Journey to the Cloud – How Far Down the Road Should You Be?

By Kent Christensen, Virtualization Practice Manager, Datalink

Many CIOs today are looking to understand how cloud computing—or at least virtualization—can revolutionize IT from a complex, burdensome environment to a dynamic, agile, services-oriented architecture that accelerates business objectives and competitiveness. Rarely has there been such dramatic opportunity for IT transformation. Yet moving an organization from existing operations to a “cloud” can be a confusing proposition since the concept of a cloud is somewhat abstract. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time.”

“In not virtualizing across the data center, an organization risks losing gains in one area to inefficiencies in another, creating operational challenges as virtualization scales up”
-Kent Christensen

While the industry shifts to a cloud paradigm applicable to enterprise organizations, there are tremendous opportunities to transform internal IT operations to revolutionize the data center and obtain sizeable efficiencies. Virtualization across the data center can provide spectacular savings on floor space and power and cooling costs, as well as utilization of existing assets across servers, storage and networking. While financial benefits alone are compelling, the largest gains can be obtained by reducing complexity and streamlining the speed at which IT accelerates the business.

Need to Go Beyond Server Virtualization

These benefits cannot be maximized with server virtualization alone. A virtualized data center takes a holistic approach to server, storage, network, processes and management to create a dynamic, efficient and agile infrastructure. In not virtualizing across the data center, an organization risks losing gains in one area to inefficiencies in another, creating operational challenges as virtualization scales up.

A virtual data center leverages virtualization technologies that abstract the relationship between the services offered and the physical hardware. This provides the obvious benefit of consolidating resources into pools that make sharing more efficient. But the largest gains are obtained by the additional services that virtualization provides and the reduced complexity in having fewer things to manage.

Most organizations are familiar with consolidating servers with a hypervisor such as VMware or Microsoft® Hyper-V. However, the most significant value is not the hypervisor, but rather the management capabilities and integration in the virtualization infrastructure management suite. Examples include the ability to move workloads across hardware platforms, provide high availability, dynamically allocate workloads across resources and even enable disaster recovery. The power of virtualization is multiplied as integration with compute, storage, network, management and security technologies are leveraged to create a synergistic approach.

Storage is a Benefactor

Virtualization has dramatic effects on storage as well. Again, the abstraction layer that separates the storage device from the provisioning of storage services can produce tremendous results – over and beyond simply pooling and sharing storage space. For instance, data can be written and read over multiple protocols (i.e., Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI and NFS) to balance performance costs and ease of use. Multiple storage devices can be leveraged and tiered to provide the right cost/performance benefits to applications as they are needed. And, like server virtualization, additional services such as thin provisioning (the ability to promise the storage requested yet provide the storage needed),  deduplication (the reduction of redundant data) and clones (multiple copies of data leveraging a single source copy) can reduce the amount of physical storage required to support applications by well over 50%.

Networking Gains are Real

Networking is the latest component to be integrated into the virtual data center. Until recently, network administrators couldn't  manage a virtual application because the view ended at the physical server. Now networks can apply policies to applications even if they are running in a virtual environment. In addition, networks can be consolidated to provide multiple services (like storage, data, management and availability) over a single converged network, reducing the need to provide multiple cables and network connections to each server.

The result is a pool of resources that work together to support the organization's application loads. The combined virtualized server, storage and network infrastructure pool provides tremendous efficiencies, not only in cost but also in flexibility and manageability. For many organizations this becomes the preferred platform to support many, if not all, mission critical applications. The platform provides services equivalent to or above purpose-built application stacks that support a single application. These benefits span availability, redundancy, security, high performance and even local and remote failover. Since the infrastructure is virtualized, most applications can take advantage of the platform with no modification. As a result, when the business needs to bring up a new application, it can leverage the existing infrastructure and usually bring the application online in a fraction of the time and cost normally associated with architecting a new application platform.

How Do You Get from Point A to Point B?

So how does an organization go from potentially disparate strategies (and sometimes even different operational groups) across servers, storage and networking to providing a unified virtual data center approach that offers efficiencies today and also positions the organization to leverage cloud services in the future?  The organizational challenges can be greater than the technical ones. The technology is well on the way to becoming an accepted best practice in a virtualized dynamic data center. Yet, to successfully adopt the solution and benefits, the organization needs to embrace a new way of thinking about IT and rally around a unified approach to data center computing. Organizations that have had the most success have a strong leader who champions the strategy and coordinates all parts of the IT organization to work together to execute against the vision.

Even then, rarely does a company transform its IT infrastructure into a virtual data center overnight. Instead,  organizations must identify the most significant pain points (infrastructure utilization, storage efficiency, mission critical application management, etc.) and focus on architecting a solution to address those components up front, while maintaining the objective to build toward the virtual dynamic data center or internal cloud. In many cases, improvement in those areas will provide the highest initial ROI and organizational benefit, yet not detract from the final vision of being cloud enabled. The path to the cloud is not an event. It is a journey where much can be gained along the way.

About the author

Kent Christensen is a virtualization practice manager for Datalink, a data center solutions and services provider for Fortune 500 and mid-tier enterprises. Christensen leads Datalink's virtualization practice, keeping abreast on the latest technology developments, directing the adoption of virtualization hardware and software technologies and services, and consulting with customers regarding their data center strategies. For more information, contact Datalink at (800) 448-6314 or www.datalink.com.