NITIN MISHRA
NetMagic

The data center is a critical facility that houses computer systems and associated components, including backup power, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls and security devices. Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and fire protection systems become critical to system maintenance and recovery.

What Are Your Core Value Activities?

Any build versus outsource decision could be viewed through the prism of core competence – increasing performance and organizational delivery through a focus on its core value activities.

Unfortunately, in the past, multiple extraneous factors often muddied the perspective. The key difference is that when an activity is core and business critical, it will receive top-level attention and focus. An IT team’s time should be dedicated to the activities that provide strategic advantage to the enterprise and allow resources to be focused only on those key areas.

The decision to outsource a data center requires careful examination of options at a strategic level from a business vision perspective and a thorough tactical evaluation on an operating plane involving asset inventories, facility requirement estimations, and budgetary considerations.

Outsourcing v. Building a Data Center

Advantages of Outsourcing your Data Center

Many organizations – whether small, medium and large companies across various industry verticals – have realized that outsourcing their data centers is the best way to align IT and business in the most cost-effective manner. There are many important business benefits associated with outsourcing: organizations can gain higher operational and financial efficiencies, enjoy proactive monitoring and management of their hosted IT infrastructure, and increase customer satisfaction, while businesses can stay focused on their core business areas.

Benefits not only include protection of IT infrastructure from technology obsolescence, but also allow maximum freedom and flexibility in daily IT operations, while simultaneously lowering their financial and operational overheads.

Benefits include:

• Align to changing business needs
• Compliance with corporate governance
• Cost advantage
• Customized solutions
• Scalable IT operations to meet growing business demand
• Access to latest technology
• Business continuity
• Accountability through SLAs
• Access to skilled expertise
• Energy efficient data centers
• High Availability and reliability
• Leverage the true potential of IT; not just managing costs

What is Getting Outsourced?

Typical areas delegated to managed and outsourced data center providers include:

• Trouble ticketing and help desk
• End-user support and infrastructure operations
• Hardware maintenance and network operations
• Monitoring and management (server, systems, etc.)
• Security
• HVAC
• Disaster recovery, storage management and backup (power, data)
• Full functionality and support of all elements within their data centers

The TCO Advantage

Predicting and measuring Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the physical infrastructure for network rooms and data centers is required for Return-on-investment (ROI) analysis and other business decision processes. In addition, an understanding of the cost drivers of TCO provides insight into opportunities to control costs.

Organizations, today will need to assess the benefits of a build or buy decision based on the impact IT enablement, business continuity, process excellence, privacy and compliance requirements – in line with Board vision and cost compulsions. And as businesses look further afield at outsourcing or out locating their data centers, they need to carefully evaluate the providers in various geographies. The spectrum of decision factors will range from management mandates to energy efficiency.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

BOB DEUTSCHE
Intel

The goal of every publicly traded company is to deliver value to its shareholders. From a simple financial perspective, and with the exception of non-profits, this value is measured in terms of profitability, customer and employee satisfaction. Of the three, profitability seems to make shareholders the happiest. It’s generally a company’s line of business (LOB) groups, where the products or services are developed, that generate these profits.

Eighth Fundamental Truth: Profitability

It’s this last point I was thinking about when I set out the eighth and final fundamental truth of corporate cloud strategy: Altruistic motives do not generally keep the lights on.

Let’s face it. If you’re reading this blog, chances are good that if I asked somebody in your LOB area about your business knowledge, most would either laugh or ignore me. If this weren’t true, why after 30+ years of essentially the same dialogue, do we still have to argue whether IT has any business value?

I’d also bet that if I asked the same people what you or your group contribute to the profitability of the company, most would say they see lots of money going into IT but nothing much of value coming out. Right or wrong, you all face the attitude of the fictitious sales VP I described in one of my earlier blogs on cloud strategy.

In this same blog, I also identified the perspective you bring to the party that your LOB person doesn’t have. It is this skill that can be used, as the world struggles through the area of the cloud hype cycle that Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment, to lead your company through the chaos of broad adoption (assuming your voice is heard).

Common Sense

Many of you have led or participated in a large hardware migration project or a major application development effort.  Was the experience akin to herding cats, with each product and/or vendor representing a cat that absolutely had to move in the same direction for the effort to succeed?  How did you manage the herd through the hardware or system’s lifecycle?  Were you, like me, always impressed with how quickly these cats, when something started going south, always knew it was another cat’s problem.

Grudgingly, though, we all knew the reason for the drill.  Each cat is responsible for its own interest’s profit and time spent chasing and fixing problems impacts attainment of that goal. Unfortunately, as the ultimate stakeholder in this relationship, we were the ones held accountable to fix the problem.  This experience is the source of that unique perspective I mentioned earlier and which will be of significant value in the evolving Cloud Ecosystem.

New Order

To begin this part of the discussion, review image below. (Click graphic to view full size.)

(Graphic courtesy of Intel.)

First, using the profitability goals of each component of a typical end-to-end public cloud ecosystem as a baseline, take an architect’s perspective of the process.  Once you do this, you begin to appreciate the challenges ahead—and the unique perspective you bring to the solution.

