The Modern Data Center

Over the last 15 years, companies have been implementing packaged applications from established software vendors in order to automate critical business processes. To support these applications, IT has focused the bulk of its efforts on building and managing the infrastructure needed for the delivery of guaranteed, pre-determined service levels. As a result, over the past decade or so, companies have spent trillions investing in this enterprise-app-related infrastructure technology, peaking out in recent years at around $2.7 trillion, according to IDC and Gartner.

But all of this has changed. With the rise of mobile devices, cloud computing, the internet of things and other disruptive forces, the next 15 years will look very different. In order to capture new revenue streams, develop smarter products and deliver the vastly improved experiences that customers demand, companies need to undergo significant digital transformation.

Along with running those large enterprise apps for automation, companies need to develop consumer-grade mobile applications and embedded software to transform their products, their services and the way that they engage with the world. All of this they must do, of course, while simultaneously lowering the cost and refining the performance of existing applications and infrastructure. The only way to achieve both of these goals – i.e., to innovate and optimize – is to transform the technology we use to deliver IT services.

This means that over the next several years, businesses must get serious about optimizing Platform 2 applications – and by that I mean bringing down the cost of running those enterprise automation applications like SAP and Microsoft – so that they can shift more of both human and financial resources toward a new set of investments: those that help make possible the more transformative aspects of the business, such as new mobile experiences, better data analytics, and deeper digital innovation around products and services.

In doing this, IT executives face a complex set of priorities:

• the first is figuring out exactly where and how to lower the cost of their current Platform 2 enterprise applications. A big part of this process involves identifying which existing enterprise workloads might be better serviced off-premise with a managed service provider or public cloud.
• the second set of priorities involves providing appropriate IT resources that allow the lines of business to innovate, create new revenue streams, and create differentiation in the marketplace. This includes supporting new application development, whether developers are working on‑prem or off-prem, with access to new development platforms that is as frictionless as possible. Additionally, as these newer applications mature, increase in number, or become more strategic in nature, the CIO needs to decide where and at what point to bring them back on‑premise.

These differing sets of priorities, one focusing on efficiencies in traditional applications and the other focused on driving innovation and new application models, create a significant dilemma for IT executives. The tension that exists between modernizing as rapidly as possible without starving core business applications is in fact a challenge for most companies. In order to continue delivering value to the business, IT leaders are realizing that they must undergo significant transformation across the IT landscape: from on/off‑prem infrastructure investment, to staffing changes, skills training, collaboration among Lines of Business, and ITaaS delivery. In most cases, this is new territory and many are looking for guidance to navigate as effectively as possible.

As a leader in the IT industry who has helped thousands to navigate similar transitions, EMC is often asked for help in building a data center that will support business for the next decade and beyond.

The first step toward supporting these often conflicting priorities is to modernize the infrastructure components on which IT is built. For the modern data center, the best approach is to leverage converged infrastructure platforms. In the past, customers built their own infrastructure and bought their applications, but increasingly now businesses are looking to invert that model. They want simple, easy to deploy infrastructure platforms, on which they can build and run the core business applications and which also provide a platform for deploying next-generation applications. Converged infrastructure allows for both. It helps reduces the time and the cost of deploying, configuring and managing hardware and software components separately and increases time to value for IT investments. Additionally, it’s essential that converged systems be built on technologies that are third-platform ready: like flash, scale-out, software defined, and cloud‑enabled systems.

The next critical step for running a modern data center is to automate the delivery of IT services to lines-of-business and application owners. IT must at every level deliver a self-service experience that is built upon a well-designed, API‑driven, management and orchestration toolset; and one that frees up development teams and other innovators from IT road blocks. This is in essence a hybrid cloud environment, with on-premise and off-premise workloads running and being managed in a seamless, integrated way. But a well-run hybrid cloud experience cannot be achieved via converged platforms alone. It requires a transformation not only of the technology, but of IT Operations which is all about transforming the people and processes that deliver value to the business. Skills and processes must be modernized to support and understand Modern Data Center priorities, and these are often the most difficult steps. Many choose to transform themselves, while others choose to redirect human capital toward driving new business innovations. As a result, many move traditional applications onto enterprise class public clouds that guarantee enterprise SLAs to current work streams, while shifting limited human capital toward the job of innovating and driving business value. And many businesses will choose to approach this transformation in phases, starting by modernizing infrastructure then automating IT services and incrementally transforming people and processes in order to support new developer demands and business models.

MODERNIZE

Converged infrastructure platforms are the most efficient and effective way to begin modernizing the data center. Converged infrastructure transforms the traditional IT process of building infrastructure component by component, to buying infrastructure all-in-one platform. A good example of this are VCE’s rack scale systems, built upon industry-standard servers, software‑defined storage and compute technologies, designed to support enterprise and service provider scale infrastructure for general-purpose workloads, both traditional and next-generation cloud native applications. Additionally, hyper‑converged infrastructure appliances are also available to deliver a complete virtual infrastructure experience in compact form factors, capable of scaling to dozens of nodes and focused on the simplicity, low cost of entry and modular approach to scaling design.

