Table of Contents - Dell · 2020. 7. 8. · establish your current data center capabilities and set...

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2013 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2

Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3

Innovation of the Data Center Upgrade Business ....................................................................... 4

Upgrades: The Human Effect ..................................................................................................... 5

Levels of Upgrade ...................................................................................................................... 5

Upgrade Types .......................................................................................................................... 7

Upgrade Challenges .................................................................................................................. 9

Key Steps in an Optimal Data Center Upgrade .........................................................................11

Data Center Upgrade Plan, Phases, and Process .....................................................................14

Using Virtualization When Upgrading the Data Center ..............................................................19

Disclaimer: The views, processes, or methodologies published in this article are those of the

author. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes, or methodologies.


Introduction

Business climates changes, business models change, information technology certainly

changes, and data centers change. What? Data centers change? Yes. The view that the data

center is just a room or facility that is a large capital investment and built every 10 to 15 years

has indeed changed. This doesn’t mean throw more money into it with greater frequency.

Rather, it means approaching it in new ways and making intelligent decisions about the data

center. The data center strategy is just as important as the IT strategy it protects and provides

for and the business strategy that both empower.

Remember: “It’s not just your data center; it’s your business center”

This Knowledge Sharing article introduces innovation implementation theory to the EMC Proven

Professional body of knowledge and draws service delivery implications for implementing

effective IT upgrades within organizations.


Innovation of the Data Center Upgrade Business

Most companies hope to get the same service from their data centers as they were getting

some years back. Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to achieving that length of service. In

particular, some key components that data centers rely on are not designed to last that long. In

addition, rapidly changing data processing requirements demand that data centers remain

flexible and support greater rack densities. Massive data growth, tough economic conditions,

and physical data center limitations (power, heat, and space) exert extreme pressure on IT

infrastructures. Finding ways to take cost, complexity, and associated business risk out of the

data center without sacrificing service levels has become a major objective for almost every

enterprise.

Typical characteristics of degraded data centers include:

complex cabling

increase of unplanned data

legacy operating systems

old application versions

electrical and mechanical failures

degraded efficiency of power and cooling

aging equipment

lack of scalability and flexibility

changing regulatory compliance

out-of-date documentation

These types of data centers are more prone to local disasters, equipment failures, disk errors,

inefficient, poor output, more administrative and managerial overheads, heat up of apparatus,

and lower speed.

The world of technology has seen plenty of change in recent years. To keep up with it,

organizations with data centers that are 10 years of age or older should seriously consider

modernizing those facilities.

This article adopts data center upgrade as a program for innovation implemented within IT

organizations of businesses, for the purpose of enabling the organization’s information assets to

deliver strategic business benefits. It is about delivering business upgraded capabilities through

IT innovation.


This article views data center upgrade as a general program for business, technology, process,

and behavior innovation. Upgrade refers to the replacement of the product with the new version

of the same product in order to bring the system up to date or to improve its characteristics and

enabling the business to flexibly and quickly respond and deliver business services. Data center

upgrade impacts infrastructure, applications, and the user experience.

Upgrades: The Human Effect

Successful upgrades are brought about by deep organizational willingness to change at its

core—its approach, organization, and processes, its infrastructure and toolsets, and its

skillsets—and by the ability to address and stay focused on the many multiple threads of an

upgrade initiative until the desired end state is achieved. Some organizations that have

achieved a level of efficiency and maturity may not require a transformation, and some may

even choose to wash their hands of technology altogether and outsource to a third party. You

and your management should consider the following questions to help you determine if your

organization is a candidate for this journey:

Do you understand the profound opportunity inherent in a data center upgrade?

Do you understand the challenges ahead and are you ready to assume the risk?

Do you have the discipline to stick with an upgrade initiative even when progress and

benefits realized at any point are not up to expectations?

Do you have the strong sponsorship you need to support you throughout your journey?

Do you have the “can-do” culture to enable and sustain momentum and achieve your

upgrade goals?

Do you have the upgrade leadership in place?

Do you have the right staff to carry out this journey?

Levels of Upgrade

The levels of upgrade are defined based on the key business requirement and associated IT

challenges to determine where you want to focus your upgrade efforts first. You also need to

establish your current data center capabilities and set goals for your upgrade program.

The combination of upgrade framework and maturity model such as those illustrated in Table 1

can help you evaluate your current capabilities—where you are today. An assessment of your

data center against this framework can enable you to have strategic discussions on the


business value of deploying new technologies to improve the current state of your IT

infrastructure and address cost issues, security risk, and operational agility.

