The
datacentre is the heart of the organisation. The network
provides the arteries and the veins that distribute vital
information to the various parts of the corporate body, but it is
the datacentre that keeps pumping it out. Keeping the heart in the
best of health is critical to your long term survival, a difficult
task with the stresses and additional burdens of the modern
business environment.
As data loads increase and place ever more strain on the heart,
how can organisations ensure that they keep themselves in the best
of health? Amid much talk of optimisation and
virtualisation technologies, there are some much more basic
questions to be asked about how you manage your datacentre. Are you
going to build it and run it yourself, incurring potentially
significant in-house cost and overheads at a time when budgets are
under increasing presure? Will you outsource it wholesale, cutting
your costs but potentially alienating your workforce and delivering
a new set of challenges to do with managing a third-party
relationship? Or perhaps something in-between - a managed service
or an excursion into the brave new world of
software as a service (SaaS)?
The reality is that whatever your preferred option is, there is
no universal solution, but what is undeniable is that all
organisations are facing similar challenges. According to one study
by IDC, the cost of staffing and maintaining in-house datacentre
operations came out as top concerns for those surveyed, at 62% and
45% respectively.
Another piece of research - Hewlett Packard's 2008 Data Center
Transformation Survey - found that more than one-third of CIOs say
that within two to five years, their datacentres will not be able
to cope with growing demand for business services and applications.
While the majority of respondents said that they spend less than
20% of their IT budget on maintaining datacentres, over a third
expected this to increase over the next five years. This is a
serious problem.
So some form of action is needed. What form that takes probably
depends most on what the function of the datacentre is perceived to
be. Is it an operational support structure used mostly for
operational tasks such as transaction processing, or is it a centre
for driving the creation of new processes and services to maximise
the potential of the business, which takes it beyond the scope of
basic transaction processing and storage? The goal of most
datacentre transformation strategies is to be able to meet demands
for increased datacentre capacity as well as reducing costs. There
are multiple options for how to manage datacentre capacity and a
number of key trends influencing the decisions made.
There are companies that still manage their own datacentres,
especially in the hi-tech sector where they are providing services
such as web-hosting for other firms. For example,
telecoms firm Vialtus, formerly Pipex Business Services, runs
five datacentres across the UK, including locations in London,
Oxford and Leeds. Angus Peacey, head of product marketing at
Vialtus, says that keeping tight control over datacentre management
ensures that the firm can provide robust services to its
clients.
To ensure that the datacentres operate at optimum capacity,
Vialtus consulted with Pillar Data Systems to build network storage
and managed service offerings around virtualisation, e-mail
exchanges services and Oracle, a process which has resulted in
standardisation on a Pillar-based infrastructure including Archive
and D2D-based backup. As part of that process, the Pillar Axiom was
deployed last quarter and is already at 60% utilisation.
Then there are those who have dabbled in outsourcing, but choose
to bring datacentre operations back in-house because of changing
circumstances. For example, telecoms services provider KPN has
decided to in-source its Dutch datacentre services, which were
outsourced to Atos Origin. "KPN is a very different company from
what it was in 2001," says Marcel Smits, CFO of KPN, adding that
bringing the datacentres back in-house enables the firm to engage
with new business markets more effectively, boosting the bottom
line.
Sometimes datacentre transformation is triggered by
circumstances beyond your control.
Northgate HR decided to abandon its Hemel Hempstead head office
after it was partly destroyed by the explosion at
Buncefield oil storage depot in 2005. The company, which
provides human resources systems and services to some of the UK's
largest employers, instructed local agents to search for a new
building within a 10- to 15-mile radius, which meant rebuilding the
datacentre.
Northgate HR's new facilities are in datacentres operated by
IBM, which allows more customers to use the same server, meaning
lower electricity output and lower costs. Typically, only between
5% and 10% of central processing units (CPUs) in a datacentre are
used at any one time. Using IBM's P-Series, Northgate says the
processing power is increased so CPUs can run at 80% capacity at
any one time.
"Creating a next-generation datacentre does not mean building
one from scratch - it is more a question of maintaining high
standards in the interior of the buildings," says Wendy Logan,
technical operations manager at Northgate.
"This includes conserving power, adjusting air conditioning,
fire safety, doors and security. For many customers, modernisation
also means updating to the latest technology, take for example the
IBM P-Series, which means that we can service more customers on a
single site.