These converged/hyper‑converged platforms deliver tremendous value to businesses: up to five times more applications, provide new services to the business four times faster, reduce downtime by up to 96%, and cut the overall time required to spend on simply keeping the lights on by upwards of 41%. Of course, converged infrastructure designs alone are not responsible for these saving and results. It is the job of IT is to align infrastructure investment with business requirements. In today’s world, the business requirements have never been more clear as they’d typically sound like: “I want to be agile so that I can seize new opportunities in an ever-changing environment. And whatever I do has to be done with the utmost efficiency, in terms of cost and speed. Everything today is about speed. And not only do I have to deploy everything quickly, what I deploy has to be high-performance.”

These are in fact the three requirements of every modern business:

1. Agility
2. Efficiency
3. Speed

And converged infrastructure systems deliver on all these requirements.

When you break it all down, four foundational pillars must be in place to deliver business results via the Modern Data Center. These pillars are flash, scale out, software-defined and cloud-enabled systems, with adequate degree of Trust.

Flash

As demand for low latency performance has increased over the years, storage administrators have had to solve that problem by increasing the number of spindles in storage solutions, simply in order to deliver sufficient IOPS and latency for these workloads. Flash technology dramatically reduces the cost of delivering consistent and predictable low latency performance by reducing the number of drives required. This significantly reduces the floor space, power and cooling requirements needed to deliver storage services.

Scale-out

As business and capacity requirements grow, scale out architectural designs allow businesses to deploy systems with a low cost of entry while delivering a modular approach to scaling infrastructure. By designing these systems to scale as a single managed scale-out system, IT can efficiently manage massive capacities with very few resources.

Software-defined

Since scale out systems are managed as a single elastic namespace, they allow IT to manage massive capacities of infrastructure in a manner that modern architects refer to as “infrastructure as code”. This new software‑defined model allows to automate the configuration and deployment of IT services, delivering greater business agility and a more flexible, programmable approach to managing data services.

Cloud-enabled

Cloud-enabled infrastructure is a fundamental architectural design. Infrastructure services should be delivered via policy‑driven methodologies, and these policies should extend beyond the data center. IT should have the ability to deploy and manage information and applications, both on/off‑prem, and the flexibility to move them back and forth as the business requires.

Trust

Businesses must be able to trust the systems they leverage and the vendors they do business with, not only to deliver the best in class platforms on which to run business critical applications, but to also ensure information security and governance and provide local and remote data protection and real-time support. At the end of the day, in fact, who will you trust when driving towards your transformational goals?

AUTOMATE

Once businesses have a plan for modernizing their infrastructure, the next step is to automate everything. Any manual process that must be done as a predictable, repeatable step must be ruthlessly eliminated via management and orchestration tools, up and down the IT stack. For example, leveraging storage array APIs to consolidate and automate the configuration, deployment and ongoing operations of heterogeneous storage systems, which dramatically simplifies and drives cost out of storage operations. Service catalogs can be built and managed within tools such as VMware vRealize, Openstack and other Cloud M&O software layers. Full scale automation is the single most transformative change in IT delivery today. Not only does it accelerate service delivery while guaranteeing predictable outcomes, allowing the business to be more agile with less risk, but it frees up human capital to focus more on business value and allow their creative minds to help transform the business.

TRANSFORM

This brings us to full scale IT Transformation. While technology can be modernized and automated using hardware and software approaches, to deliver a well run hybrid cloud experience that supports multiple CIO priorities, IT itself must continuously transform the people and processes that deliver business outcomes. IT-as-a-Service means taking that Modern Datacenter platform and layering on top of that some key capabilities for extensive automation.

If internal IT teams are to succeed in competing with external IT service providers, they must learn to be organized and operate like IT service providers that can win the business, and this revolves around 3 essential directions:

1. a new IT business model - Behaving more like a professional services organization than a customer services organization, starting with the services as opposed to the technology
2. enabling technologies - Probably the easiest of the three, delivering infrastructure modernization and automation
3. DNA, Skills, Roles & Organizational Alignment

In conclusion, businesses in transformational mode today are either transforming existing IT systems towards a hybrid cloud or are building and deploying new digital applications to transform their business. In either of these scenarios, they need a modern data center infrastructure based on flash, scale out, software defined, cloud enabled and trusted technologies to transform and grow by decreasing costs, increasing agility, removing risks and driving innovation. Actually, studies across the industry continue to prove that transforming IT to a modernized hybrid cloud delivers effective change and adopting a modernized hybrid cloud is helping businesses fuel their digital transformation. For example a recent IDG survey of almost 1000 IT Executives showed that those who adopt a modernized hybrid cloud on average saved 24% on IT spend and they typically redirected 40% of those saving toward new initiatives and as a result they were 3 times more likely to be approaching their digital business goals.