BITS Pilani

presentation
BITS Pilani WILP
Pilani Campus
 BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

CSIWZG522 Design and operations of Data center

CS 08
Books

Text Book(s)
No Author(s), Title, Edition, Publishing House
T1 Building a Modern Data Center: Principles and Strategies of Design
by Scott D. Lowe (Author), David M. Davis (Author), James Green (Author),
Seth Knox (Editor), Stuart Miniman (Foreword)

Reference Book(s) & other resources

No Author(s), Title, Edition, Publishing House
R1 Data Center for Beginners: A beginner's guide towards understanding Data
Center Design
B.A. Ayomaya (Author)

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Slide references

Building a Modern Data Center:

Principles and Strategies of Design
by
Scott D. Lowe (Author),
David M. Davis (Author),
James Green (Author),
Seth Knox (Editor),
Stuart Miniman (Foreword)

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Lecture Plan
Contact Hour 15&16

Time Type Description Content

Reference

Pre CH RL5.1 Monitoring of data center

5.2 Maintenance of data center

During CH CH5 Thing Big T1: ch-5

Start Small
Move Fast

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 Making Your Data Centre Agile:
Principles & Strategies

• The modern enterprise is a very different beast than the enterprise of days past.

• In the modern enterprise, IT and the data center play pivotal roles in the
operation and success of the business.

• In fact, the role that IT and the data center plays in helping the business achieve
its goals is becoming increasingly critical.

• IT is not just an expense that impacts the bottom line.

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 Making Your Data Centre Agile:
Principles & Strategies

• For many businesses, IT is a key top-line revenue driver.

• However, the old ways of managing these critical resources are no longer
sufficient.

• Rather than build complex conglomerations of components that are carefully

crafted into crazy combinations, the emerging enterprise must create
environments that are agile and that imbue the business with ferocious flexibility.

• There are three key principles around which agile IT revolves:

– Thinking big

– Starting small

– Moving fast

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Think Big

• Small thinkers need not apply.

• Today’s technology environments demand big thinking from people who have
deep understanding of both the business and technology.

• Be bold.

• In practical terms, here’s what this means: it’s time to look at the whole
technology environment and re-evaluate everything.

• Does the data center lend itself to emerging constructs, such as pay-as-you-go
adoption?

• Data centers of days past required massive initial investments, which were
neither economical, nor particularly practical.
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Think Big

• Organizations then spent years attempting to recoup these large investments,

only to find that they may have never really realized a maximum return.

• New thinking may require that you jettison your old ideas around how IT
systems are procured, deployed and supported.

• Your efforts though, will result in a streamlined IT function that is laser-focused

on the needs of the business.
• Are you still providing break/fix services for devices like desktop computers
and printers? Anyone can do that.
• Outsource it.
• You will likely save money and end up getting better service.

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 Think Big
• It’s easy to say that you should outsource something, but it’s important to
understand the reason why you should outsource these kinds of commodity
services.

• That reason is summed up by two words: opportunity cost.

• The future of IT revolves around “value added” services, not commodity

services that are easily outsourced.

• For every commodity service that you keep in-house, and to which you dedicate
internal staff, there is less time that can be devoted to those value-add projects
that can propel the business forward.

• This time you take away from potential value-add projects is the opportunity
cost of the commodity services.
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Think Big

• When you’re making the decision to keep a particular service in-house or

outsource it, the actual cost of the service is only a part of the decision
process.

• Even in the unlikely scenario that you can perform certain services for less
money than an outside party that specializes in those services, you are
probably paying a steep opportunity cost to do so.

• Although agile IT principles demand that you consider all aspects of the IT
organization, since the focus of software defined storage (SDS) and
hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is on the data center, let’s start there.

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 Think Big

• Do you have automation and orchestration tools in place that enable a

streamlined and more efficient data center? If not, rethink how everything
works in your organization.

• If you have people performing manual, repetitive tasks, look for ways to
automate those tasks.

• If you have users who would be better served through the implementation of
self-service tools, implement them.

