations.
5. Business outcomes - Generate momentum by identifying tangible short-, medium- and long-term results. ‘Quick wins’ are instrumental to gain support, so look for outcomes you can achieve within six months.
6. Facilities transformation - Addressing ageing facilities, rationalising data centre locations, ensuring sufficient space for expansion and reducing energy consumption are key priorities. Look at the practical steps you can take to transform your data centre facilities.
7. Infrastructure transformation - Technology is the vital component within the data centre to deliver IT services. Take a structured approach to updating, streamlining and virtualising your infrastructure.
8. Application and information transformation - It will likely be necessary to migrate your applications and information as you transform your facilities and infrastructure. Consider if this is a trigger to transform your application and information portfolios.
9. Management transformation - Improve your management processes and systems to improve service levels and minimise operational overheads and cost.
10. Organisational change - Changing data centre management as part of the overall transformation often implies cultural and organisational change. Align your staffing, skills, roles and responsibilities to support the DCT goals.
11. Roadmap - Lay out your high-level transformation roadmap.