Basic Standard Rationalized Dynamic

Customer and Service

Support technology always in "react"

mode

Service catalog established

Service catalog SLA reports to clients

Utilization-based chargeback

Allocation-based

chargeback Automated services

management

Organization and Process

No formal processes, procedures

Process efficiency baseline established

IT best practices documented,

measured

Continuous process improvement

Some best practice

processes documented

Managed automation

Automated management reports

RACI aligment Operation for

virtualization in place

Infrastructure and Toolsets

Technology "silos" supporting single

applications

Tiering, application alignment

Broader virtualization

deployed

Complete production virtualization

Many non-integrated tools

Availability alternatives assessed

Policy-based data classification

Multi-site load balanced DR

Targeted, policy-based archiving

Backup to disk, Optimization

Policy-based data mobility

Infrastructure consolidation

Limited virtualization

deployed

Backup architecture

rationalized


People

Employees support technologies without training experience

Career paths defined Strong retention through career

growth, mobility

Business requirements

gathering skills in IT

Skill set assessed,

training plan in place

Benefits Realization

IT viewed as cost center IT value

difficult to articulate

Lower-cost, efficient data centers

Energy related savings from virtualization

Agile infrastructure

Consistent IT

services across enterprise

IT service performance reports

IT service performance

Information pooled, available for re-use

Decision support enabled

Business intelligence enabled

Table 1

Upgrade Types

Not all data centers require the same type of upgrade. The need to upgrade depends upon the

key business requirement and bottleneck in achieving the business goals. Data center upgrades

are therefore categorized in various types depending upon the IT requirement. There can be

more than what is presented below but here are some of the major types of upgrades.

Site upgrade

Some data centers are required to shift or moved due to space limitations or cost

factors. In such scenarios, a site upgrade is necessary in which land evaluation, land

analysis, building evaluation, and space planning is required.

o In land evaluation, a comprehensive study of sites is provided, including

characteristics and utilities. Multiple sites are evaluated and ranked based on

location, environmental limitations, available utilities, and aesthetics.

o Land analysis provides an in-depth study of site conditions (surface and

subsurface), characteristics, and suitability.

o Building evaluation is required to analyze the suitability of an existing building.

o Space planning is also required in such cases for future business growth and

sustainability of the new shifted data center for many years.


Mechanical upgrade

Mechanical upgrade pertains to existing equipment, including air conditioning, cleansing

and distribution, water chillers, and heat rejection. The fire detection and suppression

equipment are the recommended setups for the upgrades, Mechanical upgrades also

include uninterruptible power supply and battery equipment.

Electrical upgrade

The electrical upgrade is generally observed in many of data centers due to growing

data and business demands. New hardware in the data centers typically consumes extra

power. This requires upgrade to power distribution units (PDUs) to deliver the required

outputs. Besides data centers, lighting and other areas for the data center and support

rooms also fall under this category. The electrical upgrade also covers safety, grounding,

and noise attenuation issues.

Network upgrade

Network upgrade includes upgrade of switches, modules, hubs, and network cables. The

continuous demand for a fast network and fast accessibility drives the need for the

network upgrade. Today, speed is the main concern in the data center. It has taken quite

a while but 10GbE has become the standard for data center network backbones.

Connectors, SFP, and modules also come into play under network upgrade.

Hardware upgrade

Hardware upgrade is required when the business demands increase from critical to

mission critical. Improvements to hardware lead to faster accessibility and less response

time for the users. Hardware upgrades include servers, storage, supporting systems,

desktops, etc. A server upgrade includes decommission of the old models and

commissioning of the new models with smart arrays and more advanced hardware.

Storage upgrades include upgrading the storage tiers from slow disks to faster disks.

Generally, chassis upgrade also comes under hardware upgrades.

Software upgrade

Software upgrades include firmware, drivers, tools, management consoles versions,

reporting software, alerts. etc. This type of upgrade is more frequent and required for

better output and to reduce bugs in the existing supporting software.


Upgrade Challenges

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick

walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick

walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the

other people” (by Randy Pausch, The last Lecture).

Data center upgrade projects are critical to the success of the initiatives that the upgrades

support; an enterprise-wide application upgrade, a data center consolidation, or an

infrastructure upgrade. Such upgrades impact business-critical data, applications, and systems,

and result in significant cost. The data center upgrade project itself possesses significant risks

and requires proper planning and attention to ensure success of the data up gradation and the

initiatives that it supports.

S. No. Types of Risks/Challenges

1 Information Growth

2 Infrastructure Complexity and Interdependencies

3 Different Geographies

4 Unexpected or Extended Downtime

5 Performance

6 Heterogeneous Data Center Vendors

7 Funding the project

8 Out-of-date documentation

9 Risk of downtime during construction

10 Code compliance

11 Other (Stability/KT)

12 Do not know/NA

Information growth and infrastructure complexity: Today’s complex environment—including

ever-increasing information growth, number of vendors and applications being deployed,


applications becoming Tier 1, and complex infrastructures—drive higher cost and risk. While IT

organizations work to deliver specific service requests with innovation, speed of delivery,

flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, they must also concentrate on addressing the specific

upgrade challenges listed here to ensure that they continue to manage complexity and reduce

risk.

Unexpected or Extended Downtime: Detailed and careful planning needs to take place to

clearly identify windows in which downtime is acceptable and ensure that no data is lost. For

data migration projects that include mission-critical business data, the risk of impacting sales

operations is high; the loss of availability or access to the data could directly impact the profit

and loss of the business. Trends in compute architectures and the adoption of virtualization

have increased the number of applications running on a single host. This has resulted in

decreasing maintenance windows where the downtime to a host can result in multiple significant

application outages.

Performance: Discussions with any customer regarding data center upgrade will always raise

two major questions:

1. Will performance be affected during migration activity?

2. Will all of my data remain available and accessible to users during the upgrade process?

These factors need to be kept in mind when designing an upgrade activity. It has been observed

during every upgrade that these two will impact your business every now and then both in terms

of cost performance and data availability.

Heterogeneous Data Center Vendors: It is rare to find a customer using only one data center

technology in its infrastructure. In heterogeneous data center environments, a number of factors

need to be considered while upgrading equipment from old to newer versions. These factors

vary depending upon downtime availability, technology, and cost.

Funding the project: Before data center managers can update a computing facility, they must

first persuade senior executives to fund and authorize such a project. That means building a

detailed and persuasive business model complete with concrete ROI calculations. Without prior

experience, however, assembling such facts and figures can be difficult.

Out-of-date documentation: Retrofitting an older data center’s electrical or mechanical

systems haphazardly can result in overloads and other dangerous conditions. To prevent such


problems from occurring, facilities managers need access to complete and accurate blueprints

of the data center’s existing electrical or mechanical infrastructure. Unfortunately, many

companies neglect to keep those documents up to date.

Risk of downtime during construction: Few companies can afford to take a data center

offline for months at a time during upgrades. Yet replacing electrical and mechanical systems in

a live, production environment without affecting availability can be a demanding task and

requires careful planning.

Code compliance: Data center operators must verify that any changes they make to a facility’s

electrical or mechanical systems comply with current arc flash safety requirements. However,

conducting thorough arc flash studies without jeopardizing critical workloads requires specific

engineering knowledge and skills.

Key Steps in an Optimal Data Center Upgrade

Data center upgrade projects are complex projects that pose significant cost and risk. To

successfully complete a data migration project, organizations must develop a comprehensive

plan encompassing people, processes, and technology. There are many steps for data center

upgrade but most critical stages are overviewed here:

Assembling the right project team

This is the first and most important stage for any data center upgrade. The project team for the

data center upgrade should include all relevant stakeholders from within the organization as well

as a complete set of appropriate vendor partners. Internal stakeholders should be in agreement

with respect to goals and objectives of the project, and there should be no organizational silos

between the IT and facilities departments. Make sure that vendor partners under consideration

have documented proof of having successfully completed similar projects under similar

circumstances in the past.

Assessment and planning

Initial investigation of any project is key to achieve successful completion. The homework gives

you an idea of the limitations and risks associated with the project. Before commencing a data

center upgrade, organizations should create a complete list of their facility’s limitations and

identify multiple options for overcoming them. There are numerous possible solutions to any

given data center problem, and evaluating all of them is the best way to ensure that you select


the best approach available for your specific needs. A vendor such as EMC with expertise in

data center modernization can help identify appropriate options to study.

Establishing the business care

Once they’ve identified potential options, businesses must weigh their costs and benefits and

then decide which make the most sense to pursue. Based on that analysis, managers can then

prepare a business case for securing adequate funding.

Note that while cost saving and return on investment are likely to figure prominently in the

business case for a data center upgrade project, non-fiscal considerations are often important

as well. For example, sometimes the strongest justification for a data center upgrade is that it

will be impossible to accomplish your organization’s long-term strategic goals without it.

