IT Solutions Blog

New Data Center Efficiency Standard Proposed

As any data center manager or CIO can tell you, data center power costs have become a huge concern. Being able to measure the efficiency of power usage at the data center and being able to make improvements can reduce energy costs and also create an environment in which data center equipment operates at a higher level of efficiency. The good news for data center managements is that there’s a new way to measure power on the way.

A number of organizations, spearheaded by The Green Grid, has created a method for data centers to be able to measure the efficiency of their power expenditures. The standard, known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), is designed to help bring some consistency to the way that data centers measure power usage, and to make it so that different data centers can compare their numbers.

The standard creates the PUE measurement by comparing the actual energy used by a data center to the amount of energy that actually makes it to the IT equipment. This demonstrates how much power is consumed by ancillary systems, such as cooling systems.

There’s been talk of using PUE in the data center for some time, but up until now there hasn’t been a way to compare it in a standard way. This method for calculating PUE was developed by The Green Grid along with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Program, the Uptime Institute, the U.S. Building Council and more.

For now, the group has only released recommendations for dedicated data centers. The plan is to provide another set of recommendations for use in data centers that are not part of a dedicated facility, but rather are one part of a mixed-use facility.

This new standard will help to create a common understanding in the industry that should foster dialogue and will, in the long run, create more efficient data centers. It utilizes four different ways of tracking PUE so as to include as many types of data centers as possible. The lowest level of measurement uses the utility meter to take snapshots over 12 12 months, while the most accurate type of PUE measurement will measure at the point where devices connect to the electrical distribution system.

Green Networking in the Data Center

Download this white paper from HP for more information about: 

• The challenge of a complex data center
• Green data center best practices
• Power and cooling utilization
• Building efficient infrastructures

HP and Storage Retention Policies

It’s easy to get stuck in an infinite retention trap. Absent a unified storage management and retention policy and strategy, you wind up erring on the side of caution and saving everything forever.

This is, of course, the retention policy that takes the least amount of effort, at least in terms of design. It’s also the least efficient. When you keep all of your information forever, you’re going to have higher costs in the end. You need to maintain every application tied to all of your retained information, and eventually you’re going to find your data center bursting at the seams.

The folks at HP are familiar with the infinite retention trap. Accordingly, they offer a handful of ideas about how to get started in creating an information retirement policy:

1.    Know what your data needs are. You need to analyze how much data you have today, as well as how fast your data needs are growing. At some point down the road, you’re going to hit your limit. That limit might be one of physical space in the data center. It might be a limitation in manpower to manage your burgeoning infrastructure. In most cases, that limit is going to be budgetary.

2.    Know what kind of information you have. Not all information is created equal. You need to bring in experts from your various business units to categorize every piece of data. You need to classify data as business records or non-records, and then proceed to create a specific policy of retention and retirement for each category.

3.    Identify your regulator obligations. Once you have your categories of information, you need to start thinking about how regulatory requirements affect each of those categories. Regulations will vary greatly depending on your industry, as well as the type of data you’re talking about and how you use that data.

4.    Choose your vendor carefully. You need to choose the right solution for your needs. You want a solution that can implement your retirement and retention policies through the entire life of the record. You need a solution that will support multiple types of data, including email and business applications. Whenever possible, your solution should include an open data format so you can access your data through a variety of means. Finally, you need to choose a vendor that’s going to be around through the life of your data, so they need to be one that’s stable and that isn’t going to shut down any time soon.

There are many vendors that can help you implement these kindsof storage retention policies, and HP is at the top of the list when it comes to providing robust solutions in an affordable way.

IBM Power7 Hardware Planning Pitfalls

IBM POWER7 promises to be one of the most robust, flexible and efficient technologies offered by IBM to the enterprise to date. If your organization is thinking about making the move from a previous IBM Power Systems configuration to POWER7, there are some specific things you’ll want to watch out for in order to keep things moving along the way that they should.

Power5 Upgrades

As it stands today, any upgrade for your Power Systems that intend to preserve the same serial number when going to POWER7 will have to come from a POWER6 server. What this means is that, if you’re on POWER5 or older technology, you’ll have to add the interim step of upgrading to POWER6 prior to upgrading to Power7, if you intend to be able to keep your serial number.

I/O Drawer Support

POWER7 systems will be able to support the current POWER6 system 12X I/O drawers. Older drawers, such as the slower RIO/HSL-attached I/O drawers, won’t be supported on POWER7. What that means for you is that you should consider replacing your old slower RIO/HSL-attached I/O drawers with drawers featuring newer technology.

SCSI Disk Drive Support

When POWER6 was released, IBM announced that this would be the final line of servers to support SCSI drives at 36GM or smaller. In addition, it was the last to support 10k rpm SCSI drives. If you still have smaller SCSI drives or slower SCSI drives, you’ll want to consider replacing them with newer, supported drives prior to your POWER7 adoption.

QIC Tape

As with SCSI, POWER6 was the last IBM series to support usage of Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC) tape (also known as SLR) drives. Here again, if you want to go POWER7 you’re going to need to move to newer media, drives or technology prior to your upgrade.

PCI Adapters

POWER6 also signals the end of the line to support the IBM I IOP and IOP-based adapters. These adapters can be replaced with IOPless, also known as “Smart IOA,” options.  Moving off IOPs will help make your implementation of POWER7 go much more smoothly.

Some of the problem comes with device support for IOP-based tape libraries, for example. Other problems come with the need for an IOP from SDLC or X.25 on WAN and LAN adapters. Check to see if your current hardware requires an IOP before you migrate to POWER7. If it does, that hardware will have to be replaced, as well.

Consolidate Maintenance Contracts for Cost Savings

While there are signs that the economic downturn may be finally beginning to turn around, the fact is that IT departments are, for the foreseeable future, going to be asked to offer more services with higher performance for less money. As technology advances, some costs naturally come down, and so there are some built-in ways that the market is going to help IT departments manage. Still, you’ve got to cut some corners here and there, and one of the best ways to do that is in the area of your maintenance contracts.

Support contracts themselves can be a cost savings measure. If you have an application or a particular solution and you don’t have any in-house expertise, you have a few choices. You can repurpose existing personnel to manage that technology. This creates a drain on your personnel, however. You can bring in new personnel to support the technology, but in many cases those positions may be very temporary or not need a full-time person to administer them.

So, you buy a maintenance contract. You save a bunch of money when compared to hiring someone new, and you get expert support from folks who deal with that particular technology day in and day out.

But, even these contracts add up. And, depending on exactly the extent of your inventory of solutions and contracts, it can be hard to keep your arms wrapped around your inventory. That’s where it can become worthwhile to begin consolidating your maintenance contracts. Consolidating your maintenance contracts with a single, reputable support vendor provides you with a number of immediate benefits. Your contracts are contained within a single coterminous agreement. You have a single point of contact when it comes to external support. There are fewer invoices and fewer agreements, therefore there are fewer opportunities for error. Not only that, you now have a support resource that is not only familiar with the specific technology that’s being supported, but rather that has a handle on your entire IT structure and strategy.

You’ll also realize immediate cost savings, as a consolidated maintenance contract will be less expensive than several separate contracts. You can likely negotiate even better pricing when you make a multi-year agreement, or when you add additional systems and technologies to the support contract.

If your maintenance contract situation is a mess, talk to your favorite reliable IT vendor today about cleaning things up with consolidated maintenance contracts.

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Addressing your Enterprise NAS Priorities

While there are naysayers who think that the NAS market is on the decline, there are others that forecast continued and expansive growth in the NAS market. One company suggest that the enterprise NAS market will hit 62,000 petabytes some time in 2012.

What does that mean for your enterprise? Well, for one, it means that the big NAS vendors, from EMC to HP to IBM to Dell, will all be competing for your business, alongside the traditional NAS market leaders. It also means an opportunity to take advantage of innovations in the area of file virtualization systems, and with cloud storage solutions that meet the NAS needs of your enterprise in unconventional ways.

It also means that you need to get your Enterprise NAS priorities in order. You need to recognize the problem areas in your NAS implementations. The biggest problem for the vast majority of enterprises is the rapid growth of your installed storage systems base.

You need to be able to make your NAS systems as efficient as possible in many areas, from power to cooling to footprint. How do you do that? While every enterprise has its own unique situation, there are some general guiding principles you can follow to address this enterprise NAS priority:

•    Maximize your storage resource management tools. Use those tools to measure your NAS capacity and efficiency. Even starting with something basic like the File Server Resource Manager built in to Windows Server 2008 is a start. Most enterprises should consider implementing a more robust storage resource management tool, however. IBM, HP and all of the major vendors offer these kinds of tools, and there’s bound to be one that will work well in your environment.

•    Focus on optimization. There are a number of optimization tools out there, as well. Specifically, you want to use storage optimization tools that will not only give you data on your environment, but be able to use deduplication and comrpession technologies, as well.

•    Increase virtualization. Virtualization of your enterprise storage environment lets you use intellegent tiering of your storage, moving your less-used data to lower-cost storage systems accordingly.

•    Move valuable data with infrequent access to the cloud. There are a number of solutions that allwo you to move applications to the cloud, including your storage management, optimzation and virtualization tools.

Implementing these kinds of changes will help you meet the rapidly-changing needs of your organization while making sure that your NAS solutions don’t overcrowd the resources of your data center.

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Desktop Virtualization Primer for CIOs

One of the most talked-about topics for many IT executives right now is desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization comes on the heels of server virtualization, which has been a tremendous boon for many organizations. CIOs see desktop virtualization as the rightful heir to server virtualization, and they have high hopes. They want to save money and improve the efficiency of the IT function all at once.
Still, there are some important concepts you need to grasp as a CIO before you dive your department directly into the desktop virtualization world:

•    Desktop virtualization is more than just virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI is based on the idea of centralized desktops hosted on a server. Desktop virtualization more broadly includes technologies like terminal services, blade workstations, application virtualization and even streaming workstation.

•    Desktop virtualization can save you money, but not in the same way as server virtualization. You’re going to save on operating expenditures which are often where the highest spending is in IT. Chances are that desktop virtualization probably isn’t going to save you money on capital expenditures in the way that server virtualization did. There’s no data center footprint, and the physical desktop is already self-contained.

•    Business continuity and disaster recovery become an important question in a desktop virtualization world. Virtualization offers a great way to help with BC/DR, because virtual desktops can be more easily backed up and replicated.

•    Compliance and discovery are aided by desktop virtualization. If you had to do discover on thousands of PCs, the costs can be astronomical. If all the data is backed up and replicated in your data center, you can do whatever legal discovery you need to do and verify whatever regulations apply to your business are being complied with.

•    Desktop virtualization is a boon to the support department. There’s no process of pulling someone’s machine, trying to restore their data and configs. You just swap the hardware and push the virtual desktop back out to the user.

•    Secure, versatile access is one huge benefit of desktop virtualization. Providing secure access to your Network Engineer from his home laptop at 3 AM means less downtime and a happier Network Engineer. For a distributed sales force, it means real-time access to all of the important business data they could ever want, from sales materials to inventory.

The question isn’t whether desktop virtualization is a good idea. The question is whether the current offerings can meet your business’ needs.

Desktop Environment Assessment

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5 Ways the IBM i Series Helps Your Enterprise

The IBM i series is the latest in a line of cutting-edge enterprise technologies from IBM. Whether you’ve been using IBM up to this point or not, you should consider taking a look at the IBM i series.

