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Page 1 of 2 Achieving the Promise of the Next-Generation Data Center By Jamie Bernardin published: Monday, November 17 2008
As
we face one of the worst financial crises in our lifetime, businesses today are
looking for ways to outperform their peers without breaking the bank. As they
scrutinize internal processes it has become clear that they need to make the
corporate data center more intelligent, agile and efficient. The renowned
brands we all know-the Googles and Geicos of the world-were ahead of the curve
in that respect. They achieve a higher level of performance by being able to
deliver new services and deploy the latest innovations on a global scale and on-demand.
They are able to achieve breakthrough performance by breaking free of siloed,
over-provisioned data centers.
Next generation data centers will be modular, flexible and virtualized.
Doing
so requires a shift in the way we envision our data centers. Most organizations
have achieve the goal of "always on" computing, but still fall short when it
comes to "always responsive". To get there, we need to move to dynamic delivery
of services. After all, a company can have the most exciting applications, but
if they each take weeks or months to deploy, they are wasting valuable time and
labor resources, and potentially missing out on critical market opportunities. Companies
today are bogged down by the complexity, cost and inherent risk of managing
application services throughout the entire lifecycle, from integration and
testing through provisioning, deployment, activation, scaling and monitoring.
What
is needed is a new model for data centers that meet the realities of today's
frenetically-paced business environment. Next generation data centers will be
modular, flexible and virtualized. Dynamic application service management
(DASM) is a key enabler of the promise that these next generation data centers
will bring.
Drivers
for a new data center approach
The
sheer cost of managing today's corporate data centers has spiraled out of
control. The need to support increased transaction volumes, new business units
and products, as well as growth in emerging economies has pushed IT managers to
the edge. Application deployment is labor-intensive, often taking upwards of
several weeks. Moreover, data centers are not equipped to respond to
application performance issues in real-time.
Recent
studies from McKinsey and Company reflect skyrocketing operating expenses, with
little corresponding return on investment. Even after all this expense,
businesses find their technological infrastructure too constrained. Smaller
data centers tend to run out of space and get stuck managing obsolete
technology, while larger ones still have inflexible configurations that hinder
expansion.
Then
there is the resource utilization problem. Large data centers only use an
average of six percent of their server capacity and 56% of their facility space.
This alarming inefficiency is due primarily to poor capacity planning and
insight into resource usage. Even with techniques such as virtualization,
servers are rarely experiencing more than 50% utilization. Applications exist
in silos (or virtual silos), because the organization lacks the tools to
dynamically share resources and schedule workloads based on actual user demand.
This is to be expected. After all, none of us has a crystal ball to foresee
what the next business challenges will be, so how can we expect IT managers to
adequately prepare for the unknown without overspending.
To
add insult to injury, reports find that data centers are the largest source of
greenhouse gas emissions. The bottom line is, we are wasting money and
resources at a time when we should be reining in costs.
A vision
of dynamic, always responsive application services
Fortunately,
there are ways businesses can break free of this static data center model that
for far too long has squelched agility. Applications are and will remain the
lifeblood of today's businesses. We simply need a more dynamic way to manage
them. Progressive IT organizations are utilizing DASM to drive lower cost of
application ownership and greater responsiveness to change. This approach yields
five important benefits:
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