Note also that many utilities, government, and regulatory bodies offer financial incentives to data

centers that significantly improve their energy efficiency. Though no comprehensive catalog of

such programs exists at present, an experienced vendor can help businesses determine which

offers are applicable to their initiative. Be advised that many rebate programs require

organizations to apply for and receive that rebate before any construction work commences.

Setting project objectives

After receiving funding approval, data center managers should create a list of goals and

success criteria for their effort that clearly specifies not only which infrastructure changes are

within the project’s scope but which are not as well.

Creating a project plan

The next step is to prepare a thorough plan of action, including a realistic schedule. In addition,

a well-written project plan should:

Indicate precise steps for minimizing disruption to production workloads during

upgrades, assuming the data center must remain operational throughout that process.

List potential issues that could arise while work is underway and define contingency

measures for addressing them. What will you do if an electrician accidentally severs the

building’s main circuit, for example or your facility temporarily loses connectivity? Finding

solutions to such problems before they arise can save precious time later.


Executing the plan

To ensure quality results, businesses should work only with contractors that have exceptional

project management abilities and a demonstrated history of completing similarly ambitious

efforts on time and under budget. It is also important to make certain that the project manager

holds meetings at frequent and regular intervals to ensure that the project is following the

agreed upon schedule and that issues are addressed promptly.

Updating blueprints

Though a largely administrative step in the retrofit process, updating the data center’s blueprints

is an important best practice that will make life significantly easier for future IT and facilities

managers. To ensure that revised drawings are as accurate as possible, organizations should

hire an engineer or draftsman to assist them.

Conducting tests

The commissioning process for an upgraded data center should include careful testing of any

system that has been changed, added, or replaced. Such tests should assess modified

components both individually and collectively. For example, if an organization updated its UPS

hardware, deployed new PDUs, and installed aisle or rack containment cooling, it should

confirm that each of those systems functions properly on its own and then verify that they also

work correctly together by subjecting them to various simulated workloads.

Validating results

Before putting their upgraded data center into production, companies should return to the goals

and objectives they defined earlier and validate that they’ve achieved all of them. This should be

a rigorous and objective evaluation of the modernized facility’s real-world performance and

capabilities, executed with the assistance of a knowledgeable vendor consultant.

Performing an arc flash hazard analysis

If a data center retrofit included electrical changes, checking the revised infrastructure for

compliance with current arc flash safety codes is critical. An arch flash hazard analysis can help

uncover arc flash risks and identify appropriate mitigation strategies. Data centers should

always conduct hazard studies in partnership with a qualified power systems engineer.


Data Center Upgrade Plan, Phases, and Process

Any upgrade process is complex, involves multiple phases, and requires coordination and

planning at the technology, process, and business level. This section describes the phases of

the data up gradation project.

Phase 0: Assessment

Phase 1: Planning and design

Phase 2: Change control

Phase 3: Up gradation execution

Phase 4: Post-upgradation review

Phase 0: Assessment

The first phase of the upgrade process involves defining scope and requirements and

performing a preliminary analysis of the current environment to determine the level of

conformance to the supported standards. During this phase, also select the appropriate

migration methodology based on the defined requirements. Effort spent during the assessment

phase results in the following benefits:

Safe, structured upgrade solutions that minimize risk

Repeatable and predictable results

Process tailored to the specific requirements of the lines of business

Efficient execution of the project by the shared data center management teams

Numerous data upgrade technologies and methodologies are available. Business requirements

dictate the most appropriate methodology to deploy for a specific project. To determine the

appropriate approach, it is important to perform a preliminary analysis that involves gathering

the following information:

Quantity of equipment to be upgraded

Gather the specific information regarding the number and specifications of the

devices which need to be upgraded. If they are firmware, drivers, or management

console software, check the compatibility and interoperability of each other with the

hardware and software.


Application availability

The amount of application downtime for an application often determines the

appropriate upgrade method. Many hardware and software supports upgrade without

any downtime. These types of hardware have the characteristics which we generally

called “failover”. Vendors providing systems which have two or more processing

units are pro-actively designed to have upgrade facilities without any downtime.

Best Practice: Online upgrades introduce additional risk that must be weighed

against the impact of application availability. The best practice is to check the failover

and failback capability of the system before starting any upgrade activity in off-peak

hours and to perform offline upgrade whenever failover is not possible.

Allocation requirements

Allocation requirements define the extra devices required to support the system so

that it does not collapse during upgrade. For example, the support of the pillars

required when you are upgrading or renovating the roof of your house. The allocation

requirement should be addressed in the planning phase.

