WITH the extensive use of the Internet and the corresponding explosion in digitised information, data centres have become a vital tool for business competitiveness. So much so that a company can have good data centres and the software to manage them optimally and still not be competitive. However, you can't have a world-beating company without having good data centres to back up its business processes. Data centres have their roots in the huge computer rooms of the early years of the computing industry. That was the time when computers were huge and needed sophisticated cooling systems to keep them working - hence they were stored in huge rooms.
In the 1990s, microcomputers, known nowadays as servers, started to replace the huge mainframe computers. They took their place in the large rooms that had been set aside for the mainframes. Thus the idea of data centres was born.
The dot.com era was when the boom in data centres really kicked off. The then new online companies like Amazon.com needed non-stop operation and fast Internet connectivity. To service these needs, many companies built very large Internet data centres, called IDCs, which served different businesses with a whole gamut of solutions. The new technologies and practices developed during this period found their way into company-specific private data centres as well. However, with the explosive growth of information, data centres have become larger and dramatically more complex. This is posing a new set of problems for chief information officers (CIOs).
As the recent the Symantec State of the Data Center Report 2007 says, today's data centres are becoming more complex and are likely to become even more so during the next five years.
"Increasingly, businesses are demanding higher application availability and the rapid integration of new technologies," says the report. At the same time, the amount of data generated by data centre applications is exploding and much of it must be protected, as per new privacy and government regulations, and retained for longer periods of time.
As a result, in today's rapidly changing business environment, CIOs are facing a challenge to align their IT investments with the business value.
The Symantec report notes that one of the reasons data centres have become more complex is that IT departments have been asked to support additional users, a growing list of applications, and new technology. In the survey, evidence of this trend emerged in both the qualitative and quantitative parts of the study. The concerns expressed about complexity seem to be universal, as managers from all regions of the world noted that they are dealing with similar frustrations. Many managers pointed to the growing pressure to keep systems and applications available 24x7. Driving this demand is the global nature of the Internet and the international extent of many companies.
Making matters more challenging is the fact that this high availability now applies even to non-essential applications. As one manager from Tokyo put it, during the Symantec survey "the time differences between countries requires us to run a 24-hour operation". The consequence of the 24x7 operations mode is that there is less opportunity for scheduled downtime. That means more sophisticated technologies such as load balancing, failover, and site and data mirroring must be employed, and this adds to the complexity.
Another factor contributing to the complexity is the need to support new technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
As a Symantec spokesman said, the situation is not going to change. In fact, most study participants foresee their data centres becoming more complex due to the need to support more applications (and associated data), pressures from end users, and the requirements to meet the growing number of data protection and retention regulations.
On top of all these pulls and pressures, business leaders and CIOs are required to provide increasingly efficient systems while keeping costs down.
As organisations grow, organically or through acquisition, IT nerve centres proliferate and become increasingly difficult to manage. The sheer volume of data, much of which now has to be retained in order to meet the requirements of good corporate governance, further increases the pressure on already-stretched IT departments. Such issues can be a serious distraction from IT's key role as a business enabler.
A spokesman for Hitachi Data Systems told BizIT that one of the ways in which companies can cope with the current situation is to ensure that IT and facilities work together. "There needs to be a closer linkage between the IT department and facilities planning. The IT manager has traditionally been focused on scalability and performance when making his purchasing decision, leaving the facilities manager to worry about space and energy requirements," the spokesman pointed out.
Another way is to leverage storage virtualisation to decrease energy consumption and operational cost. "There is a need to recognise that energy consumed by storage infrastructure relates to the number of drives and not quantity of data stored. This means storage becomes more energy efficient as capacity density increases. Storage virtualisation enables better utilisation through tiered storage and common management frameworks," the HDS spokesman noted.
Open system storage utilisation is at best 50 per cent today, according to storage industry analyst Steve Duplessie, founder of the Enterprise Storage Group.
Another suggestion from HDS is for companies to organise data centres by cleaning them up.
"This will greatly improve management."
However, it's only possible to "clean up" the data centre when there is a current and clear picture of IT assets and dependencies. Customers should:
- consider virtual consolidation and physical distribution;
- decommission legacy equipment;
- implement application management (group systems by application type);
- implement tiered storage; and
- implement virtualisation design.
"Increasing storage utilisation will help improve data management. Storage growth is irrational and has become unmanageable. Therefore it's important to increase utilisation rates," the HDS spokesman noted.
IT professionals need to increase the service levels and have the right solutions that can help them to embark on a journey for a smoother and smarter transition to the next generation data centre (NGDC).
However, research agency IDC believes that a set of new challenges will emerge for data centre managers as more established data centres in the Asia-Pacific region take incremental steps to migrate to the next-generation platform which is characterised by service-oriented applications running over a virtualised infrastructure.
IDC feels these managers will have to comply with the required performance and security standards that are top priorities for users. "IDC has identified virtualisation as one of the key technologies underpinning the successful evolution of existing data centres to the next-generation platform," Willie Low, IDC Asia-Pacific's senior market analyst for infrastructure software, told BizIT recently.
He added that server virtualisation is already gaining traction rapidly in Asia-Pacific, and the same trend is seen in the storage infrastructure space, albeit at a slower pace. "Resources will be pooled to hold down operational costs and to provide a more flexible and agile environment that will facilitate rapid application deployment," he added.
However, Mr Low noted that from a process and people perspective, virtualisation technology may render many security and data protection policies ambiguous. This is due to the fact that these policies were designed for the current generation of data centres where virtualisation technology is not common. "These ambiguities will have implications on data privacy, compliance and regulatory requirements," Mr Low noted.
Results from IDC's Asia-Pacific end-user survey 2007 shows that three of the top four management features or tools used in virtualised servers by data centre managers in Asia-Pacific are directly connected to business continuity and disaster recovery issues. These features or tools are security, maintenance and health monitoring, and systems recovery and back-up disaster recovery.
The results clearly show that users have come to expect a suite of security and performance management tools to be available as they adopt virtualisation technology for their data centres, the analyst said. In such a situation the question that inevitably arises is, why manage your own data centre when a specialist service provider can offer significant operational and financial advantages?
Organisations are finding that working with an IT service provider is a sensible option. In doing so, they separate high-value management functions from routine IT tasks.
The economies of scale provided by a specialist third party reduce the cost of corporate systems, enabling organisations to extend the services they offer while benefiting from improved and consistent IT service levels.
Fujitsu, for example, says its data centre services offer world-class facilities and carrier-independent high bandwidth access within secure and resilient environments.
"We offer a variety of managed solutions for a diverse range of customers - from start-up companies looking for low-cost collocation or Web-hosting through to large enterprises seeking to leverage Fujitsu's significant data centre assets," a Fujitsu spokesman said.
Recently, Fujitsu Services was awarded a landmark global contract for the internal IT infrastructure of Reuters, the world's largest news and information provider.
Fujitsu has agreed a 10 year contract with Reuters to provide IT services for Reuters? 17,500 employees based in more than 100 countries around the world, from Dubai, to China, to Brazil.
The new IT Fujitsu-hosted infrastructure has improved substantially the end-user experience for Reuters people, the spokesman said.
