Data Center Optimization: An Opportunity for Partners

Are there businesses that are increasingly dependent on IT for mission critical applications, or, are trying to increase its IT efficiency? Or, considering the effect of glooming economy, are there companies trying to cut costs?

Whatever may be the situation, system integrators and solution providers have a good business opportunity to seamlessly manage their IT environment, increase their efficiency and reduce downtime. But the important question is where to start with?

One of the important places is to look into data center end-to-end services. Whether it is a big, mid-sized or a small enterprise, or a government body; every sector is now dependent on IT to deliver the kind of output required in real time, on demand. Amidst all this, data center is one such important area where top level players are putting their capital for a smooth flow of data, in case of government bodies-smooth flow of services. This brings a good business opportunity for channels where they can earn good revenue by optimizing these data centers without compromising on services; essentially it means reducing costs.

To begin with, let's look into the overall Indian Data Centre market. As per the latest reports by Nasscom, India's Data Centre market was estimated at $2.2 bn in 2012 and is expected to grow over 8% over the next 3-4 years. Such is the quantum of amount of money involved in the data center business. It clearly indicates the growing need for efficient data centers; may be due to upsurge of data (read big data) from social media, smartphones, e-commerce portals, etc, or with the Indian government's ambitious social inclusion projects or various e-government services to citizens.

So in the future, it is expected from many companies to increase their dependency on end-to-end data center services following the rising need for a smooth dissemination of data.

End-to-End Data Center service

So what is end-to-end data center services mean? It starts right from assessing a customer's business needs, challenges, concerns, application needs-and this is where optimization starts-making a master plan, design recommendation, programming and an aim to obtain energy efficiency among others, forms an end-to-end services.

An end-to-end data center provides the entire bouquet of solutions to enterprises for their data center management needs, while effectively integrating services, network and IT resources, says Piyush Somani, MD, ESDS Software Solution.

 

When hosting with an end-to-end data center, he adds, "The complex tasks of data center planning, design, relocation, and construction should be taken care of with flexibility to accommodate organization's present and future needs, while remaining cost-effective."
Designing details also forms an important part of the data center services, concurs Sandeep Vahi, Director, Compton Computers, who further emphasized on the need for conceptual design.

Vahi adds, "What if scenarios are planned to ensure all operational outcomes are met, in order to future-proof the facility. Conceptual floor layout has to be driven by IT performance requirement, as well as lifecycle cost associated with IT demand, energy and cost efficiency and availability."

Aneev Ansari, VP, Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions takes a different standpoint and suggests that clients need a data center essentially to meet a business need. Ansari mentions that many service providers are in the fulfillment space-simply multiplying a number of racks with average power consumption.

He adds, "However, what is important is to be in the client's value chain is to understand why the client is motivated to build or upgrade the data center. What are their BCP plans? Does their business really disallow maintenance windows? What are the opportunities to move some or all of their data to cloud? What are the opportunities to consolidate and virtualize?"

On optimizing data center

Immediately when we think about optimization, businesses talk about the gains associated with it. One is obviously-it lowers the IT cost, which in turn ensures a good Return on Investment.

Secondly, it enables maximum resource utilization, for example, in server consolidation and virtualization we tend to use 80% of the server capacity, thereby eliminating some redundancies.

G Dharanibalan, Executive, offerings management and development, global technology services, IBM, ISA said that data center optimization will only increase in the coming times, as more and more managers expect more from less. He added, "Security threat pose catastrophic risks.
End users are demanding feature-rich content and continuous uptime. At the center of it all, power-hungry data centers are consuming more energy as data-intensive applications are pushing past network and storage capacity boundaries. This increases the need for data center optimization."

Some of the key elements of optimizations includes efficient use for physical space which means space planning, engineering infrastructure design of mechanical systems such as cooling and electrical systems including power. From the infrastructure point of view server consolidation is important, which in turn increases server efficiency upto 80%. Blade servers are preferred over tower servers, saving more space.