Performance impact

Upgrades involve blocking of functionality for a certain time so that it performs better

than before. However, doing so can impact performance of the host, array, network,

and fabric. This impact must be considered.

Best Practice: Schedule the upgrade when performance demand is not required.

Scheduling requirements

Depending on the criticality of current operations, maintenance or cutover windows

may be small. Some techniques allow upgrades to occur over an extended period

with actual cutover being performed during the next scheduled maintenance window.

Rollback plan

To reduce the risk to the business, a detailed outline of a working backout plan is

required before beginning the upgrade. When upgrading the hardware, ensure that

older hardware is available so that you can roll back or degrade the system to it if the


new hardware does not work. When upgrading the software, ensure that older

versions of drivers and firm ware are available so that you roll back or degrade to the

older versions if the upgraded version does not work.

Phase 1: Planning and design

During this phase of a migration project, a detailed design and timeline are developed based on

requirements identified during the analysis. Completion of this planning and design phase is

required for any well-developed change management process. This phase consists of

developing an implementation plan that includes not only the specific details of the project but

also an analysis of future requirements based on possible growth of the application. A solution

design must document the upgrade method as well as an environmental assessment to ensure

that the solution meets defined business requirements.

Some of the information identified and documented during this phase includes:

Interoperability and compatibility check of existing hardware or software with the new

one in the system

Pre-requisites of the new hardware/software

Bottleneck in the system

Power and cooling requirements for the new system

Physical connections requirement

Fabric connections

Software versions and licensing

Hardware and software support with extended warrantee, if required.

A macro view takes into account the complex nature of data upgrades and the impact on shared

resources, including server load, network bandwidth, storage array, power devices, chilling

towers, and impact on operational schedules. All have an impact on the amount of data flow.

Proper solution design allows proper sizing of resource requirements and sets the expected

project duration. This is critical to project success.

Criteria for success are defined during the planning phase and validated with the stakeholders.

These criteria fall into two categories: data integrity and performance. Obviously, data integrity

is paramount for any data migration project. A team that includes the application stakeholders

must first define a test plan.


This plan could be simple, such as performing flash test or successfully starting the application

after new installation; however, more comprehensive testing to validate dataset consistency

between interrelated application data is more likely required. In addition, current performance

benchmarks should be established during the planning phase and revalidated during post-

upgrade phase. Capturing the output performance and/or IOSTAT is recommended for at least

one day prior to upgrade so that the results can be compared with post-upgrade performance.

Best Practice: if the proposed solution includes a new technology or technique that has not

been deployed previously in the production environment, a best practice is to validate the

approach in a proof-of-concept exercise in a non-production environment. This minimizes risk,

and benchmarked transfer rates can be used to set appropriate expectations.

Phase 2: Change control

Data center upgrade projects must conform to the change management process. The following

is a summary of the change management components:

Risk assessment

A critical component of change management is a full risk assessment. Risk assessment

is the analysis of what can go wrong, how to prevent it, and how to mitigate the impact

resulting from a failed change. This analysis should be documented and include a

tested back out plan.

Upgrade plan

This is a review of the upgrade implementation plan that was created during the

planning and design phase. This outlines the current and target environment and

includes a step-by-step process.

Prerequisites and dependencies

Prerequisites such as site support engagement, vendor, and parts availability should be

documented and planned for.

Timeline and schedule

If the current operations are critical, the timeline and schedule will need to be well

defined in order to meet limited maintenance or cutover timeframes. Ensure that backup

plans are prepared in the event that an implementation needs to be backed out.

Resource plan

The plan should include human resource availability, skills, and ownership.


Phase 3: Upgrade execution

In this phase, the plan developed during the design phase is implemented. General upgrade

implementation best practices includes:

As a first step, perform a full backup of all data involved.

Review detailed procedures. A scripted methodology is the preferred approach.

Ensure that support needs are defined and available and that back out plans are as well

understood as the data upgrade plans.

Conduct a pilot upgrade or execute advanced testing whenever possible. A test before

a scheduled event can be extremely valuable.

Perform the consistency check.

Follow the test plan and document everything! The highest risk in upgrading the system

is incompatibility issues occurring even though they were compatible in vendor’s guide.

If the plan is documented and explicitly followed, this risk can usually be mitigated. It is

critical to have the customer sign off on each upgraded and tested data source before

moving to the next data source.

Escalate issues promptly. It may seem easier to wait before asking for help, in the hope

that the problem can be resolved. However, if behavior that is not within the plan is

observed, it is important to involve the support system to ensure that help is available

when needed, especially if the staff involved has little experience performing data center

upgrades.

