Operational efficiency and overall cost reduction are important factors in today's data center. However, as the world becomes more connected (vendors to customer, partners to each other, information workers to each other and so on), the ability to react with speed and flexibility is growing in importance.
Agile data centers will: manage the balance between speed and operational efficiency; understand their enterprise and its requirements; become agile where the enterprise requires it; measure agility improvements; and focus on agility through changes in technology, process and people.
Agility is the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change. However, no organization will be agile if its data center and infrastructure aren't. Future infrastructure shared across customers, business units or applications, where business policies and service-level agreements drive dynamic and automatic optimization of the IT infrastructure, reducing costs while increasing agility and quality of service.
Speed and agility are not the same thing. Reacting with speed may solve a tactical problem, but it may also cause strategic efficiency issues (for example, the dot-com bubble followed by the bust). Speed and operational efficiency are often at odds with each other. An operationally efficient data center will standardize and eliminate exceptions; uncontrolled speed creates exceptions. Agility is the right strategic balance between speed and operational efficiency. Several metrics can be used to measure the “success” of the data center initiatives put in place by the data center managers. These metrics can encompass broad initiatives in CPU utilization, storage utilization and human resource utilization. Since then, energy prices have continued to rise steadily, and awareness of both the financial and the environmental costs of enterprise computing has changed the way we view large data centers. As we retool IT to be better stewards of both enterprise and natural resources, greening our data centers, other measures should now come to the fore as well, based on data centers’ interfaces with the environment. The basic means of interaction are energy consumption and heat production.
Improving agility (to the level required by the enterprise) should be a measurable goal of an infrastructure strategy. The following initiatives can be key driving forces to form a successful strategy:
- Standardization
- Rationalization
- Virtualization
- Service-Based
- Real-Time
Agility should be measured in a way that makes sense to the business — time and cost to deploy a new service, to roll out a new capability, to eliminate an old service or to react to changing business requirements. These kinds of measurements need buy-in from the enterprise as well as the IS organization. Within the data center, each of these business-related measurements should be broken down to internally meaningful measurements — for example, the time and cost to deploy new servers, to install new software or to fix a problem. This requires process definitions, process standardization, process measurements and monitoring, so that you can continuously improve processes and become more agile. Agility is not just about responding to change efficiently and with speed — it is also about sensing that change. From a speed perspective, the ultimate goal is to reduce the response time to near zero. The most efficient way to do that might be through an event-handling script, or it might be through effectively sensing precursor events before the event occurs. At the macro-level, this means staying in touch with the enterprise environment, for example, that a major sales event is about to take place, or that competitive pressure may change technology use. At a micro level, this means identifying precursor events (before a hardware failure, for example). Improving agility requires asking the questions: could this have been predicted, and what can I change next time to sense this kind of event before it occurs? Improving data center agility requires a combined effort in three areas: technology, process and people.
Technologies. Virtualization is a key technology in servers, storage and networking that gives the IS organization much more control over how resources are allocated. Automation and resource governance tools — and ultimately, service governance technologies — provide automated response capability to change (using virtualized resources effectively). There are a number of industry technology initiatives to improve the intelligence and self-management of IT (such as IBM's Autonomic Computing and On Demand, Hewlett-Packard's Adaptive Enterprise and Microsoft's Dynamic Systems). However, many of these technologies are still at the drawing board, or very immature, and will be evolving over the next 10 years. IS organizations should monitor technology developments closely, and use those technologies that can prove a rapid return on investment. Most importantly, having and maintaining a strategic plan for infrastructure technology is critical. Technologies are rapidly evolving, and successful IS organizations will ride the wave — they won't be left behind, and they won't crash ahead of the leading edge.
Processes. Operational frameworks like IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provide the backbone for operational efficiency. The starting point for IS organizations is process definitions and standardization. But an agile process culture is critical. Agility requires that processes be designed for change.
People. While technologies and processes can create the foundation for a more agile data center, ultimately it is the people, culture and organization that will make it work, and those that handle the more strategic and critical exceptions and events. Important factors include awareness of everyone's role in delivering agility to the enterprise, buy-in, feedback, career growth and involvement in the process. While operational efficiency is ultimately about cost reduction, agility is about increasing the value of IT, which should also mean increasing the value of IT personnel to the enterprise.
Therefore, agility is a critical success factor for data centers, and is becoming more important as agility grows as an overarching business requirement. Data center agility requires a successful balance between operational efficiency and speed — determined by business needs, and constantly evolving to deal with change. When considering agility, the following key points should be borne in mind:
- Align with the business
- Build a strategic plan that includes agility improvements
- Measure agility improvements
- Agility should be built into the IT architecture
- Technologies are rapidly evolving
- Processes must be agile
- Don't forget the people side
SteelGlass with its strategic tool partners are helping IT organizations seamlessly integrate processes, people and tools to develop/optimize the business management group to ensure alignment of business drivers to technology drivers.