Next, confront the conflicting profitability expectations within your own enterprise. As we discussed in the column about the mythical sales VP, his or her first concern is profitability. From their perspective, reducing your footprint — based on the promises made by the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) — is a way to boost profit without losing anything. Sometimes this is true, but other times it’s not.

Playing Offense or Defense

At this moment, you have a choice.  Do you take an offensive or defensive strategy to confront your contribution to profitability?  If on the offense, what are you doing today, within your larger organization, to remove the emotion from these types of discussions and to force an unbiased financial focus on the realities of your environment? It’s also critical to recognize that in some cases, outsourced and cloud-hosted applications will save your company money and boost profit. How will you discuss these instances?

Next, recognize that every CSP is different and they, like every other component of the cloud ecosystem, are not altruistic. To stay in business, they must be profitable in the long term. While it’s not your job to understand the details of how they make money, it is your job to understand how their pursuit of profit will potentially impact the services provided to your company. Although this isn’t an exhaustive list, we can infer some indicators by looking at how they ensure delivery of services:

• What are the procedures for monitoring/reporting SLAs, maintaining global government policy compliance, and securing data?
• Do they have an audit process and what standard is it based on?
• What is their level of assumed indemnity (first and/or second)?
• Do they support an open architecture if that is important to your corporate strategy?

Finally, how do the Telcos end up playing in this space?  This varies from country to country, and we are beginning to see a trend where they are assuming the dual role of data center and network cloud service provider. If this trend continues, the evaluation criteria we mentioned earlier fall a bit short if you consider topics like intelligent edge, radio access, and broadband access networks. Right now, though, it’s hard to predict how this business model will play out other than to recognize that changes are imminent. The best advice I can offer is to insure someone in your organization is assigned to monitor activity in your geography.

To conclude, this blog is the final one in our series of discussions on the eight fundamental truths of corporate cloud strategy. Thanks for reading them, and for contributing your thoughts and experience through the journey. Also, thanks to Data Center Knowledge for publishing it and to my colleagues at Intel for the collaboration.

My next series of columns will take a practical look at end-to-end cloud security. I hope you’ll be there to join in the discussion. As always, you can reach me through Twitter.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

KATE BREW
Anue Systems

As the demand for data center efficiency rises along with the demands for higher bandwidth, speed and performance, facility managers worldwide are challenged to conserve available space and energy, and “do more with less.” As a result, data center professionals, IT managers and networking staff are likely to share the burden of conserving energy, as everyone responsible for the IT facility will play a role in reducing operations costs of the ever-evolving data center.

Energy Demands Continue

According to the September 2011 report by Forrester Research, Inc., Power and Cooling Heat Up the Data Center, energy costs currently comprise approximately 70% of the operations costs of the average data center facility. The report states that the data center rack is becoming a bottleneck due to increased rack space and energy demands.

In addition, airflow restrictions create limits on rack space cooling capabilities.  As confirmed in the Forrester Research report, wide spacing between networking appliances (required to achieve adequate heat dissipation) is a leading cause of wasted rack space and overall data center inefficiency.  In a worst case scenario, up to two-thirds of the rack space can be unusable due to cooling limitations.

Considering Networking Energy Consumption

While networking  alone comprises approximately 9 percent of the average data center’s power consumption today (as noted in the May 2011 Wikibon.org report entitled Networks Go GrEEN, based on detailed figures from the EPA Final Report to Congress 2007) , this is not the complete picture for the future. Networking components are expected to become an increasing portion of data center energy consumption as servers and storage become more efficient, leading to a higher percentage of power consumption coming from network management tools. Therefore, energy and space requirements for network security and network monitoring tools will become an increasingly important factor for organizations to consider going forward.

With these considerations in mind, it is important to understand that data center networking tools, such as network monitoring switches, can effectively reduce traditional data center energy and cooling needs. Network monitoring switches, primarily used to eliminate the limitations of TAP and SPAN port connections for increased network visibility, can also be used to reduce the duplication of network traffic on monitoring tools. The de-duplication functionality serves to increase the performance and efficiency of the facility’s network monitoring solutions and can result in less monitoring equipment and lower energy bills.

Hardware and Rack Space

Another aspect is the network monitoring switch hardware itself, which can be as little as 1U or as much as 14U in rack space. It is becoming increasingly important for data center managers to know how to identify smaller and more energy efficient network monitoring switches.

To find a specific network monitoring switch that is highly efficient, look for the following three specifications:

• High density: Determine how many network ports and tools can be configured for the appliance.
• Minimized rack space: Determine how much physical space is required for the appliance, independent of rack configuration.
• Low power consumption (low watts per port): Determine how much actual power consumption per port will be consumed. This will be important for energy conservation, and possibly even more important for rack heat dissipation reasons.

To improve data center efficiency, facility managers and engineers need to consider these specifications, as well as increased efficiency of network monitoring tools possible with a network monitoring switch.  A well-chosen network monitoring switch can be an important step in the evolution to an increasingly green data center.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

KENT CHRISTENSEN
Datalink

Cloud computing is gaining popularity. Yet, we know that only about 25% of IT teams are actively involved in cloud computing within their organization. Why the disconnect? Many IT people tell me they are interested, but just don’t have time to explore what cloud computing could mean to their IT organization.

The best advice I can give them comes from American Revolutionary Thomas Paine, himself:

“Lead, follow or get out of the way.”