Here are just some of the ways that the IBM i series can help your enterprise:

1.    Increased availability. With IBM i series, unplanned outages can be a thing of the past. A number of different technologies, from PowerVM to various redundancies like disk clustering can help keep your users plugging away during times of hardware failure. Even planned outages are kept to a minimum as you can perform hot upgrades simply by moving an application off a given server and back once the upgrade is complete.

2.    Server consolidation. Whether you have IBM i series or x86 servers in place, you can use an IBM BladeCenter solution to bring those disparate systems together in a single hardware solution.

3.    Increased performance. Both IBM i series and IBM System Storage environments benefit from newly improved SAN support. In addition, you can add Fiber Channel Adapters to give your Power System performance over the SAN that is comparable to a localized disk. You’ll also see increased performance for both WebSphere and Java applications with IBM i series.

4.    Easier management. Web-based management vis the IBM Systems Director gives you a way to manage a heterogeneous server environment. In addition, Systems Director offers a web-based Performance Data Investigator to put performance data at your fingertips.

5.    More efficient virtualization. Power VM VIOS allows a IBM i series partition to support a number of storage systems solutions, making your SAN available to a wider range of partitions than it otherwise would have been. In addition, you can create test or development environments using virtualization, allowing you to reduce costs and simplify new implementations. Power VM Active Memory Sharing also helps the flow of memory between partitions in order to increase both utilization and flexibility in virtualization.

IBM i series is one of the quickest and most effective ways to make sure your enterprise information technology environment is as efficient as it can be, and to experience maximum availability across the enterprise.

Register for a Server Consolidation Assessment

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How to Do More with Less in Enterprise Storage

It’s true that there are some signs our economy is starting to turn back around, at least in some areas and some sectors. Still, it’s going to be a while before IT has the kinds of resources it had access to just a decade ago. The storage management component of IT, while it may see some growth due to things like increased need for compliance and demands for greater storage capacity, is going to be asked to do more for less. Enterprise storage personnel are asked to move the organization forward without investment, or with minimal investment.

Cost Avoidance and Cost Savings
If you are being asked to cut your enterprise storage expenses, you’re going to look at those cuts in terms of the impact they have on the organization. Cuts fall into two camps:

•    Cost savings reduce your budget today. They product quick and tangible results, right now. Examples would include reducing or eliminating a service contract or lowering your contracted throughput with an outside vendor.

•    Cost avoidance reduces your budget in the future. It lets you put off costs or even eliminate costs that you anticipated would hit in the future. This is the kind of cost “cutting” that politicians like to discuss, and doesn’t represent spending less but rather not spending more.

Obviously, cost savings have the most visible impact. Arguably, cost savings is also the real measure of whether you’re doing more with less. Cost avoidance is more like doing less with the same, or even doing the same with less.

In practical terms, what are some of the ways to avoid costs in enterprise storage? Things that come to mind include improving capacity utilization. Many enterprises find their used to usable ration at around 20 percent, which means there is plenty of extra space that can be put to good use. Cleaning up data, eliminating unnecessary copies, getting rid of temporary files, utilizing compression and deduplication technologies will all help us to avoid buying new disks or arrays and expanding infrastructure.

Cost savings are harder to come by in the enterprise storage environment. Dropping an existing expense probably means breaking a lease, returning equipment or worse. In many cases, getting tough in negotiations with your vendors may lead to cost savings. Unfortunately, one of the most rapid ways to save costs is to eliminate personnel. The problem, of course, is that this move can dramatically impact service.

There are some other ways to realize immediate costs savings. Converting capital costs to operational costs is one way. This usually involves bringing in service providers. Rather than choosing to replace a server, for example, you hire a vendor to provide managed services. This lets you take the old equipment off the floor, reducing power and maintenance costs out of the gate.

