Improving Data Center Efficiencies with Innovative Technologies

When asked to list the most pressing problems and challenges they face today, the reply from our customers is almost always the same – first and foremost it is data center consolidation. Hewlett Packard is one such example, and their case illustrates why getting it right is important. HP recently announced the consolidation of their 85 data centers worldwide to just six in the US. Business imperatives such as this require the design of a network to support these six major consolidated data centers, one that is capable of supporting a global network of tens of thousands of users. When HP publicly announced this planned consolidation, their stock price rose four percent, because the changes meant projected operational cost savings of around one billion dollars.

Those facing consolidation want to remove the negative side of distributed, workgroup and departmental computing that they have experienced in the last few decades, where applications were moved from the mainframe to departmental servers and client server applications. Whether driven by the network, the server team, or the application, servers started appearing under desks, in wiring closets and sometimes even broom closets. Through data center consolidation, centralized IT management aim to establish a strong IT governance model. Fortunately, the technologies exist today to overcome the organizational challenges associated with this and, most importantly, to ensure that the user experience isn’t degraded.

Today’s data centers – the challenges
Over the last 5-10 years, data center complexity has risen – storage was decoupled from the server creating storage networks, compute fabrics evolved based on Infiniband technologies. Furthermore, in the last 13 years, computation capacity in clustered environments has increased by four orders of magnitude. All of this means that enterprises today must manage a vastly more complex environment than they faced a decade ago.

As a result, the operational expense and human assets necessary to support and manage this infrastructure is now much greater than the telecommunication costs of interconnecting a distributed environment. It has become increasingly cost-effective, both from a telco perspective and a people perspective (and also in terms of utilization of assets), to bring servers back centrally. Few of us would be happy with an employee who worked 20 percent of the time, so why be content with a server that does so?

A second key data center challenge for enterprises is business continuance and disaster recovery requirement. We’re finding that, even down to the commercial level, there is now a strong focus among companies on insourcing or outsourcing disaster recovery models.

Disaster, whether man-made or natural, can seriously impact your business. When Hurricane Katrina hit, many companies found that they lost their data centers and, without a functioning backup facility, business ground to a halt. One solution is to use an active-active or active-standby redundant facility, ensuring that those facilities are far enough away to be protected against the power outage, natural disaster, etc.

When the data center works right, it can protect against an outage in such a way that the end-user doesn’t even know there has been a problem. There is a collection of dedicated technologies and applications to enable that.

The last thing that is becoming a challenge in data centers – which is possibly exacerbated by data center consolidation – is power and cooling. Where we once had three or four servers in a rack, we now have 20-40; the density has increased dramatically. Organizations suddenly find themselves faced with 12-15,000 watts per rack and some blade server deployments that generate 30,000 watts, all of which needs cooling. Businesses are running out of capacity – not only space, but power.

So why consolidate?

The foremost benefit of consolidation is a reduction in operations costs. It is very hard to refute the fact that, in Hewlett Packard’s case for example, six facilities are far easier to manage than 85. There’s also the cost of running the facilities themselves – cost of power, interconnectivity from telecom links, etc. It’s all about economy of scale. Large organizations can often do the same work with fewer, larger and better-interconnected servers. Bringing servers together in a central facility is one example of how consolidating data centers can have a direct impact on the cost of operations or the future capital outlay required.

Storage is another good example; moving toward a single consolidated storage area network allows the enterprise to achieve more efficient utilization of the assets they already own.

There are also advantages in improving business productivity. As an example, when we as a company consolidated multiple storage area networks to a single large and global storage area network, the number of people needed to support our storage reduced from 32 to eight. These people were then moved to other areas of IT that needed their expertise and were retrained, enabling us to make better use of our assets.

One final advantage that is often overlooked, and that we achieved through our storage consolidation, is an improvement in service velocity. Previously, if I needed a terabyte of storage for a new application, IT would tell me to wait a month. Today, they can have it online for me tomorrow. We also reduced the total cost of ownership of managing that storage by nearly 80 percent and achieved more efficient utilization of our capital assets.

The data center of the future

In the next year, we will see an increasing focus on provisioning. As we start to enable end-to-end provisioning of the network and network-attached elements we will see a very dramatic shift in enterprise systems capability in the data center.

A key aim for us is finding ways to make the network more usable, and moving towards a network that is more adaptable to the business needs. The aim is to be able to install a server, plug it in, turn it on and walk away. That server will then connect to the storage network and the local area network, it will be mounted to the drive it needs, will load the necessary applications, and be on the right LAN segment, network services, firewalls, intrusion detection, application networking, etc. to function as a useful part of the overall IT infrastructure of that enterprise.

The other trend that will continue to grow and that will absolutely change the way that data centers are designed and operated is server virtualization technologies.

Virtualization and the data center

Virtualization is probably the most overused term in networking today and everyone’s experience and definition of it is different. Virtualization is about taking a resource and either extending its reach out to groups that weren’t able to access it before or segmenting it in such a way that one server looks like 10. The most common example of virtualization, and one that is receiving a lot of attention today, is server virtualization. Server utilization is often less than 15-20 percent, and this means that a huge opportunity exists to reclaim those servers, use them more efficiently, or to add multiple virtual machines to them. Other forms of virtualization that are happening today, but are perhaps receiving less airtime, include security virtualization, application networking virtualization, storage virtualization, storage network virtualization and local area network virtualization.

To be relevant to CIOs today, we need to consider virtualization as a key technology area. At Cisco, we moved our server load balancing and content switching, and application front-end and SSL technologies into the virtualization realm with the recent introduction of the Application Control Engine (ACE) module and its customer contacts. Those customer contacts can be applied to some of the business challenges of compliance – for example, segmenting the customer-facing applications for traceability – and we can do that with less equipment than our competitors. And, of course, less equipment also means lower power and cooling costs, and less space required. The ROI can be measured in months – weeks, in some cases.

In every major product category, we’re shifting from a focus on consolidation alone – which is about scale, availability and performance – to a focus also on virtualization.

Demonstrating real value

We have a very intimate and direct relationship with our largest customers and take the time to work with them to show how our products can solve their issues and illustrate what business benefits can result through an architecture approach. We also encourage our own IT department to interface with customers, to communicate what problems they are experiencing with complex systems, and how they can be overcome with different types of solutions.

Cisco will continue to do outreach to industry thought leaders and attend the key industry events to build awareness of Cisco data center networking solutions can drive business benefits for our customers.

Since we know that networking alone will not solve our customers problems, we will work even closer with our industry leading partners to provide end-to-end solutions for our customers, with a broader, in-depth focus . At Cisco, we understand the powerful role the network can play in the data center and we aim to communicate the best data center networking strategies for our customers and promote the quantified diverse business benefits resulted from consolidation and virtualization technologies – the benefits we’ve experienced in-house, and those we have seen accomplished by our customers.

To learn more about innovative data center technologies from Cisco visit: www.cisco.com/go/datacenter