Phase 4: Post-migration review

Confirm that there is no quality-of-service impact during the post-migration phase. Complete the

following actions:

Capture performance statistics and compare them with pre-upgrade benchmarks.

Perform project cleanup by removing the tools utilized during upgrade.

Decommission the original source of data.

Review issues that occurred during the upgrade, the manner in which they were

handled, and the results.

Provide a functional overview regarding the end state of the upgraded data environment.

Examples include addresses, sizes, access speeds, and the names of the data sources

that have changed that can impact operations.

Update documentation.


Using Virtualization When Upgrading the Data Center

Your business is facing an interesting challenge when it comes to designing your enterprise

data center. The previous method of having servers support each office no longer really delivers

an effective or secure solution. What are some of the things you should consider as you plan

your updated data center? The first thing to consider should be the operating needs of the

business. Next, it is important to determine if virtualization is a viable option. Another area for

the leadership to study is how redundancy of computer components helps or hurts the business.

Finally, the executive team should study if using a cloud service provider can deliver the needed

resources safely and at a substantially reduced cost. With these issues in mind, management

can design the data center to benefit the business.

Far too often, the business creates a data center that does not support the strategy. This

potentially leads to higher operating costs and missed opportunities. For example, a month ago

we met with a large insurance company that decided to open several new branch offices. Each

office has a server and these feed to the central data center for backup and archive services,

but not for data sharing. When speaking with the executive team it became clear that they

lacked an operational vision for how the data center should operate in support of their growth

strategy. This lack of planning led the IT department to plan the technology to support the

strategy by putting servers in each location. The IT department needs leadership to design the

best solution to support the vision or old methods will continue to hamstring opportunities.

The next thing to consider is the role of virtualization. Today’s data center can potentially reduce

hardware costs through creating several virtual servers on a single physical server. Where once

there were many servers scattered through the country, an enterprise can now work with fewer

servers in a central data center, substantially reducing risk and costs. This method requires

running virtualization software such as Microsoft’s HyperV or VMware’s VCloud. Some


important things to consider are the cost of the virtualization software and the technical skill

required to run a virtualized data center. It is also critical to make sure that sufficient bandwidth

exists at both the data center and remote locations.

Recent data center upgrade case studies have shown that virtualization has played a significant

role for migrating data in terms of various factors such as eliminating the need for third party

tools, reducing downtime, application availability, least impact, performance maintenance during

upgrade, re-use of existing assets, and so on.

Key benefits of using a virtualization approach are:

Reduce number of servers

Partitioning and isolation, the characteristics of server virtualization, enable simple and

safe server consolidation. Through consolidating, the number of physical servers can be

greatly reduced, bringing benefits such as reduced floor space, power consumption, and

air conditioning costs. However, it is essential to note that even though the number of

physical servers is greatly reduced, the number of virtual servers to be managed does

not change. Therefore, when virtualizing servers, installation of operation management

tools for efficient server management is recommended.


Reduce TCO

Server consolidation with virtualization reduces costs of hardware, maintenance, power,

and air conditioning. In addition, it lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by

increasing the efficiency of server resources and operational changes, as well as

virtualization-specific features. As a result of today’s improved server CPU performance,

a few servers have high resource-usage rates but most are often underutilized.

Virtualization can eliminate such ineffective use of CPU resources, plus optimize

resources throughout the server environment. Furthermore, because servers managed

by each business division's staff can be centrally managed by a single administrator,

operation management costs can be greatly reduced.

Improve availability and business continuity

One beneficial feature of virtualized servers not available in physical server

environments is live migration. With live migration, virtual servers can be migrated to

another physical server for tasks such as performing maintenance on the physical

servers without shutting them down. Thus, there is no impact on the end user. Another

great advantage of virtualization technology is that its encapsulation and hardware-

independence features enhance availability and business continuity.

Increase efficiency for development and test environments

At system development sites, servers are often used inefficiently. When different

physical servers are used by each business division's development team, the number of

servers can easily increase. Conversely, when physical servers are shared by teams,

reconfiguring development and test environments can be time- and labor-consuming.

Such issues can be resolved by using server virtualization to simultaneously run various

operating system environments on one physical server, thereby enabling concurrent

development and test of multiple environments. In addition, because development and

test environments can be encapsulated and saved, reconfiguration is extremely simple.

Improve availability of your virtual environment

The impact of a failure in a physical server can increase after virtualizing and

consolidating servers. To prevent such problems, vendors provide Cluster solutions and

other products for improving the availability of virtual servers.


