Super Fitness Health BlogThe Future of Infrastructure and Operations: The Engine of Cloud Computing and Virtualization
How much do companies spend on IT just to keep current? As much as 70 percent! The best companies can get this down to 10 to 30 percent, leaving the rest of the IT budget to facilitate transformation. It is predicted that companies are transforming their data centers from sprawled servers to virtualization, towards a fully automated, service-oriented, real-time infrastructure.
Whereas the original motivation for IT virtualization is to reduce costs, companies now recognize that they greatly improve agility, the ability to rapidly provision resources for new workloads, and that this will then lead to opportunites for alternative sourcing, such as cloud computing.
The operating system is becoming commoditized, focusing attention instead to a new concept: the “Meta OS”. VMware’s Virtual Data Center and Microsoft’s Azure Fabric Controller are just two examples. Currently, analysts estimate only about 12 percent of x86 workloads are running virtualized, but that this could be over 50 percent by 2012. In this same time frame, year 2012, storage Terabytes is expected to increase 6.5x fold, and WAN bandwidth growing 35 percent per year.
Virtualization is not just for business applications. There are opportunities to eliminate the most costly part of any business: the Personal Computer, poster child of the skyrocketing costs of the client/server movement. Remote hosting of applications, streaming of applications, software as a service (SaaS) and virtual machines for the desktop can greatly reduce costs of customized PC images and help desk support.
Cloud computing not only reduces per costs per use, but provides a lower barrier of entry and some much needed elasticity. Draw a line anywhere along the application-to-hardware software/hardware stack, and you can define a cloud computing platform/service. About 65 percent of the attendees surveyed indicated that they were already doing something with Cloud Computing, or were planning to in the next four years.
To help get there, the Value-added Resellers (VAR) and System Integrators (SI) would evolve into “service brokers”, providing Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMB) “one throat to choke” in mixed multisourced operations. The term “multisource” caught me a bit off-guard, referring to having some workloads run internally (insourced) while other workloads run out on the Cloud (outsourced). Larger enterprises might have a “Dynamic Sourcing Team”, a set of key employees serving as decision makers, employing both business and IT skills to determine the best sourcing for each application workload.
What are the biggest obstacles to getting there? The IT staff. People and culture are the most difficult to change. The second are lack of appropriate metrics. Here were the survey results of the attendees:
* 41 percent had metrics for infrastructure economic attributes
* 49 percent had metrics for qualities of service (QoS)
* 12 percent had metrics to measure agility, speed of resource provisioning
The Data Center Scenario: Planning for the Future
The focus is on the importance of having a documented Data Center strategy and architecture. Unfortunately, most Data Centers “happen on their own”, with a major overhaul every 5 to 10 years. Some “best practices” for driving this effort are listed below.
The first issue was to identify tiers of criticality, similar to those by the [Uptime Institute]. In their example, the most critical workloads would have perhaps recovery point objectives (RPO) of zero, and recover time objectives of less than 15 minutes. This is achievable using synchronous mirroring with fully automation to handle the failover.
The second issue is to recognize that many applications were designed for local area networks (LAN), but many companies have distributed processing over a wide area network (WAN). Latency over these longer distances can kill distributed performance of these applications without the help from WAN optimization.
The third issue is that different countries offer different levels of security, privacy and law enforcement. Canada and Ireland, for example, had the lowest risk, countries like India had medium risk, and countries like China and Russia had the highest risk, based on these factors.
The following best practices are suggested:
* Get a better understanding of the costs involved in providing IT services
* Centralize applications that are not affected by latency, but regionalize those that are affected to remote locations to minimize distance delays.
* Work towards a “lights out” data center facility, with operations personnel physically separated from data center facilities.
For the unfortunate few that are trying to stretch out more life from their existing aging data centers, the speakers offered this advice:
* Build only what you need
* Decommission orphaned servers and storage, which can be 1 to 12 percent of your operations
* Target for replacement any hardware over five years old, not just to reduce maintenance costs, but
also to get more energy-efficient equipment.
* Consider moving test workloads, and as much as half of your web servers, off UPS and onto the native electricity grid. In the event of an outage, this reduces UPS consumption.
* Implement power-capping and load-shedding, especially during peak times.
Enacting these changes can significantly improve the bottom line. Archaic data centers, those typically over 10 years old with power usage effectiveness (PUE) over 3.0 can cost over twice as much as a more efficient data center.
While virtualization can help with these issues, it also introduces new problems, such as VM sprawl and dealing with antiquated licensing schemes of software companies.
Comments are currently closed.