"Normally, CPUs in datacentre hardware systems are not fully
utilised, which incurs unnecessary costs and uses excess power. The
reason this has to happen is because users have to allow for a
certain amount of 'white space', which is only used in busy
periods."
The datacentres are mirrored with duplicate facilities in London
Docklands, and in West London. In the event of another disaster the
size of Buncefield, customers' servers will remain running and
could be back to normal service within hours, rather than days or
weeks.
"Following the Buncefield explosion, our disaster recovery
system has become known as a 'hot swap'. We operate two datacentres
- one in East London and one to the West. Data is replicated from
one to the other regularly, so in the event of one datacentre going
down, we can swap all activity into the other within a few
hours.
"Increasingly, our customers are also asking us for new
datacentre measures to comply with
Sarbanes Oxley requirements, including encryption technology
for connectivity, and additional security around sensitive files.
This has to be part of the datacentre," Logan says.
Organisations can opt for full-scale outsourcing of their
datacentre operations, but, increasingly, there is a trend towards
managed services, where certain aspects of the operation will be
handed over to third parties.
According to research for COLT, half of UK businesses are
already using some degree of third-party datacentre management
today and 48% plan to increase this immediately. The research
revealed that the main challenges UK businesses face in managing
in-house datacentres include finding available space, security and
managing the building and systems.
"The traditional IT model was to build and operate datacentres
in-house, but CIOs are now increasingly leveraging third parties to
meet their needs. The traditional IT model just is not receptive
enough to the needs of the business. Line of business people cannot
wait 18 months for processes to be delivered through the IT
department. CIOs are looking to develop platforms that enable them
to selectively deliver applications on a managed service basis,"
says Geoff Gilton, head of products for COLT Managed Services.
The current slide into recession is also adding to the
third-party managed services shift. "One of the reasons that people
look to third parties is to reduce the capital constraints of
building a datacentre," says Gilton. "That is also one of the main
drivers behind the SaaS movement with which CIOs are starting to
engage."
The basic principle of SaaS makes perfect sense. If we want
electricity in our homes, we do not dig up the garden, build a
generator and produce our own power. Instead, we go to a company
that provides electricity, buy as much or as little from that
company as we want and then pay monthly or quarterly.
SaaS differs from wholesale outsourcing, says Zach Nelson, CEO
of NetSuite. "The traditional application outsourcing model takes
applications that were designed to be run on a customer's premises,
and moves the burden of managing those applications to a third
party. All the traditional outsourcing model achieves is shifting
the cost associated with managing an application from internal
employees to an external provider," he says.
The SaaS model does make you dependent on the provider's own
datacentre being up and running, and there have been some
embarrassing outages in the past, most notably Christmas 2005 when
Salesforce.com's datacentre went down in the back of a database
problem. But then, say proponents of the SaaS model, your own
server could go down on Monday morning with the same effect it is
just that with the SaaS approach, you cannot just ring down to your
own datacentre to complain.
The latest factor to influence datacentre management policies is
the emergence of the Green agenda. "In the UK, focus on the Green
Agenda has rapidly gained momentum," says Derek Wade, executive
vice-president at Atos Origin. "Datacentres are believed to consume
20% of large corporations' energy requirements. Virtualisation,
shared service models, utility computing, datacentre optimisation
and waste energy re-channelling need to be employed to reduce the
dependence on multiple equipment. Energy efficiency must be gained
through combinations of all of these developments."
Datacentre infrastructure suppliers have realised that the
"Green box" is an important one to tick off in any procurement and
are adjusting their pitches accordingly. So, for example, Fujitsu
has spent £44m on a 65,000-square-foot London-based facility that
has a low carbon footprint as a result of using new IT-cooling and
processing technologies, saving enough electricity to power as many
as 6,000 homes every year, equivalent to saving 10,000 tonnes of
carbon dioxide a year.
The Green agenda is also likely to increase the move towards
handing over datacentre management to third parties. "For most
large enterprises, running power-efficient datacentres is not a
core competency," says Ian Brown of research house Ovum. "What
better way to attack energy efficiency than by outsourcing the
problem to an IT services supplier's shared datacentre? The leading
datacentre infrastructure suppliers are all itching to sell their
services."
So, in-house, out-of-house, somewhere in between? The approach
taken to datacentre operation and capacity management will depend
on your company's needs. It is up to you whether you go for
homeopathic medication or traditional NHS pharmaceuticals the
important thing is to keep the heart beating strongly.