Now’s the time to move forward with plans for your own internal, private cloud. If you don’t, you may find yourself — and your IT organization — left behind.

Migrating to Cloud

Here are five reasons to move to private cloud computing:

1. You need to do this.

Today’s economic environment will continue to be challenging for IT organizations. Companies are looking at ways to trim IT budgets and staff even further. Many business owners and C-level execs are also actively seeking other ways (outside of traditional IT) to run their applications.

Some public cloud successes include:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) or Business Process (BP) services. These include CRM applications like Salesforce.com, outsourced e-mail services or payroll processing applications from ADP, PayCom, etc.
• Low-cost, agile Web services for everything from block storage to database or virtual server platforms. (Think Google or Amazon Web Services).
• Consumer cloud examples like the highly popular iCloud.

You need to look at the appealing attributes of cloud computing and determine how to offer similar functions within your own IT firewall.

2. You can do this!

You may be closer than you think to private cloud operation. You’re likely running virtual servers, which are backed by data storage. Many may also be using advanced virtualization, where resources are virtualized across servers, network and storage.

Many attributes derived from advanced virtualization closely match those in a private or public cloud. These include:

• Agility
• Elasticity
• Standardization
• Added Efficiencies
• Service-Oriented

All you need is the vision, commitment and IT leadership needed for a cloud initiative. This includes getting cross-functional IT teams (server, storage, network and application support) to work together.

3. Your cloud will be lower cost to begin.

Building your private cloud will likely be 25 percent cheaper than the cost of using an external cloud service provider. Cloud providers need to buy much of the same infrastructure as you do, plus they need to make a profit.

Select cloud offerings (SaaS or BP services) may be cheaper to outsource. But what about the other specialized or security-sensitive applications you run in your data center? I hear from at least 10 companies who say they want to outsource 40 percent of their IT infrastructure ‘to the cloud’ to save costs. When we start asking the tough questions, most realize it doesn’t make sense at this time.

One company planned to roll out a social media application. They thought a public cloud provider would be a highly affordable fit. The provider’s monthly bill; however, showed the company it could run more efficiently and cost-effectively by running the application in their own internal cloud. Planned expansion multiplied the benefit of internal vs. external. This was true even when compared to the cheapest cloud provider.

4. Your private cloud/infrastructure can be shared amongst business applications.

Technology from external cloud providers needs to mature before it can offer the shared infrastructure and level of security, delivery, compliance and qualities of service required for many enterprise IT applications. Most external cloud providers may even require significant application rewrites.

Once you offer similar cloud attributes on your private infrastructure, internal business owners should find your internal IT services more appealing. These are services more closely aligned to your corporation’s internal systems and unique goals. Business application owners can also get easy access to the shared infrastructure while limiting their risk.

5. He who controls orchestration, controls the cloud.

As you move ahead with private cloud computing, you’ll need to learn how best to manage the environment. I summarize this as orchestration. It covers everything from on-demand resource provisioning to life-cycle management of virtual machines. It can even cover which applications should be outsourced to an external cloud provider.

Eventually, you may be called on to manage private clouds, public cloud services or a hybrid scenario (a mix of both private and public cloud services which you’re more than likely to move toward).

Many vendors are willing to step into this role and orchestrate your IT infrastructure for you. As you move ahead with private cloud computing, you’ll have the option to retain control of orchestration yourself.

You want to do this so that you control how much it costs to run an application internally versus outsourcing it. You want to retain control of the application and its resources, even if you choose to outsource peaks in activity to a cloud provider. You want to still be able to compare the cost of your raw materials to what the cloud service provider offers. Orchestration allows you to:

• Determine the best mix of internal and external resources
• Obtain bids surrounding Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on cost/performance characteristics, versus just the need to outsource an application
• Retain ultimate buying power and control

So, there you have it. Five reasons to own your private cloud (and many more reasons not to delay in getting there).

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

TRAVIS VIGIL
Dell

The concept of introducing virtualization into corporate data centers has moved well past the trial phase over the past few years into one of wide acceptance today. The latest virtualization technologies deliver on the promise of increased efficiency, reduced expenses and a smaller overall footprint.

But when it comes to a truly virtualized data center, server virtualization, which enables several applications to run independently on a single physical server, is only half of the solution.

Storage Demands Continue

CIOs today continue to struggle keeping up with the demands for more storage capacity as data continues to grow exponentially. That, in turn, has led them to add storage systems ad-hoc, responding to the needs of a specific deployment, a particular business function, or a geographic area. As such, many organizations have created a complex, inflexible storage infrastructure that has become both difficult and costly to manage.

To help address this complexity, leading storage providers have worked diligently and closely for years with server virtualization software providers – such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft — to seamlessly link storage systems with highly virtualized server environments.

Through these efforts, and industry-wide projects such as VMware VAAI, storage arrays can now best optimize storage performance and flexibility when called upon by virtual servers.

Innovative Storage Systems Employ Virtualization

While this virtual server and storage array integration is extremely important for the success of a virtualized data center, innovative storage systems should be using virtualization technology themselves. In fact, when combined together, a truly virtualized server and storage environment paves the way for most effective cloud infrastructures.

This is where storage virtualization comes into play.

Think of storage virtualization as technology that masks the complexity of the storage environment by simplifying the cumbersome tasks that come with managing it – like performance tuning, load balancing and configuring RAID.

These tasks are still occurring, but they happen in the background of a virtualized storage environment, abstracted from not just the administrators but the servers, as well. In a nutshell, the storage capacities can be consolidated and presented as a single, highly-automated volume that looks like a normal disk to the virtualized servers.

It’s a simplified explanation for something that’s actually far more complex. But that simplified understanding is the heart of why storage virtualization systems can be as effective as they are now. They improve efficiency and productivity because they reduce the time, effort and, more importantly, the knowledge that’s needed to effectively manage storage.

Yes, it’s consolidated storage but presented as “pools” of storage in a system that allows loads to be balanced and volumes to be created and expanded quickly, in a manner that doesn’t impact or disrupt the users. In the process, RAID configuration, replication and snapshots are all integrated and transparent to the applications.

IT managers know that not all storage is created equal. Most enterprise SANs utilize a tiered environment that includes faster, more expensive storage with slower, more economical drives. Critical data is housed on the faster-performance storage while data that’s used infrequently gets stored on the lower-end drives. Some SANs require a manual process to move all this data around, while more modern, virtualized SANs handle the tiering automatically, which is why the feature is sometimes called automated tiered storage.

Real-life Example of Storage Needs

So, how does this play out in real-life scenarios? When the lawyers of Milwaukee-based law firm Quarles & Brady log-in to their workstations remotely, the power of storage virtualization is at work. The firm’s virtual desktops are accessing data from an automated storage array equipped with both higher-performance solid-state drives and more economical SAS drives.

Physically determining which types of data belong where and migrating it to the most cost-effective type of storage easily would become a cumbersome and labor-intensive – and unnecessarily expensive – process. The storage arrays used by Quarles & Brady handle the peak traffic with automated load balancing, shifting “hot data” to higher-performance drives during “boot storms,” such as the morning hours when employees all start logging into their virtual desktops.

The tiering and load-balancing are automated, the performance is uncompromised, and the firm has seen the time that it takes to provision a virtual desktop drop from 7 minutes to about 40 seconds.

As such, the firm has become an example for the increased efficiency, cost savings and, more importantly, the flexibility that can come with a true virtual data center, instead of just server virtualization.

Virtualization Reduces Demand for More Devices

This business and others have discovered that storage virtualization also reduces the need for more storage devices. By automating the management of existing storage, the data center not only takes advantage of all available space but also shifts data on the fly, without any interruptions. Shifting data to the most cost-effective tier of storage becomes an automated process and that not only reduces labor costs but also dynamically utilizes less-expensive storage products while freeing up valuable space on the higher-performance drives.

Thin provisioning also eliminates the need to pre-allocate drive capacity to a volume before that capacity is used, a long-time problem that sometimes involved a best-guess approach in determining the amount of storage that would be needed later. Managing storage needs the old way usually led to over-provisioning, a costly and wasteful approach.

The demands facing today’s IT environments are often large and complex. Data continues to grow at exponential rates. In many cases, there are compliance regulations and data governance policies that dictate which types of data must be retained and for how long – even if it’s not being accessed regularly. And the teams that are accessing the data have come to expect real-time information regardless of how or where they try to access it – whether from a remote office or a mobile device.

Transition in the Data Center

IT managers have come to enjoy the cost savings and increased efficiency that server virtualization has offered. Many are now discovering that a truly virtualized data center is more than just virtualized servers. This combination of virtualization from servers and storage also provides a natural transition to users looking to deploy various cloud and IT-as-a-Service models by setting the framework for a more easily shared and optimized environment.

Companies that are implementing or considering a server virtualization strategy need to know that those efforts are only part of the solution. Storage virtualization completes the puzzle by bringing the data centers of the past into the future, leaving behind the expenses and workloads that once went hand-in-hand with outdated approaches.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

BHAVESH PATEL
Emerson Network Power’s ASCO business

This year I’ve noticed a few big-name data centers lost power for significant amounts of time due to preventable power reliability measures that shouldn’t ever be overlooked. Data center power reliability can be enhanced by employing three measures that work hand in hand: testing, maintenance and modernization.

Maintenance Is Critical

Maintaining a data center is a complex task that requires well-trained professionals to keep operations running smoothly. As complex as maintaining a data center is, the basic maintenance principles parallel those for regular car maintenance. And we can all identify with the need for car care and repair.

For instance, 99.99 percent of the time, your car will start when you insert the key into the ignition and turn. Cars are so reliable that we almost always take them for granted – until the day the engine turns over, but fails to start. Then, frustration sets in. The same could be said about data center power reliability when it’s operational and when it fails.

For most of us, cars are our lifeline to work, school, social events and everything in-between. In many ways, vehicles are a necessity to daily life. So, too, are data centers. They are the lifelines to the businesses we work for, the social media we use and the financial institutions we rely upon. We maintain our vehicles to ensure they operate reliably and should do the same for data centers.

Power Equipment Requires Maintenance and Testing

So when I read that transfer switches fail when utility power is lost, I wonder about the maintenance program for those switches and the on-site power systems. Maintaining and testing on-site power systems are integral elements of high power reliability. Maintenance programs cost pennies on the dollar compared to revenue lost when a data center’s backup power system fails. Lost revenue caused by interrupted business continuity either to the data center’s owner or its customers, if it’s a hosting service, tallies into the millions annually.

