Mastering Complexity in the Data Center

By Tom Schmidt

Most IT professionals would agree that a better approach to managing the data center infrastructure is long overdue. After all, the demands on data centers are growing dramatically, budgets and staff levels are essentially flat, and data centers themselves are becoming so complex, they've become increasingly hard to manage. Surely there must be a better way to manage this vital corporate asset.

This article explores a new approach to mastering data center complexity, one that is designed to help IT take proactive control of the data center, drive down costs, and increase service levels.

The complexities of today's data centers
Consider the challenges facing EDS, a $20 billion technology services company and the second largest outsourcer in the world. The scale of EDS' IT operation is enormous.

"EDS manages 65,000 servers located in 100 data centers around the world," says Larry Lozon, vice president of EDS' Data Center Services group. "On the storage side, we manage over 12 petabytes of storage. It's a diverse mix, too, with hardware and software from a wide range of different suppliers. And we have clients all around the world. Anything that rationalizes and simplifies the management of this conglomeration is obviously going to help us be more efficient -- and profitable."

Today, virtually every data center uses equipment from a variety of different storage and server hardware vendors, and these vendors each provide unique and discrete tools to manage their own platforms. Unfortunately, the result has been a proliferation of inconsistent tools and approaches.

To remedy this situation, organizations need an approach that creates a software infrastructure that enables companies to simplify their data centers, actively manage and optimize their diverse storage and server assets, and deliver IT service levels that support the business.

Data management
The need for instant, on-demand data recovery is becoming increasingly vital for all business operations. While traditional tape backups have proven effective over the years, today's dynamic business climate demands faster, more efficient backups and on-demand recovery. Disk-based data protection, specifically continuous data protection, addresses these issues in a way that eliminates the need for backup windows, allows end users to recover their own data without contacting IT, and delivers an integrated disk-to-disk-to-tape solution. For organizations looking to manage data growth, improve reliability, and speed data recovery, continuous data protection can also improve overall data protection without weighing down IT in costly, high-administration solutions. By using disk as the primary medium for data protection and recovery, organizations can leverage traditional tape backups to provide secondary data protection for longer-term retention and off-site storage.

Storage management
If IT organizations are to meet the growing demands placed on them, and at the same time keep costs under control, they must find ways to make optimal use of data center assets such as servers, storage hardware, and their IT staff. This requires the ability to transform storage management beyond a single application, or a single server, or a single storage device.

Application management
A survey conducted in July 2006 by Applied Research indicates the extent to which business application slowdowns affect business productivity, customer loyalty, and employee morale. The survey revealed that 24% of IT staff time is devoted to addressing business application performance delays. In complex business application environments, delays can be caused by changes or updates required to keep pace with end user demand. In addition, the IT professionals polled in the survey recognize that the performance and availability of these applications directly affect the customer experience. Of the IT managers polled, 76% acknowledged that persistent delays would affect customer loyalty to their organizations.

Conclusion
Data centers today are at the breaking point. Complexity has run out of control, driving costs up and jeopardizing service levels.

The goal: increased protection and availability of critical information and applications, improved utilization of storage and server hardware assets, and enhanced visibility and control of the data center environment.

Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.