Building a Habitat for Technology

Part six in a series. Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO and the author of The Green and Virtual Data Center.

New IT data center facilities can be designed to be green and energy efficient. Existing facilitates can be upgraded and enhanced to address various energy and environmental concerns. It is critical to understand the various components and practices that comprise a physical data center. Beyond the basics, abstracted items that make up cloud and managed service virtual data centers must be accounted for to implement strategies to achieve a green and virtual data center.

As mentioned in previous installments, virtual data centers require physical resources to function. Similarly, physical IT resources, including servers, storage, and networks, require habitats or physical facilities to safely and securely house them. An IT data center is similar to a factory in that it is a combination of equipment used to transform resources into useful goods and services.

A factory is more than a building; it also requires equipment and raw resources to be processed. And a factory is more than a room or building full of equipment in which to process raw goods. A productive factory requires energy, management, automation, and other tools to run at peak efficiency. In the case of IT data centers, best practices, metrics, and measurements for insight into infrastructure resource management (IRM) combined with facilities and equipment operating in an energy-efficient manner result in a viable and economical data center.

Closing or eliminating the previously discussed green gap involves understanding the many facets of being green as a way of doing business, including actually addressing power, cooling, floor-space, energy, or economics (PCFE) issues as opposed to being preoccupied with being perceived as green. Given that data centers provide a safe and secure habitat, including power, cooling, and floor space, for IT resources, addressing the green gap involves taking a closer look at various data center challenges and issues.All data centers, whether company-owned physical facilities, a virtual out-sourced or managed service facility, or a cloud-based service, rely on some real and physical facility somewhere. Likewise, Web and traditional applications that rely on virtual servers, virtual storage, and virtual networks also need physical servers, storage, and networks housed somewhere.

Server consolidation using virtualization is part of an approach to addressing PCFE issues. Consolidation by itself only addresses those servers and applications that lend themselves to being consolidated; it does not help or address applications that need to scale beyond the limits of a single or even multiple servers. Thus, in addition to server consolidation for candidate servers and applications, deployment of newer-generation, faster, and more energy-efficient equipment helps to address various PCFE issues.

IT resources including servers, storage, networking and applications that are hosted remotely in an abstracted and virtualized manner are commonly referred to as cloud or managed services. While the implementations and vendor marketing initiatives around cloud services -- including cloud-based computing, cloud storage, or cloud-based applications and software as a service -- have evolved, they are in essence variations of previously available managed or hosted services. For example, instead of maintaining IT facilities, servers, storage, networks, and applications, organizations can opt to have business applications run remotely as a service on someone else's hosted virtual environment accessed via a public or private network.

The term "cloud" stems from the generic cloud nomenclature that is often used to abstractly represent various services or functionality. For example, often in diagrams a cloud is used to represent some infrastructure item such as a network, the Internet, or some other generic entity without showing the details. Similarly, cloud computing or cloud storage leverages this cloud or generic nomenclature to abstract the services actually being delivered.

Cloud and managed service provider names and acronyms may be new; however, the fundamental concepts go back most recently to the ISP, ASP, SSP, or generic xSP models of the Internet dotcom craze. Older variations include on-site managed services, time-sharing, and service bureaus, as well as traditional outsourcing to a third-party firm. What has changed besides the names and buzzwords are the types of services, cost structure, network and processing performance improvements, and availability. What remains constant is an increasing amount of data to move and store for longer periods of time, along with existing and emerging threat and security risks.Leveraging cloud servers, hosting, and managed service providers enable organizations to focus on core business functions or avoid costs associated with establishing an IT data center. Some business models rely extensively on outsourced or managed services, including contract manufacturing for virtual factories, managed payroll, and human resource functions from companies like ADP and Paychex, or email services from other providers.

While smaller businesses can offload or defer costs to managed service providers for functions including data protection, email, Web hosting, and other functions, large organizations can also leverage online, managed, and traditional outsourcing services as part of an overall IT virtual data center strategy. For example, legacy applications associated with aging hardware can be shifted to a managed service provider whose economies of skill and operating best-practices may be more cost-effective than in-house capabilities. By shifting some work to third parties, internal IT resources including hardware, facilities, and staff can be redeployed to support emerging applications and services. Similarly, new technologies and applications can be quickly deployed using managed service providers, while internal capabilities, staffing, and associated technologies are brought up to speed prior to bringing applications back in-house.

Cloud and managed services can be thought of as service delivery capabilities or "personalities" of IT resources, such as servers for compute or running applications as well as data repositories for storing data. Some examples of service personalities include email, digital archiving management systems, and online file storage, portals for parking your photos and videos, backup, replication, and archiving storage targets, among others.

A benefit of cloud, managed, utility or hosted services is to offload IT functions from organizations, enabling them to focus on their core business. Essentially, costs and control are shifted to a third party instead of an organization establishing and managing IT resources on its own. If an IT data center is optimized for productivity and efficient resource use, the cost to use a third-party or external service may be higher than using internal resources. On the other hand, internal resources can be supplemented by external services for email, Web hosting, business continuity, and disaster recovery, or other specialized services. Third-party services can also be used for surge or on-demand supplement resource capacity to shift certain applications while updating or restructuring existing data centers.

Regarding cloud and managed solution providers, look into how they will ensure that different customers' data and applications are kept separate, not only on disk storage systems and file systems but also when in memory on virtual servers. Another thing to consider is the establishment of alternate copies of critical data elsewhere, independent of the copy entrusted to the cloud or managed solution provider, to ensure continued access as well as to guard against data loss or loss of accessibility to data when a cloud service goes offline unexpectedly.It is important to determine if moving applications or data to a cloud is simply moving a problem or is an opportunity to improve the overall business. It is also necessary to keep in mind that a cloud-based service needs to make a profit and needs to rely on its own host or managed service provider to house its service or leverage its own facility including equipment. Its goal is to keep costs as low as possible, spreading resources across multiple users or subscribers, which could lead to performance or resource contention issues. Performance and latency or delays in accessing information from a cloud or network-based service provider also need to be kept in perspective. Mission-critical or high-risk applications may not be well suited for a cloud or Web-based model, however, they can be safely hosted in managed facilities or outsourced data centers using secure best practices.

Cloud and virtual data centers still require physical resources, including servers, storage, and networks, as well as a facility to house the hardware and software to deliver and manage the service. Similar to a manufacturing company performing a make-versus-buy analysis along with building in-house or using a third-party considerations, IT organizations moving forward should analyze their needs and requirements for in-house or external cloud and managed provider services.

Data centers continue to evolve and, with a growing spotlight on green PCFE-related issues, there are opportunities to improve productivity. Data centers will continue to adapt to support changing business needs, boosting efficiency and productivity to remain competitive. Factories need to be reinvested in and retooled to remain competitive; so, too, must IT data centers be kept up to date to remain competitive and be a corporate asset rather than a cost center. This means that investments need to be made to improve the efficiency and use of resources, such as electrical power, so more work can be done with available resources.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on data center unification. Download the report here (registration required).

Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO, an IT industry research and consulting firm. He has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, and capacity planner for various IT organizations, and also has held positions with industry vendors. He is author of the new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and of the SNIA-endorsed book "Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)".0