One Vendor - or Two, or Three or….

In today’s market place, we typically run into two philosophies. Its either a one throat to choke philosophy that seeks advantage through leverage of one point of contact and negotiation, or it’s a choose two and play them off against each other philosophy. Sometimes we find the operationally focused organization with a multi vendor approach driven by the illusion that happiness in IT comes from highly configured fit for purpose solutions.  Even though end user needs are rarely known empirically.

Personally, I think the key here is to ensure the reference architecture does not contain any defacto or hidden lock-in. Some examples of how lock-in can occur include appliance solutions (like backup and dedup), virtualization that is not frame based, and encryption enforced over all disk based storage.

If there are no impediments to data migration, then moving to another vendor is not only doable but should actually be a defined process that is tested once a year (like disaster recovery) just to make sure no vendor has secretly captured the storage jewels.

I’d recommend closely constraining the number of suppliers as part of an official policy to minimize the technologies that need investment and training in administrative support. That’s where the real expense lies. People costs go up and up, hardware costs go down and down.

Administrative workload (cost) is calculated by the number of technologies that need managing times the number of activities occurring in provisioning and alerts, times the complexity of the environment.

The ability to minimize administrative support should always trump lower hardware prices. It should also trump the illusion of business satisfaction that comes from allegedly fit for purpose solutions where each tier has a highly engineered unique technology, albeit to meet a “business need that is more often presumed than defined with specific attributes. The strategic view has to place inordinate emphasis on automated monitoring, provisioning and management. As we progress and listen to the many stakeholders involved and try to capture their interests and needs in empirical terms, its critical to think carefully and objectively to identify the real problem that we are trying to solve, and then to make sure, through due diligence, that the solution does not cause unintended consequences – like vendor lock-in. Saving pennies in hardware can costs multiple dollars in on going administrative expense.

By Dick Benton, GlassHouse Principal Consultant

So going green seems to me a relatively new label to old data center problems / considerations. Power consumption, air conditioning, floor space, rack density. Outside the data center, green means things like low emissions, ride your bike to work, clean energy, reduce your carbon footprint, recycle, or even plant a tree.

So where it makes $ sense, go for the green. Here’s some areas that I think of and make a lot of sense to consider when going data center green:

Servers:
blade servers - increase rack density and decrease power consumption per server ratio (power, cooling, less EOL junk in 5-10 year)
server virtualization - reduce server count and better utilize compute cycles (power, cooling, less EOL junk in 5-10 year)

Storage:
Archiving - if sent to a idle medium like tape or idle disk (power and cooling)
Thin provisioning - or any other storage virtualization that allows for better utilization and deferred storage purchase (power and cooling)

Networking:
Data center interconnect aggregation - SAN and TCP/IP blades combined in an enterprise switch. Reduces Networking equipment footprint (power, cooling, less EOL junk in 5-10 year)

I’m sure there are many more you all can think up, but what you don’t see a lot of out there are clean energy solutions hitting the data center. Solar, wind, geothermal heating/cooling etc… The above technologies attempt to reduce how we consume resources in the data center, but what about shifting to a cleaner source of power for the data center. Unfortunately in my experience this is left up to NSTAR to figure out.

-James Brissenden, GlassHouse Senior Consultant, Storage and Data Protection

A while back I wrote a white paper for GlassHouse - Five tips for a green data center it read. Practical tips was its objective.
Since that time almost every vendor has jumped on the green wagon. Of course every vendor has their own claim to getting there. Some claim that SATA drives spin slower and hence should be considered green. Some claim solid state drives generate less heat and are placing bets on them. Some claim spinning down disks when they are not being used is the way to go. No matter how you look at it, there is no escaping the fact that there is no universal agreement on how to really make storage green nor is there any pattern that seems to have emerged thus far. Makes me wonder…
You as the keeper of storage however can do a little bit of everything to reduce the footprint, bring down consumption and prepare for your own version of green storage. I recommend taking a pragmatic approach. Start with the low hanging fruit and work your way up. Grandiose plans should be kept aside for now.
What do I mean by that?
For starters, check if every byte of storage out there is really needed or not. Does it have to be on the most “power” expensive (power consumption and heat dissipation) disk? Can it be moved to something more reasonable? Are there storage systems out there that are not being used? How about simply powering them off?
If you are in the market for new storage, put power and heat on the top of your list. Compare data. Look at new features.
Keep in mind that green is also of a way of thinking and lifestyle change than just pure hardware. It applies at home and in the same way applies to the data center.
-Ashish Nadkarni, GlassHouse Principal Consultant

The fragile economy has driven a heightened need for IT departments to control capital outlays and operational expenditures and to provide cost transparency to the consumers of IT services. This cost containment and transparency are best pursued with two things: first a clear understanding of the baseline component unit costs and the associated “current state” run rate projected over time, and second an overarching return on investment (ROI) vision of improvements that could be undertaken in the environment.

Improvements fall into several “buckets”, not necessarily in order of priority or ease of implementation:

1. Improved process efficiencies, in reference to upstream demand planning
2. Improved process efficiencies, in reference to downstream utilization of provisioned resources
3. Re-tiering of storage
4. Re-architecture or re-design of data protection policies
5. Modernization of backup infrastructure, including use of deduplication to minimize or eliminate reliance on physical tape
6. Virtualization and consolidation of physical server resources
7. Reduced operating costs through data center consolidation

The relative ROI values for these endeavors can vary dramatically depending on the size of the client environment and the maturity of the client organization within the context of ITSM best practices and the service provider model.

The organizations that are less mature are more likely to have larger process inefficiencies, too much storage on expensive tiers, exceedingly complex environments, and few if any documented service levels that define IT value to the business. The more mature organizations typically have tighter alignment between business drivers and IT policies, including data protection and archiving, as well as defined service levels and appropriately engineered and standardized infrastructure to support those service levels.

It is vital to the health of your business to make optimal use of the IT assets you already have or are planning to buy. Understanding how your processes and supporting infrastructure may drive improved return on IT investments is the first step.

-Robert Latimer, GlassHouse Senior Consultant