Putting the Evolution of the Data Center in Perspective

No company can hope to create a streamlined and efficient hybrid cloud environment with a traditional siloed data center structure. Establishing an environment to support these new and emerging business models doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a road map and successful planning between IT and business. Each company starts from a different place and has a unique set of business objectives that will impact the route they follow. For example, a mid-size company may move fairly quickly from an internal server environment to implement SaaS and BPaaS in addition to a private cloud. On the other hand, a large enterprise in a highly regulated industry that supports a highly complex traditional data center may need to focus on streamlining its environment prior to implementing cloud technology. This section illustrates what companies with a traditional data center are facing as they begin to rethink the data center.

How siloed IT environments developed

The early data centers had a pretty straightforward role and architecture. These data centers were designed and built to support custom-built enterprise transactional applications. Typically, a single hardware architecture and a single operating system included all the security, systems management, networking, and middleware. The environment was complex and sophisticated, but it was designed to support the intended workloads quite nicely. Then everything changed in the 1980s, when a host of new hardware, operating systems, networks, and middleware became available.

Companies began investing in relatively inexpensive servers and desktops to support a huge revolution in new technologies. Computing became the purview of an increasingly large number of business users. Over time, data centers began to grow out of control. Each time a business discovered a new application, it purchased the application along with a specialized operating system and often specialized hardware. Over time, this environment grew like an untended garden. Data centers became huge, containing thousands of applications — and sometimes hundreds of different versions of those applications. So, what had started out as a well-designed environment with a purpose became a complex environment almost impossible to manage efficiently.

In essence, the data center had become the place where any application and its supporting infrastructure were brought together. The conventional wisdom was that because all computing had been unified into a single physical environment, the economies of scale would add efficiency. The skills of the professionals running the data center would ensure a well-run, efficient computing environment. There would be a single organization with professionals skilled in the field who would manage all the requirements for the IT department. It didn’t quite turn out as intended.

Regardless of how sophisticated the professionals running the organization were, gaining economies of scale was impossible because of the disparate nature of the data center. There were simply too many hardware platforms, too much software, and too many silos of disconnected data. The data center was never the unified environment that it was intended to be.

Addressing the challenge of moving from silos to streamlined operations

Recognizing the challenges of the siloed data center, many companies began to look at what could be done to create a more consistent, unified, and well-integrated environment. These companies evaluated which applications were running, what operating systems were supported, and the variety of hardware platforms inside the data centers. Despite efforts to better streamline IT operations, many companies are still struggling to address the complexities inherent in a data center world that must manage hundreds if not thousands of workloads. One measure of data center complexity is the time and expense devoted to managing the tens or even hundreds of different platforms in a large-scale data center. As a result of the large number of different applications and operating systems that IT needs to manage, it is very hard to create a highly automated and standardized data center environment.

Using cloud services to improve IT efficiency and scalability

So how do organizations move from a fragmented data center environment to one that is designed to scale, enable, and encourage change? How do organizations move to a consistent set of underlying infrastructure services that help to increase the quality and stability of the IT environment? Problems with a data center affect all aspects of IT, including software development, deployment, and maintenance. In the complicated world of the traditional data center, meaningful agility cannot be achieved without substantial transformation. The impact is twofold:

The IT organization must be able to gain a full understanding of what is actually running in the data center and why. There may be applications that are operational but that serve no purpose. For example, an application may have been developed or purchased a decade ago to serve a specific business requirement; over time it hasn’t been needed or used, yet it continues to be maintained simply because the IT organization does not have the right level of insight to adequately manage an application over its lifecycle.

Leadership that comes from collaboration between business and IT must take control and turn chaos into a logical data center. IT and the business need to speak with a unified voice and manage change as a team to drive innovation and growth.

Many companies are finding that the path to a more streamlined data center is one that begins by viewing the data center in a new way. Instead of trying to totally transform complicated and inefficient data center environments, companies are looking at cloud computing as one of the transformative steps to changing perceptions of what data centers are and how they provide value to companies. These companies are beginning to understand that they can achieve their technical and business goals by revolutionizing their data centers through a hybrid computing approach that allows the organization to leverage the right services with the right platform. The idea of a hybrid cloud computing environment is positioned to help with the transition to a more streamlined computing environment.

Case study: From silos to streamlined operations

Here is an example that helps explain how a business begins to streamline its data center. Say that you are the IT director of a major corporation. The business continues to demand that new applications be purchased and built to satisfy new business initiatives. Over time, the pace of business has taken its toll on IT. There’s no time to retire old applications or to ensure that there’s a single version of an important application. Some of these initiatives are incredibly successful, whereas others simply fade away. In good times, no one really paid attention to how big, complicated, or inefficient the data center became. But the world has changed. Your budget has been cut, but, at the same time, the business expects IT to be front and center in the new business model of the company. You have just finished reading Hybrid Cloud For Dummies, and the lessons you learned from the book have given you some good ideas about how to reduce IT costs and improve IT’s responsiveness to the business. You make sure to get a number of different perspectives from stakeholders across the organization to ensure that your approach supports business requirements. You take the following steps:

Create a business task force to understand where the business needs were evolving

Implement server virtualization to begin consolidating workloads

Add a public cloud service to quickly allow developers to prototype a new set of application services to demonstrate to the business what is possible and to implement some of these applications

Create a committee to discover what applications are still needed and which ones can be retired

Establish a pool of resources within the data center that can be used as a computing utility

The purpose behind these steps is to create a streamlined environment where consistency and predictability are the rule, not the exception.

An incremental transition

It’s becoming clear to both business and IT leaders that business as usual would not support the changing needs for technology that would support business change and the need to innovate with new business models and ideas quickly. However, just as data centers didn’t become complicated, hard-to-manage environments overnight, the data center cannot become a highly efficient and streamlined environment instantly. Companies should expect, instead, incremental changes to data centers. What does an incremental transition look like? In essence, company management needs to take a step back and take a hard look at the data center and ask the following questions:

Is the data center streamlined enough to support business change?

Are there too many operating systems and too many types of software in the data center to achieve economies of scale?

Is it possible to separate the kinds of workloads that the data center supports?

These questions may seem straightforward, but the answers may help you begin an incremental tradition to a hybrid cloud environment. Say that you do, indeed, have a well-run and streamlined data center that is very effective in supporting the business. You’ve probably done a good job at getting rid of applications that aren’t used by the business. You’ve also reduced the number of applications overall and have fewer servers and fewer operating systems. But your work is probably not done.

The process of gaining control over your data center is more complicated than it may seem at the outset. This process could take years. But the task is well worth it. It establishes the foundation for a much more efficient data center. It also sets the stage for a more rational approach to managing computing and workloads. The foundation is set, and the organization is ready to create a hybrid environment designed for a purpose, rather than for whatever comes along.