Consolidation

One of the things many of the banks in the city are facing is problems with data center space. That they’re reaching capacity, bringing on new facilities, with that in mind, is virtualization the next platform, the tool of choice to carry out wintel/linux server moves?

That I can take my Compaq DL360, virtualize it on to my DL585/my blade farm in data center 1 (DC1), then send it over the LAN, and either have a virtual infrastructure in the new data center (DC4) bringing me all the associated benefits. The reason for mentioning this is that the cost of moving a server financially as well as a service delivery standpoint can be very significant, it might only be a two hour journey in the back of a van, but its’ the move part that might take much longer from an outage standpoint. That stop application, shut down server, stop monitoring, unrack server, package it, courier it, then unpack it, rack it, patch it, switch it on, enable monitoring, test, all the hidden bits. Not to mention the cost of having some vendor approved engineers to deal with any hardware failures, do consider those Compaq 6500s, the 5000s, ensuring that you can adequately plan and respond to these is important.

So let’s use the technology as a server move enabler right? The cost of moving the server estate can be horrific, from the courier cost, the insurance, the internal/external engineers time as well as everything else, and the risk particularly to the legacy systems can be a problem, for example, say it’s £750 to move a Compaq Proliant 6500, surely from a risk/benefit analysis we’re better virtualizing it/replacing it than moving it?

Granted I know most places wouldn’t the capex (initial capital cost being the problem), but it’s nice to dream..

I’ll take the DL360, virtualize it one weekend on to my ESX host, then over the weekend when it’s not in use, send it to the new data center on to my new ESX servers. Moving our existing server estate, our existing storage, networks and everything else moves the problems with us, we don’t get to build data centers that often, so effectively and efficiently handling the space allocation, the move is just as important as co-ordinating the down time.

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2190980/rbs-consolidates-customer

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is to consolidate data from more than 1,500 sources to give sales staff a single view of customer information.

The bespoke tool will be a single port of call to establish which banking services a customer uses, their behaviour patterns and credit risk.

The system will allow employees to identify what products can be cross-sold to customers, says RBS head of performance analytics David Samson.

‘The retail banking market is saturated and this could help us increase our market share,’ said Samson. ‘Having all the data available also prevents mis-selling, such as offering a credit card to someone with debt issues.’

Cross selling is a great way of doing business, being able to be informed about your customers to see what products they might be interested, its cheaper to sell to an existing customer than a new one, with that in mind, the more IT can be used to provide an overal picture of the customer, the more the sales teams, the customer support teams can target products/opportunities that might be right for the customer and earn revenue, RBS seem to have developed a system to help with this - very, very cool.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm?featureid=3394&pagtype=samechan

Despite the consolidation trend, some companies are continuing to branch out with their data centres for reasons including redundancy of the centralised data centre for backup, a more comprehensive disaster recovery plan and better uptime at regional offices.

Indeed, some companies actually prefer this approach, and experts say it makes sense for organisations such as those with branch employees who can act as IT technicians or firms with locations dispersed on different continents.

Deciding how and where to deploy your data centers is an important strategic decision from a cost and a business strategy process viewpoint, having everything  in one location might expose you to unnecessary risk, at the same time, having many different data centers for each location or business line might introduce unnecessary cost, you need to balance the costs/risks as with anything, the interesting thing is how virtualization will change this - will it allow my IT to follow the sun with the business? To have my Singapore users use my London servers when the electricity is cheaper and I have people on site?

http://www.netapp.com/news/press/news_rel_20070515

Sunnyvale, Calif. – May 15, 2007 — Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today broke the industry’s traditional deduplication legacy with the availability of NetApp® advanced single-instance storage (A-SIS) deduplication for NetApp NearStore® and FAS storage systems to help customers achieve the cost benefits of deduplication across a wide variety of environments, including backup, archival, compliance storage, and primary data sets as diverse as home directories and genomic data. The introduction of NetApp A-SIS deduplication provides customers with the ability to reduce capital expenditures and management costs by dramatically reducing the amount of storage they need to purchase and manage. The reduction in quantity of physical storage translates into savings in power and cooling costs and data center real estate costs. Deduplication is just one of the many features customers require from storage vendors, including reliability, scalability, and the ability to easily manage their environments. With today’s news, customers must consider the cost and efficiency benefits of deduplication as being applicable across all environments and that it should be an integral part of backup, archival, compliance, and general primary storage solutions.

Very cool NetApp have announced their Advacned Single-Instance Storage, which sounds very cool, the ability to fit more data on less storage reduces the amount of storage solutions I need and in the process power and data center capacity. Check it out.

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/article/articleview/2030/1/2/

Whether we realize it or not, IT networks are intrinsically linked and mapped to larger movements within society. When the Internet began to change the way people communicate and conduct business, the network followed suit. Expansion to multiple servers was the norm in order to carry and house the increasing gigabytes of data created on a daily basis. The advent of the remote site reflected the trend toward a decentralized world, where workers migrated freely throughout the globe, and demanded the ability to take their work with them. The rise of laptops and mobile devices followed, further expanding the data center as users became dependent on the ability to be “always on” regardless of location.

Check out this article, it talks about virtualization and the green data center, very cool, do check it out, it discusses some examples of how virtualization issues relating to power consumption. It’s right but just keep in mind, that the technology is only as good as the processes set around it, that its a business enabler, not a tool to fix your business.