Emerson recently released a white paper titled, “Understanding the Cost of Data Center Downtime,” and the figures listed are sobering.

Data center downtime can be loosely compared to car trouble. Maintenance and testing to a data center is like changing the oil in your car. It’s an easy task and relatively inexpensive. But procrastinating is also quite convenient to make maintenance less of a priority. The car and data center are running fine now and will continue to do so for the next few days. Falling into this line of thinking is easy. After a while, the engine could seize up, costing thousands to repair or replace as opposed to paying $30 to $70 for an oil change. Now, think of the costs associated with on-site power components and downtime.

Without a regular maintenance and testing program, it doesn’t matter if your power system is rated Tier I or Tier IV, the likelihood of failure increases. Often times, a corporation will talk about the level of redundancy within the power distribution system. Without regular testing and maintenance, all that equipment may still start when required. But, is “may” good enough? Cars also are redundant in that most carry spare tires. But what if the spare has no air? Can you guarantee that your spare tire will be useable? When was the last time your spare tire was checked?

But maintenance can only go so far in ensuring the maximum power reliability. Legacy equipment, or equipment more than 20-years old, may be working properly without any major glitches. This equipment, however, is more prone to failure than newer equipment with the same maintenance program in place.

Buy New or Keep the Old?

In today’s rough economy, many corporations don’t have the budget to replace older gear with new equipment. There’s a way to ensure power reliability within a tight budget. It’s modernizing equipment. Modernizing, or Mods, means upgrading legacy equipment with new components. Mods provides three significant benefits for IT and facility managers: The process costs less than replacing the entire system, takes less time and minimizes disruption to business continuity.

Typically, modernizing existing equipment will save half to two-thirds of the cost of replacing the system. When capital expense budgets are tight, modernizing means there’s more money for refreshing compute equipment. In all, modernization to a data center is the equivalent of giving your car a big-time tune up to enhance power reliability for the long haul.

Power Gear Reliability

Modernizing, maintaining and testing transfer switches and other on-site power gear are integral to ensuring power reliability at a data center’s design level, whether its four, five or more nines.

Unfortunately, power reliability can create complacency. When the news stories hit the press and the Internet about power failures and downtime, most people think to themselves that losing power will never happen to them. The cruel reality is that there is never a good time to lose power or for the car to fail. Never.

We take care of our cars because they are a necessity for most of us. We need to take better care of our data centers, too, and that can be achieved by enhancing power reliability through modernization, maintenance and testing.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

GARY BUNYAN
iTRACS

I’ve been around data centers for a long time (sometimes longer than I might care to admit) and I can tell you this: When it comes to the usability of a particular technology product or solution, the question you should be asking isn’t: How easy is this to use?

The question you should be asking is:

Can I do what I need to do – and how efficiently can I do it?

Or to put it another way:

Am I going to have to work for the tool, or will the tool actually work for me?

Take the rapidly-growing world of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). There are dozens of DCIM vendors out there, each with their own products, user interfaces, and claims of usability. For IT executives who are seeking to buy and deploy these technologies, deciphering what is truly “usable” (vs. of little use to them) can be quite a challenge.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to reshape the definition of usability in the DCIM world. Here’s my definition.

In full disclosure: I have a slightly different way of thinking about usability. I’m mostly interested in how efficiently business value can be generated by the use of the DCIM tool. This is what my customers tell me is most important to them and how they measure “usability.” To them, usability relates directly to their ability to generate a positive business outcome.

Usability isn’t about being “easy to use.” It’s about getting the job done.

One root of the word “usability” is to be “of use.” When you’re attempting to manage millions of dollars of IT assets in one of the most complex entities on earth – the modern data center – you don’t need a pretty user interface which, when you pull back the covers, is lacking in usefulness. You need an interface that helps you get the job done – directly helps you manage the complex web of inter-relationships between the thousands of IT and Facilities assets sitting on your data center floor.

If you cannot manage the myriad of inter-dependencies inside the data center – if you’re stuck with a piecemeal approach that looks at fragments rather than the whole interconnected ecosystem – then you have a tool that is, ultimately, unusable. It may nudge you in the right direction, but it cannot get you to DCIM nirvana – a place where you have true intuitive point-and-click “command and control” over the entire physical landscape.

Usability Is About Information, Not Data

You can’t get the job done if you don’t have the information you need to make informed, knowledge-based decisions that drive positive business incomes. You need efficient (easily and readily available) access to the information required to accelerate not just decision-making, but smart decision-making.

Interactive 3-D Visualization offers a very usable solution. Interactive 3-D Visualization lets you manage the whole of the physical infrastructure using a visualized 3-D model. You literally point-and-click through this model, navigating through the data center to manage assets, power, space, connectivity, and other dynamics across both IT and Facilities. Talk about a user experience – Interactive -3D Visualization lets you tour your global portfolio of data centers, literally “walk” through your facilities, from a browser.