• Just remember, doing so requires that you have the aforementioned

automation and orchestration tools in place.

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Think Big

• Agile IT also demands that the underlying infrastructure be bereft of complexity

in all ways.

• Traditional infrastructure solutions introduced a great deal of complexity.

• SDS and HCI solutions bring simplicity to the data center.

• By bringing ease-of-scale and ease-of-management to what have been very

difficult to manage, size, and scale resources, these approaches are perfect
infrastructure fits for environments that embrace agile IT principles.

• With an understanding for what agile IT demands, the next question you may
have is, “How do I do it?” Even the creators of the most ambitious plans need to
start somewhere.

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Start Small

• It’s not generally feasible to simply throw away everything that already exists
and replace it with something new.
• At the very least, new initiatives need to be staged for implementation in such
a way that they minimize impact to production.
• So, start small.
• Find something that needs to be fixed and, well, fix it.
• Perhaps the physical server environment is not well-managed and you have a
desire to increase your use of virtualization.
• At the same time, part of your “big thinking” plan is to move the entire data
center to an HCI solution or one that leverages SDS.
• Unless you’re a very small company, you can’t do that all at once.
• So, use the server virtualization initiative as your stepping stone.

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 Start Small
• Implement your brand new virtual desktop environment on an HCI or SDS
solution.

• Then, during the replacement cycle for your server environment, transition that
environment over to the new one.

• In this way, you’ll maximize your investment in your legacy infrastructure while
eventually gaining the benefits of the new one, such as easy scale, fast
deployment, and simple administration.

• Your projects should be use-case driven and tied to clear business outcomes.

• Even achieving a simpler, more cost effective data center is a business

outcome if it means that the IT department as a whole can now be more
responsive to business needs.
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 Start Small

• Beyond the infrastructure though, starting small may mean finding a place to
begin automation.

• Many organizations, for example, continue to manually provision user

accounts.

• You don’t necessarily have to adopt an expensive and complex identity

management solution, but with just a few scripts, you can probably automate a
good chunk of the process.

• The role of the person who used to provision accounts then moves to one of
oversight rather than action, freeing that person up to service other higher
priority needs.

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Start Small

• To be sure, it can be difficult to get started on such initiatives, particularly in IT

organizations that are strapped for people resources.

• However, every automation that is accomplished clears a little of that challenge.

• The more you can automate, the faster you can automate even more.

• Now, with that extra time that you gain in IT, what do you do with it? You improve
the business.

• Meet with the business unit leaders in your company and help them discover
and implement new services that increase customer satisfaction or revenues
Help them find technology- driven ways to reduce costs.

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Start Small

• Figuring out how to provide analytics that helps a company market better to
their customers.

• For example, if you’re a bank, helping to implement the ability to scan checks
to deposit them via smartphones is a great example of how technology can
drive customer satisfaction.

• This service changed the retail banking industry and it’s primarily a technology
solution.

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Move Fast

• If you’re asking yourself when you should get started, that’s an easy answer:
Now! Don’t wait.

• Here are six steps to accomplish your goals quickly:

1. Talk to the Business.

• Interview business unit leaders and senior management and identify business
objectives and where technology support gaps may exist or where there may
be opportunity to use technology to improve a process or introduce a new
service.

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 Move Fast

2. Assess the Technology Environment.

• At this point, you know what the business needs.

• The next question is this: can the technology environment support it? The
technology environment (the hardware and software) itself is absolutely critical to
the business.

• However, over time, as is the case with many things, such environments begin to
take on lives of their own.

• What once was state-of-the-art is now a complex morass that has been
extended to meet unanticipated needs.

• Of course, this is not always the case, but it’s certainly not unusual, either.

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Move Fast

• The more that the environment has been customized and extended with a lot of
different point solutions, the more complex it is to manage and the slower that IT
can react in modifying it to meet new business demands.

• Your job is to figure out which technology solutions need to be maintained in

order to meet business needs and then find ways to simplify what remains so
that it is manageable and cost effective.

• This need absolutely includes the data center, too.