Integrated management of mixed virtual environments

For objectives such as reducing costs and saving space, it is expected that virtualization

will spread rapidly and companies will be managing various mixed virtualization

environments. This raises the issue of how to consolidate management of different

virtual environments.

Some vendors provide integrated virtualization management software which enables

centralized control of multiple virtualized environments, including VMware vSphere and

Hyper-V, from an integrated view. It also consolidates management of hardware such as

physical servers, networks, and storage, therefore providing the whole picture of your IT

system to increase operating efficiency.

Reallocation of workloads to eliminate inefficient operation and shut down

unnecessary servers

Virtualization vendors provide some specific integrated software which adopts an

effective energy-saving policy. The software autonomously detects server operating

status and consolidates loads to run on as few physical servers as possible. Physical


servers that are no longer being used will then be shut down. When the load increases,

physical servers that are not running will be restarted. The software can constantly

optimize operations and reduce power consumption.

Consolidated management of patch application and application updating

Operating system patches and application updates can be distributed in batches by job

group or for the system as a whole. It is also possible to deploy software on multiple

servers at one time when setting up a system.


Schedule resource allocation

It is possible, for example, to change a system configuration as previously defined to

optimize resource allocation to meet changes in server load during the day and at night.

Schedules and specific configurations can be easily changed via integrated view.

Single management interface

Managing hundreds of physical servers in the data center is the difficult and erroneous

task to maintain their performance. Jumping from one server to another every time is not

possible when maintaining hundreds of physical servers. Virtualization provides a

centralized single management interface which helps to manage all the machines

through one console. The tab on each virtual machine provides the entire information of

that machine and will look like a inventory management console.


OpEx and CapEx savings

Below are the several areas where organizations can achieve OpEx savings:

It is quite clear then that organizations are achieving a wide range of outcomes that drive

OpEx savings. They are increasing flexibility and agility, reducing downtime (and the

costs of lost productivity), reducing administration and management costs, solving

problems faster, achieving better disaster recovery and availability, and more—all areas

that directly reduce operational costs. Moreover, most organizations are achieving

several of these outcomes simultaneously, further increasing their opportunities for

OpEx reduction.

On the CapEx side, it’s easy to identify the dollar savings because Server Virtualization

helps eliminate infrastructure, or avoid the cost of additional infrastructure.

Typically, a company preparing to start a number of new projects with out-of-scope

dependencies would plan to purchase enough equipment to build out a new environment

for each project. With Service Virtualization, the need for those new environments

disappears, as does the cost of purchasing that equipment. Virtualize them and have the

system under test hit the virtual services. Performance testing is another area where

Service Virtualization can make a big difference. Companies don’t like spending the

millions of dollars that are needed to build out performance testing environments,

conversely they don’t like having their web site down. In today’s environment, minutes

equate to millions of dollars in lost revenue and tarnished reputations.

What if you already have the hardware you need and are more concerned about quality

and efficiency?


Quality is important for a number of reasons, however, let’s think about the people costs

associated with fixing bugs in production. Once a bug is found in production, how many

people need to be involved to assess/identify the issue? BA’s, SA’s, Developers from

multiple teams, etc. That gets expensive quickly.

Service Virtualization helps you identify these defects earlier because now you can

simulate all of the dependencies that you could not access previously. Finding those

defects up front means fewer defects in QA and Production. The idea is to increase

defect identification in development (i.e. “cheap” defects) and reduce the “expensive”

defects in QA, which equates to fewer defects in production. Fewer defects means FTEs

can be repurposed for other projects, or provide products to market faster. In addition, a

more effective offshore model can be implemented, with less downtime and more

productivity. Quality and efficiency are both served.

Service Virtualization gives you the ability to address both your CapEx and OpEx

challenges. Start with one and it will undoubtedly lead you to the other.

Another important issue when considering replacing servers is the role of redundancy. Five to

ten years ago, the concept of redundancy made sense as a lost hard disk or drive controller

effectively shut down the server. Today the main problem with this concept, at least from a

multi-server data center standpoint, is that computers, not components, are the

redundancy. Since each machine works as part of the whole, stripping out redundant

components substantially reduces cost. However, this approach can lead to additional risk if too

few servers make up the data center.

When planning your data center and server replacement policy, one concept to keep in mind is

using a cloud server solution to deliver the enterprise’s computing needs. In a cloud

environment, the provider virtualizes the physical servers to maintain high utilization and ensure

that each client has the computing resources necessary to support the business. Cloud server

providers build servers to reduce the cost by stripping out unnecessary redundancy while

employing virtualization managers to keep the servers running at high utilization and putting

data on multiple drives to keep it safe.