DCIM with Interactive 3-D Visualization delivers a holistic, in-context, “single pane” view of the data center and its complex web of interrelationships. It’s an open-systems decision support platform offering the user command and control over the entire physical infrastructure in a navigable “point and click” 3-D environment. Image courtesy of iTRACS.

By contrast, a more static user interface that provides text, spreadsheets, and static 3D images may look pretty, but ultimately, it creates more issues than it solves. Because no matter how clever it may look and operate, the user is still stuck with fragmented chunks of data that must be deciphered and put into some kind of context before they can be truly understood. Data without context = a user interface that isn’t of much use.

As many data center executives have said to me, Interactive 3-D Visualization isn’t just a pretty picture. It gives you the context critical for democratizing information and socializing management tasks at the operational level. Absent this, your time will be spent justifying your decisions with your peers instead of executing them.

Usability Lets Everyone Be In Their Own Roles

DCIM serves a lot of different masters. Each has his/her own requirements and expectations. The CIO needs something different from the Data Center Manager, who needs something different from the Technical Ops team, which needs something different from the Business Units and other “clients” of the data center. Everyone wants DCIM to meet their own specific information and management needs, with dashboards customized just for them. Dashboards with deep-dive analytics for making informed decisions – the kind of decisions that justify the investment in DCIM to begin with. The good news? Even in a usability scenario this diverse, the right DCIM solution brings everyone together:

• Everyone has a single-pane, open systems view into the entire physical infrastructure –IT, Facilities, and Building Management Systems assets
• Everyone has access (albeit to varying degrees) to the same rich repository of data about assets, power, space, time, connectivity, and process

From this perspective, usability isn’t about how much the individual user can get done. It’s about how much the whole enterprise can get done.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

JASON COWIE
Embotics

The IT community has identified, discussed and brooded over the challenges of reaching the cloud. We’ve examined and addressed the causes of virtual sprawl and stall, we’ve figured out the importance of automation in private cloud deployment, and we’ve come to an understanding about the value of bringing cloud computing into the enterprise, where end users can gain some autonomy for provisioning and self-service management. The biggest hurdle left to clear will become the most pressing in 2012. IT is still struggling to communicate cloud realities to business leaders. Until the CIO and the CEO see eye to eye on the path to the private cloud, too many companies will fail to reach that goal.

IT must overcome that communication challenge in 2012. Doing so will require some frank conversations with the executives in corner offices. In 2012, there are seven truths CIOs must be ready to tell their bosses when it comes to cloud objectives. These include:

Creating the cloud requires more than a technology buy

Back when we were talking about the need to invest in virtualization, CIOs went to their bosses to pitch the business benefits. Beyond a technology conversation, they talked about increased flexibility, agility and cost savings. By telling a story that applied to the whole business and not just to the data center, CIOs were able to get the capital investments they needed to virtualize.

A similar pitch is required for the move to the cloud. The CIO has to sell the CEO or chief financial officer not just on an infrastructure investment, but on a strategic initiative that drives down costs, improves customer service and provides a competitive advantage.

This first truth is about a requirement for people, processes and technology in order to reach the private cloud. Process re-engineering, aligning business goals with IT objectives, and ensuring the right people are in place are requirements. In 2012, more companies will demonstrate their understanding of this fact, as they embrace a pragmatic path toward a true private cloud. As IT and business leaders come together to see the same cloud vision, there will be fewer fears from the corner office that cloud requests from the data center will mean ripping and replacing recent investments.

The expected return on investment is backed up by research and industry experience

CIOs should seek out the advice of cloud analysts, media and vendors, and pull out the data that supports pure IT business agility. By making the business paybacks clear with supported, unbiased, third-party support, CIOs are more likely to win over their business counterparts.

IT has carefully considered the specific needs and resources of the organization

CIOs should evaluate and analyze their virtualized data centers, processes and people before they approach CEOs about cloud deployments. The key is to understand where organizations are today and where they hope to be tomorrow. If process improvement, agility and operational efficiency are important, the cloud most likely has a valuable role to play.

With that in mind, CIOs must examine what they will need to best operationalize the cloud for their specific organizational needs. Then, they should use that information in the first discussions about cloud investment with CEOs and CFOs.

We can deploy pilot tests before extending the cloud company-wide

The conversation with the CEO might be more successful in some organizations when the CIO pinpoints a specific department or workload (such as development, quality assurance or testing) in which to test out cloud processes. This approach can also help CIOs combat any counter arguments about scope creep that might be raised by the CEO or other business-focused executives.

The cloud is not an amorphous thing, and IT can detail the exact needs and investments required

CIOs should not assume that the executives who hold the purse strings fully understand the term “cloud.” IT leaders must get specific about what a private cloud is and what it should include. Conversations with business teams should cover all the components involved in a cloud deployment, such as self service management and provisioning, service catalogs, cost show-back, IT charge-back and others.

The latter might be of particular interest to CEOs and CFOs and should be explained fully. This includes discussing the benefits of showback and costing models. Private cloud deployments should not only enable companies to implement show-back and charge-back, but also help them monitor and curb consumption for IT resources. This leads to more accountability over infrastructure investments (both capital and operational expenses) and ultimately a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

There will be short-term benefits, but moving to the cloud is a long-term strategy

CIOs should be mindful of executive interest in speedy returns. For this reason, IT leaders should approach their meetings with CEOs and CFOs armed with solutions that deliver critical private cloud computing competencies quickly and effectively in order to deliver real-time infrastructure as a service to customers.

However, it’s also important to be straightforward about deployment schedules and return on investment time frames and realistic about long-term needs for automation and management. In 2012, cloud conversations should include the reasons why self-service management, increased quality of service delivery, resource optimization, and improved operational efficiency matter to successful cloud implementations.

Moving to a cloud environment is not “an IT thing.”

The CIO might be charged with starting and shaping this conversation, but it should be clear that private cloud initiatives can become strategic business enablers by providing a competitive edge in the time, speed and cost required to deliver infrastructure on demand. CIOs should be prepared to measure and quantify savings. Part of that will mean defining service level agreements and project goals that are quantifiable and realistic.

Increasingly, there is a common understanding about what a private cloud is and what it can mean for business. However, in organizations where that understanding is still weak or non-existent, CIOs need to take charge of educating their colleagues and superiors.

In 2012, IT administrators need to have frank discussions with executives on the business side of the enterprise. If they are to reap the benefits of operationalized private clouds, CEOs need to hear supported, concrete and business-focused truths from their CIOs.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

MIKE KLEIN
Online Tech

The story is a good one.  SAS 70, the 20-year-old standard for data center audits had been twisted, used and abused in so many ways that a “SAS 70 Audit” stands for very little these days.  The AICPA (American Institute of CPAs) had the right idea when they created 2 new standards – SSAE 16 to replace SAS 70 for internal financial audits and SOC 2 as an objective audit for data center operators.

Unfortunately on the way to the goal line, the AICPA didn’t just trip and fumble the ball, they conceded 90 yards in the wrong direction by creating a set of audit standards that confuse the intended audience and leave industry experts scratching their heads. The new audit reports, SSAE 16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3, were meant to substantiate data center merits, but are leaving the entire market dazed and confused.

The Problems with SAS 70

Before we get into the newly created audit confusion, let’s start with SAS 70.  SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards number 70) was designed to focus on controls relevant to internal financial reporting. Data center users, desperate for some objective data center criteria, started specifying SAS 70 as a purchasing criterion and operators responded by contracting for SAS 70 audits. It wasn’t long before a number of service providers were claiming SAS 70 certification to validate their data centers.

The problem with SAS 70 is that there are no objective criteria for the audit.  I’ve seen SAS 70 audit reports that range from as few as 11 to as many as 49 control objectives.  Some operators have claimed a SAS 70 audit despite failing to meet several of their own audit criteria. Apparently, you can claim that you’ve been audited, even if you didn’t pass the audit.

As a result, any data center operator can design their own audit criteria, pay for an audit against those criteria and then claim “SAS 70” on their website.  The end result is that a SAS 70 audit means nothing without reading the details of the audit report.

Introducing SSAE 16 and SOC 2

To address the abuse of the SAS 70 standard, the AICPA created a new standard to replace SAS 70 called SSAE 16 (Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16) which requires the auditor to obtain a written assertion from management regarding the design and operating effectiveness of the controls being reviewed. The company can still have lax controls, but as long as management attests to those controls, they can claim they have been SSAE 16 audited. The quality of the controls and the results of the audit remain an exercise left to the reader of the report.

SSAE 16 is still focused on internal financial audits – and really wasn’t designed to provide an objective data center audit. The AICPA came up with another audit standard for service control organizations (such as colocation and cloud vendors) that promised to provide a standard benchmark by which two data center audit reports can be compared, assuring the reader that the same set of criteria was used to evaluate each.  This audit is called SOC 2 (Service Organization Controls 2).

So far, so good – one audit to be used to attest to data center controls for financial audits, and another audit to compare data center service providers against an objective standard.

But Wait! There’s More. . .

But the AICPA couldn’t stop there.  Rather than hire a marketing expert to help them with a clear, concise message (and better names than “SSAE 16” and “SOC 2” and an easier to recognize logo), they started tripping over their own underwear by adding more reports and audit types. Stay with me for a minute while I try to explain the confusing web the AICPA weaved.

• An SSAE 16 audit can also deliver a SOC 1 report. SOC 1 reports come in one of two types: Type 1 and Type 2.
• A SOC 2 audit can use up to 5 different objective control criteria related to 1) security, 2) availability, 3) processing integrity, 4) confidentiality or 5) privacy of a system and its information.  The audited company decides which of these criteria they are being audited against, making it even more difficult for users to get to a single objective standard. SOC 2 reports come in one of two types: Type 1 and Type 2.
• A SOC 3 report is designed to provide the same level of assurance about the selected controls over security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and/or privacy as a SOC 2 report, but the report is intended for general release and does not contain the detailed description of the testing performed.
• The SOC 3, which is the overview of the SOC 2 report is the only report that has a public seal (which looks like something from NASA).  So a company that pays for a detailed SOC 2 audit but doesn’t pay for the SOC 3 overview report can’t use the logo associated with the data center audits.

It’s no wonder that companies put out a confusing press release claiming they achieved “SSAE 16 SOC 2 Certification,” when, in fact, no such thing exists.

So in their effort to help the industry achieve an objective set of data center audit standards, the AICPA has subsequently set the industry back 20 years. Now service providers need to decide on and users need to sort through the swath of data center audit reports:  SSAE 16 Type 1 & Type 2, SOC 1 Type 1 & Type 2, SOC 2 Type 1 & Type 2 with up to 5 different objective control criteria, and SOC 3 with 5 different criteria.

As any good marketer will tell you – too many options confuse the message and make it hard for the audience to understand.  Online Tech has made a significant commitment to compliance and we decided to become an early adopter of these standards.  We have completed our SSAE 16 (aka SOC 1), SOC 2 audits (both Type 2) and have the SOC 3 report available as well.

Despite the investment, I’ll admit that when we explain these audits to our clients, their eyes roll in the back of their heads and they walk away dazed and confused – negating all of the effort and money we spent on the new data center audits.

Back to the Future?

At the end of the day, our clients want simple, easy-to-understand standards that give them an objective seal of approval. The AICPA failed in this mission, and unless they move quickly to clear it up, I predict that the industry will settle on SSAE 16 as the de-facto “new” audit standard – and SSAE 16 will be used and abused in exactly the same way that SAS 70 was.

Unlike the PCI (Payment Card Industry) audit which is rigorous and prescriptive, SSAE 16 leaves us right back where we started – with non-objective data center audits that are a “checkbox” required by our clients.

How does a user compare two different audited data centers?  For now, the burden rests on the buyer to sort out the good from the bad.  Users need to ask for the audit report and read it.  There is a wealth of information in the SSAE 16 and SOC 2 audit reports that detail how rigorous the data center operator is in defining and adhering to processes and procedures that protect their data.

As long as users only look for the SSAE 16 audit checkbox, operators will be tempted to use the least rigorous audit criteria to simply pass the audit.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

BRUCE LICHOROWIC
Blue Hawk Networks

It’s the business, not technology first…what a concept! IT services via technology are what matters. IT departments, over the decades, have learned that their sole purpose is supporting the business and their respective users. Unfortunately, some corporate leadership has not learned how important IT departments are and what it takes to deliver IT services accurately. With IT cutbacks in government, state and now private sectors, the overwhelming demand for new services as well as maintaining the existing ones will continue, but with less capital resources. Therefore, the need to streamline and provide cloud IT services remains and will grow.

It’s Time For a Fresh Approach

IT Management is now facing growing complexity of virtual servers, desktops and figuring out how to monitor and manage it all. Additionally, there’s the management of a galaxy of un-integrated communications and computing devices, including smart phones and tablets plus Macs in PC environments. Addressing and solving this double-edged, expanding service/system complexity requires complete access to all information 24/7. Yet, existing legacy tools can be either too expensive to purchase all the modules necessary to run the business or unable to integrate into existing systems (which calls for expensive consultants). This balancing act will also demand a closely integrated tool set including automated resource provisioning, real-time analytics and chargeback implementation within one “single pane of glass,” not numerous open windows.

Of course, the legacy IT tool market leaders tell you, “We’ve been providing these tools for years…we don’t know what you’re talking about.” This may be somewhat true in random combinations but the killer here is the price tag. Also, count on at least a year to install and customize it.

In parallel, CIOs are demanding that one platform be used to run all services. Only problem is, the latest and coolest applications coming out are cloud-based. Yet, what is often installed is on-premise-based legacy systems requiring a full-time team to operate.

For Enterprises Transitioning to the Cloud

The promise of the cloud certainly offers many potential advantages. It can provide greater resource efficiency, power savings, real estate benefits and most of all, it can save a ton of money. However, if the IT infrastructure in an organization is not also managed through the methodical application of best service management practices (ITIL), migration to the cloud will both increase IT overhead as well as headaches.

ITSM Market Convergence
What’s happening in this relatively overlooked market is that for the first time we’re seeing service desk applications being integrated into virtual services, and all being monitored as a Service (MAAS). This coming year will see the inflection point where three previously separate vertical markets converge and positively affect IT management. The three sectors are:

• Network Monitoring Services, MAAS
• Virtual Services IAAS
• ITSM Service Management SAAS

The IT market is at the intersection of the three formerly separate ones shown above. It will provide IT management with an architecture managing and monitoring assets through a single pane of glass and encompassing private, public or hybrid clouds. It will deliver awareness into how computing resources are seamlessly moving data between similar or dissimilar clouds.

More importantly, what’s next in IT tools dramatically enhances the customer experience into the cloud by increasing management capabilities in automatic provisioning of resources, providing real-time analytics and implementing charge-back capabilities so IT can become a profit center rather than a glaring cost. Most significantly, this new architecture rapidly adapts, allowing IT to become the catalyst for business acceleration.

Competitive businesses aren’t silo-ed. Effective IT management continually focuses on integrating all business aspects and managing information seamlessly. Adopting highly integrated IT tool technology makes this possible. As the IT management tool market evolves, essential components will become more and more integrated into ubiquitous information management. Further, an underlying software platform is essential to integrating the triple play in IT tool innovation.

The Bottom Line
The goal has to be increasing productivity with what you have and investing in a fully-integrated IT management system letting the enterprise realize the financial benefits because management truly understands their IT spend and can accurately calculate returns. This is true whether you start with a small group or with the corporate enterprise. It will not happen overnight, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process  for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.