7 februari 2012 11:14

[Partner Info] Reshaping the Datacenter: What Do You Need To Do?

Being an aggregate of technology and human elements, datacenters have constantly been in evolution, welcoming new types of hardware, supporting changing business models, and becoming an increasingly relevant asset for private and public organizations.
Over the past three years, elements of disruption have been mounting up, ranging from faster swings in market conditions, to booming computing density and storage volumes, to the challenges presented by aging datacenter facilities, unable to support current power requirements.

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IDC believes that datacenters are built around four main pillars: infrastructure hardware; infrastructure software, including virtualization and management tools; applications and workloads (SAP, databases, etc.); and facility and energy components. Using the correct set of best practices around each of those is key to improving overall datacenter performance.
Organizations rank achievement of IT budget plans as the key priority, with 67% of the organizations interviewed classifying it as a KPI, followed by metrics related to quality and delivery of IT services such as user satisfaction with IT (56%) and achievement of service level agreements (SLAs, 53%). Only a small portion of IT departments succeed on the full KPI stack and effectively deliver added value to their companies, while the rest still too often act as a cost center.
Among the key steps needed to boost datacenter performance are: focus on a smaller number of projects; tighter connection between virtualization and system vendor management tools; provisioning of flexible platforms for different workloads; deep attention to storage issues, as those tend to spill out, impacting other areas.
Virtualization has become the glue of datacenter infrastructure, as over 20% of the physical x86 servers shipped in 2011 are bound to host a virtualized environment. Most organizations, however, are not making the most of it, as they stop at physical consolidation, without gunning for time savings and staff reallocation, where the real benefits are. As a rule of thumb, and in order to achieve management improvements, the administrator-to-VM-ratio should be at least 1:30. Successful service providers are hovering at 1:50 to 1:100, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers have ratios in the four-digit range.

This whitepaper presents datacenter management best practices and highlights key intervention areas for organizations that want to increase their success rate in reaching key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost, time-to-market, and user satisfaction.