Ultimately, if your organization is asking you to do more with less in terms of enterprise storage, you’re going to have to get creative about making the most of what you have and finding new solutions that don’t increase costs.

Rethinking Business Continuity

Almost every business organization understands that successful operations depend on the continuous availability of its applications. Most companies rely on internal applications – ranging from enterprise resource planning to payroll systems – to keep the wheels of the organization turning. They also depend on external-facing applications for everything from selling products to their customers to automating the supply chain with suppliers and partners. The failure of any of these business-critical applications could be catastrophic to a company.

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Business Benefits of Data Center Automation

Today’s data center has to contend with more technology, more different applications and more physical servers than ever before. Simply managing your data center inventory can be a significant chore, and it’s one that your IT personnel are paid way too much to do. Add to that the fact that IT departments are being told their data center needs to provide higher levels of service at a lower cost, and you can see why many folks in IT management are extremely frustrated.

Fortunately, there are ways to lower costs and improve your data center. Technologies like virtualization are enabling data centers to avoid overutilization, at least to some degree, and make the most of the assets they have.

Data center automation is another way to cut costs while increasing service levels. Automation takes a variety of repetitive, manual tasks and turns them into automated processes.

What are the direct benefits of data center automation? Here are just a few:

•    Data center automation increases compliance and standardization. If, for example, you have a manual patch process, you’re always going to run the risk that there is one old server in a corner somewhere that got missed. That server gets out of sync and then it has a ripple effect throughout the data center. Automating processes like patching allows you to ensure compliance.

•    Data center automation increases server efficiency. Underutilization is a problem. In environments where virtualization hasn’t been effectively implemented, underutilization has been a failsafe of sorts to help insure service levels are maintained. When you implement automated virtualization processes in the data center, you can actually anticipate server and infrastructure demand and allow the system to adjust itself on the fly to meet real time needs.

•    Data center automation uses staff more efficiently. You don’t really need to pay your server guru insane amounts of money in order to do a simple upgrade. Automation frees up your staff to focus on big-picture items such as new technologies, projects and finding even more ways for your data center to offer more services for lower costs.

Data center automation, in short, increases the reliability, performance and efficiency o your data center, while providing a lower TCO.

Lower Operational Costs Through Process Automation

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Creating a Top-Down Virtualization Strategy

Virtualization is one of the best ways for an organization to increase its IT service levels while reducing expenses. Whether you’re talking about server virtualization, desktop virtualization, cloud computing or server consolidation, there are many areas that virtualization can impact a business.

The challenge, for many organizations, is to be able to virtualize in an organized, comprehensive and strategic fashion. To do that, you need to be able to create a top-down virtualization strategy.

That’s not always as easy as it sounds. If technology is easy to adopt, people are more likely to get excited about it. Because of that, you need to create your strategy over time, and implement some very specific steps:

1.    Address virtualization at the demand layer. Find out what the users want. Find out what the applications need. Understand where the data goes, where processing done, and go from there. Your virtualization efforts will not only be met with resistance if you don’t do this, chances are pretty good that they’ll be either ineffective or inefficient.

2.    Next, you need to virtualize the supply of IT resources. This means you virtualize the network, storage, computing power, memory and IO. Each component of the IT supply has to be virtualized if a top-down strategy is going to work. Your virtual servers have to be across the board, and won’t mix well with other physical components.

3.    Now, you need to incorporate the life cycle management of your virtualization platform. Essentially, you need to look at both the virtualized demand and the virtualized supply and match them with the right virtual resources. Further, you need to determine how they are matched and provisioned.

Performance, cost and efficiency are key in the virtualization process, as well. As you move through these stages, you need to always go back to those three principles. You need to look at your business processes, from most critical to least critical, in terms of those factors. From there you can decide where business needs aren’t being met, and establish priorities for moving forward.

When to Virtualize Servers

If you haven’t started using virtualization or you haven’t fully virtualized your IT environment, here are five steps to determine when you should make that move.

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