One of the most important aspects is to know and analyze the energy usage in the data center because energy consumed by simple infrastructure equipments like fans and chillers also form a key part. Energy efficiency analysis has to be done to identify mechanical and electrical source of inefficiency.

Vahi from Compton feels that to optimize a data center, one needs to conduct extensive systems study and evaluate key areas with a focused approach.

He adds on optimization, "Designing the redundancy levels keeping (in mind) uptime guarantee of 99.9% and creating multiple independent distribution paths serving the IT equipment (for optimal performance), the design had to be such that the downtime available would not be more than 94 minutes."

On the line of optimization, through efficient energy usage, ESDS-manufactures its own data center-claims to be one of the country's first Green Data Centres, which is environment friendly and sustainable. It maintains that regular maintenance by extending lifecycles of infrastructure assets and replacing or adjusting equipment in a timely fashion significantly improves energy efficiency.

Their asset utilization practices include dynamic and automatic shifting of resources such as servers, disks and networks among applications as required, leading to increase standardization, automation and virtualization.

At ESDS as it claims, data center automation automates the typically manual tasks associated with provisioning, patching and support of data center services, also improving scalability and agility. Somani adds, ‘Our virtualization model acts as a utility-like service. The Data Centre witnesses reduced costs and quicker delivery of resources/services, enabling increased flexibility and responsiveness to ever-changing business needs with higher levels of service availability. The benefits of these practices include a 30% reduction in cost, better support and response time, significant energy saving and excellent service delivery."

Meanwhile, "Every business should analyze their budget and re-evaluate their business and functional requirements before laying down plans for a data center. One has to balance between protecting existing investments already made vs improved efficiency and service levels vs managing budgets," feels Ansari.

He adds, "The goal is to always reduce operational costs, have a clear defined return on investments and improving service levels."

Industry Challenges

Cyber Media Research says that major challenges in the sector include coping with the changing business needs, new application developments, and IT infrastructure advances. It also states that the entire life cycle of the data center, the technology within it, and the business it supports, must be brought into synchronization, as the change happens very quickly. Other challenges include complex IT infrastructure management, large expenditure on vendor specific point product, among others.

One of the major challenges has been the client acceptance, admits Ansari of Choice Solution. He adds it takes courage to go in for a simple and optimized solution when the buzz is about highest uptime.

Highlighting the important aspect of taking risks, he added, "It becomes easy to go with voices that say: why take a chance, who will consider the potential benefits, if the solution does not work. However, the clients who are open to evaluate the solution vs the risks vs the benefits see the value of right sizing and have become heroes within their organizations."

Another major challenge is to reduce wasteful consumption significantly along with the problems with management and visibility across data center boundaries, states Somani. He emphasizes that amid budget restrictions, balancing power requirements with rising energy costs, complying with tougher environmental regulations and improving power usage effectiveness forms key challenge.

While Vahi concludes that the lack of testing and monitoring tools as well as the online monitoring services with manageable cost is one of the important problem areas.

Opportunities Gallore

In the times to come, the role of IT is going to increase only and the demand placed on the IT infrastructure will continue to grow. This will create a wide array of opportunities for SI partners to explore and exploit. With the changing times, the requirements and expectations from existing data centers based on old models are slowly falling short of providing satisfactory outcomes. With the emergence of technologies and solutions around cloud and big data, the data centers now have to evolve and will need to undergo a complete overhaul in future, to fulfill the need of the hour. So in this line, existing data centers relying on manual tasks, homegrown scripts and occasional point solution would have been sufficient for yesteryears requirements, however, the new expectations of agility, flexibility, and above all cost savings will lead to near obsoletion of these data centers.

Businesses today expect a rapid and reliable turnaround on requests. These factors are now creating opportunities for SI partners which they should not ignore. The time is to gear up and tap in to these avenues as these are the clear indicators on how the future is going to evolve. Data centers today are becoming a requisite for small to large organizations which open numerous avenues for SIs to cash upon.