Your business can no longer effectively compete without seriously considering the role of the

server today. Your data center must support your strategy; but this requires looking at

leveraging today’s technology and understanding available options such as virtualization and


reducing hardware costs. To succeed however, you need to consider if the costs of owning and

operating an internal data center are substantially lower than outsourcing to a cloud provider.

There are other issues to consider, such as data security and data center location, but if profits

and cash flow are critical, outsourcing could provide a critical edge over your competition. In the

end, however, it is essential that the executive team ensure IT supports the vision, not the other

way around.

Data Center Activity - Customer Scenario: The success story

Project Summary: In late 2011, XYZ completed a significant data center upgrade, overhauling

one of the company’s Tier-1 data centers and focusing on one of many areas where XYZ is

implementing innovative solutions to help reduce the company’s environmental impacts. As a

global leader in design and engineering software, XYZ has developed many of the software

products used to plan, design, build, and manage more energy-efficient and sustainable

buildings and infrastructure. With the completion of the project, XYZ hoped to demonstrate that

its dedication to the environment extends to its own operations. Data centers are currently the

single largest source of IT-related emissions at XYZ. In 2011, they were responsible for almost

four percent of XYZ’s total carbon footprint; approximately 1,870 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Objective: Make a parallel data center that would replace more than 85 percent of the existing

technology stack and move from a Solaris-based system to Linux and Windows.

Risks and Challenges

The center’s house numerous mission-critical core business applications. If those

applications stop, XYZ stops.

Low-efficiency power and cooling equipment.

Complex cabling.

Lack of flexibility and scalability.

Consuming more space.

The solution

Virtualization of severs.

Using smart storage allocation system such as SSDs and FAST.

Automatic provisioning.


Sell the unwanted hardware which are serviceable and recycle the rest through a

certified green recycler. (A good practice. The equipment will go through its full life and

not create any waste.)

The result

IT infrastructure costs reduced by 15 percent of the company’s IT infrastructure budget.

Zero waste. 100 percent of decommissioned equipment recycled.

75 percent reduction in physical servers.

62 percent reduction in energy use.


Conclusion

It has taken quite a while but 10 GbE has become the standard for data center network

backbones. Compared to the adoption rate for earlier versions of high-performance Ethernet, 10

GbE has experienced a glacial rate of acceptance, which brings us to an interesting point.

Back in September, the Ethernet Alliance held a plugfest event for 40 GbE and 100 GbE

equipment as a way of showing how close to reality these newer high-performance backbones

actually were, and in November, at Supercomputing 2010, CommScope and Cisco

demonstrated a viable networking ecosystem using their equipment to support 40 and 100 GbE

connectivity. Earlier in 2010, AT&T completed live field trials using Cisco equipment

implementing a 100 GbE networking environment.

So what does this mean to your data center? Generally, purchasers of networking backbone

infrastructure equipment would have looked to future-proof their purchases by looking for

chassis and equipment that were upgradeable to the next level of performance standards. But,

there are a number of other factors to consider beyond performance.

It's likely that since your last infrastructure refresh the issue of green computing has come up;

it's only in the last few years that this has become a major issue, and if you are moving toward

the end of your equipment cycle, your existing networking hardware likely predates the push to

energy efficiency as a major concern.

So what do you plan on looking for in your next generation backbone equipment? Energy

efficiency and power management goes pretty much without saying, but do you plan on

investing in 10 GbE now, and upgrade to 40 or 100 GbE in the near term? Are you considering

just waiting on greater availability of the faster technologies and replace from your core outward

with the fastest currently supported backbone? Do you have the wiring plant in place to support

the higher performance networking? Are there changes that need to be made to your

environment to prepare the way for a new, maximum performance backbone?

I talk to various different data center administrators and I get a wide variety of answers and a lot

more expressions of concern over the direction they need to take to replace their data center

backbone infrastructure. Let me know the decision points for your choices were and I'll spread

the word.


References

1. Key points to consider when upgrading or designing a new Datacenter or Server room

by John Caughell on 17/08/11 at 9:53 pm.

2. EMC Corporation. “What you need to know about Data Center Transformation: What

you need to know about Data Center Transformation. H5786.” EMC Perspective.

September 2008.

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The

information is subject to change without notice.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” EMC CORPORATION

MAKES NO RESPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED

WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an

applicable software license.

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