• Look at the data center environment both holistically and granularly.

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 Move Fast

• With all of the information you gather, create a list of every product and service
and identify, where appropriate, the business need served by that product or
service.

• For example, your marketing department might have its own application
environment that supports their customer relationship management (CRM)
system.

• Your job at this point is not to eliminate services and products, but simply to
identify.

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 Move Fast

3. Create a Support Inventory.

• Analyze every aspect of the IT organization and list every process that is currently
supported and determine where there are support gaps based on what you learn
in the previous step.

• For example,

o Is that CRM environment being maintained in a way that truly meets the needs of the
business? If not, why not?

o Is it because the staff has skill deficiencies?

o Is it because there are too few staff to support the existing operational environment?

o Is it because the existing staff do not have a focus on the business?

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 Move Fast

• This is your opportunity to determine where there may be deficiencies that would
prevent IT from fully executing on the strategic priorities that were identified
during your discussions outlined in the previous steps.

• In this step, focus on people and process.

4. Identify Core Services and Gaps.

• At this point, you should have a good understanding for how the various products
and services present in the organization actually meet business needs.

• You should also have a good understanding for where gaps exist in the
environment.
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 Move Fast

• You should be able to answer the following questions:

o Which products and services are core to the mission and vision of the business?

o What gaps exist in the current product portfolio that make it difficult for IT to meet
business goals?

o What gaps exist in the IT support structure that make it difficult for the business to meet
its goals?

• The core services list may not mean that you need to maintain the status quo.

• It simply means that the particular service is required to be provided in some way.

• It’s here that you begin taking concrete action to correct deficiencies and help
propel IT forward.

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 Move Fast

5. Decide What to Outsource.

• Many IT departments continue to believe that all technology services must be

provided by the in-house IT department.

• That is simply not the case anymore.

• People have been really wary of the word outsource because it can imply that
people will lose their jobs.

• But you have to look beyond all of this and figure out what is best for the
business.

• Outsourcing is not just about saving money; it’s also about creating opportunity
for the business.

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 Move Fast
• Every time you outsource a function, the internal people that were handling that
function can redirect their efforts to more value-add projects.

• As you review the list of services being supported by IT and the list of support
gaps that you have identified, you need to look for the best way to address the
core services.

• Sometimes, this will mean outsourcing a core service.

• For example, if Microsoft Exchange is a core service, does it make more sense to
keep it inhouse or should you move it to Office 365? Other times, it may mean
outsourcing a non-core service.

• For example, you might choose to outsource your SharePoint portal and redirect
those staffing resources to managing your Exchange infrastructure.
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Move Fast

• With your lists in hand, figure out what you can “make someone else’s problem”
via outsourcing and then pick up the phone and start calling potential vendors.

6. Decide What to Improve.

• With what’s left, you must now decide where you want to improve.

• The hard part can be figuring out where to begin.

• With that in mind, here’s a tip: Look at the items on the list and, for each one,
assign two metrics (a value of 1 to 5 for each): • The difficulty level for
addressing that need.

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 Move Fast
• For the difficulty metric, a 1 indicates that it’s low difficulty and a 5 means that it’s
a high level of difficulty.

• The potential payoff — in terms of both staff time and money — that will result if
that item is addressed.

• For the cost metric, a 1 means low payoff value while 5 means high payoff value.

• Now, immediately attack the items that have a 1 or 2 difficulty level and a 4 or 5
payoff level.

• Get them done and done fast.

• Obviously, you will need to coordinate with business leaders to really prioritize
your efforts so that everything you do aligns with what the business needs.

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Links you can explore

1. Most common data center operations challenges faced by data center managers. –

YouTube

2. Data Center Management System | Delta InfraSuite - YouTube

3. 6 Preventative Maintenance Tips for your Data Center – YouTube

4. Facebook's largest Data Center you never seen - YouTube

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 THANK YOU !!!
How to make your data centre more agile - YouTube

Agile Data Center - YouTube

Nvidia and VMware Come Together to Make your Datacenter

More Agile - YouTube

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus