Service Delivery to Business Enablement: Data Center Edition
Lead Analyst: Adam Braunstein
I have never been a fan of alarmist claims. Never have I witnessed the sky falling or the oceans abruptly swallowing masses of land. Nonetheless, we have all seen the air become unsafe to breathe in many parts of the world and rising water levels are certainly cause for concern. When rapid changes occur, those progressions do not take place overnight and often require a distanced perspective. Secondly, being paranoid does not mean one is wrong.
Such is the case with the shifts occurring in the data center. Business needs and disruptive technologies are more complex, frequent, and enduring despite their seemingly iterative nature. The gap between the deceptively calm exterior and true nature of internal data center changes threatens to leave IT executives unable to readily adapt to the seismic shifts taking place beneath the surface. Decisions made to address long-term needs are typically made using short-term metrics that mask the underlying movements themselves and the enterprise need to deal strategically with these changes. The failure to look at these issues as a whole will have a negative cascading effect on enterprise readiness in the future and is akin to France's Maginot Line of defense against Germany in World War II. While the fortifications prevented a direct attack, the tactic ignored the other strategic threats including a Belgium-based attack.
Three-Legged Stool: Business, Technology, and Operations
The line between business and technology has blurred such that there is very little difference between the two. The old approach of using technology as a business enabler is no longer valid as IT no longer simply delivers the required business services. Business needs are now so dependent on technology that the planning and execution need to exist using same game plan, analytic tools, and measurements. Changes in one directly impact the other and continuous updates to strategic goals and tactical executions must be carefully weighed as the two move forward together. Business enablement is the new name of the game.
With business and technology successes and failures so closely fused together, it should be abundantly clear why shared goals and execution strategies are required. The new goalposts for efficient, flexible operations are defined in terms of software-defined data centers (SDDCs). Where disruptive technologies including automation, consolidation, orchestration and virtualization were previously the desired end state, SDDCs up the ante by providing logical views of platforms and infrastructures such that services can be spooled up, down, and changed dynamically without the limitations of physical constraints. While technology comprises the underpinnings here, the enablement of dynamic and changing business goals is the required outcome.
Operations practices and employee roles and skills will thus need to rapidly adapt. Metrics like data density, workload types and utilization will remain as baseline indicators but only as a means to more important measurements of agility, readiness, productivity, opportunity and revenue capture. Old technologies will need to be replaced to empower the necessary change, and those new technologies will need to be turned over at more rapid rates to continue to meet the heightened business pace as well as limited budgets. Budgeting and financial models will also need to follow suit.
The Aligned Business/IT Model of the Future: Asking the Right Questions
The fused business/IT future will need to be based around a holistic, evolving set of metrics that incorporate changing business dynamics, technology trends, and performance requirements. Hardware, software, storage, supporting infrastructure, processes, and people must all be evaluated to deliver the required views within and across data centers and into clouds. Moreover, IT executives should incorporate best-of-breed information enterprise data centers in both similar and competing industries.
The set of delivered dashboards should provide a macro view of data center operations with both business and IT outlooks and trending. Analysis should provide the following:
- Benchmark current data center performance with comparative data;
- Demonstrate opportunities for productivity and cost cutting improvements;
- Provide insight as to the best and most cost effective ways to align the data center to be less complex, more scalable, and able to meet future business and technology opportunities;
- Offer facilities to compare different scenarios as customers determine which opportunities best meet their needs.
Even though the reality of SDDCs is years away, IT executives must be travelling on the journey now. There are a number of intermediary milestones that must be achieved first and delays in reaching them will negatively impact the business. Use of data center analytical tools as described above will be needed to help chart the course and monitor progress. (The GreenWay Collaborative develops and provides tools of this nature. RFG initiated and still contributes to this effort.)
RFG POV: IT executives require a three-to-five year outlook that balances technology trends, operational best practices, and business goals. Immediate and long-range needs need to be plotted, moved, and continuously measured to mitigate immediate and long term needs. While many of these truths are evergreen, it is essential to recognize that the majority of enterprise tools and practices inadequately capture and harmonize the contributing factors. Most enterprise dashboard views evaluate data center performance at a tactical, operational level and identify opportunities for immediate performance improvements. Strategic enterprise dashboard tools tend to build on the data gathered at the tactical level and fail to incorporate evolving strategic business and technology needs. IT executives should incorporate strategic data center optimization planning tools which address the evolving business and technology needs to the mix so that IT can provide the optimum set of services to the business at each milestone.