How To Modernize A Datacenter With Linux (Amd64)

W H I T E P A P E R

T h e R o l e o f L i n u x i n D a t a c e n t e r M o d e r n i z a t i o n

Al Gillen August 2013

I D C O P I N I O N

Datacenters are, and always have been, investments that evolve as the industry changes, new technologies emerge, and application needs change. However, today, datacenter managers are facing a daunting future that may not include any meaningful expansion of their datacenters in terms of floor space, yet their existing datacenter assets may need dramatic modernization in preparation for tomorrow's computing models. In detail:

 The same evolving technologies that are at the forefront of today's conversation will potentially bring dramatic change to today's datacenters. Just a few of these technologies include the broader concept of cloud computing hosted by third-party service providers, the eventual movement to a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) compute model, and the need for a fully virtualized dynamic datacenter that can federate with external resources on an as-needed basis, creating new challenges to network and storage infrastructure, and the related impact on the system infrastructure software layers.

 Today's datacenters continue to have a diverse infrastructure in use. It is not uncommon to have at least three, and potentially four (or more), architectures in use. Those architectures would include Windows on x86, Linux on x86, and Unix on RISC or EPIC. It is not so unusual to also find mainframe-class systems or older-generation distributed systems like IBM i, HP OpenVMS, or Unisys ClearPath systems in use. Linux may be in use aboard architectures other than x86, including POWER and IBM z.

 For most datacenters, the path toward tomorrow's compute paradigm mandates some investment — and frequently significant investment — in standardization and consolidation as well as a more robust adoption of enterprise virtualization software, along with cloud system software to extend that virtualized infrastructure into a true private cloud environment. Realistically, before a customer can truly utilize a private cloud, organizations must standardize and minimize the variability in their existing environment.

 Linux has emerged as one of the key elements to a modernization program for a datacenter. The role Linux plays is one of cross-architecture standardization to a single operating system (OS) as well as a target platform for migrated workloads from Unix and other operating systems.

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I N T H I S W H I T E P A P E R

This IDC white paper looks at the transition that today's datacenters have to move through to adapt to and leverage the changing technologies that will be the underpinnings of tomorrow's compute paradigm. This transition includes the standardization of infrastructure software, the commoditization and standardization of hardware layers, and the changing programming model that customers will utilize for next-generation applications. This IDC white paper looks at Linux as an enabler to help organizations respond to and leverage these changing paradigms.

S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W

The computer industry has a history of reinventing itself, and it's not done yet.

One of the trends that we have seen time and again in the computer industry — which is actually not surprising if you have ever read Clayton Christensen's landmark book The Innovator's Dilemma — is that new technologies come along and present disruptive change to the incumbent players and products. New products typically win on the basis of low price at a vastly lower level of functionality when competing against the previously dominant products. Over time, these new low-cost solutions move upmarket, driving incumbent players even further upmarket.

History also shows that every 10–20 years, a fundamental architectural shift takes place for compute infrastructure. These shifts have often manifested themselves as a competitive solution that — at first — appears to be vastly inferior across multiple metrics, but that initial inferiority comes with desirable attributes that the market may find to be unavailable, or unaffordable, from the incumbent platforms.

Over time, the competitive platforms improve and evolve, although not necessarily into an exact replacement for the previous solution. Indeed, these platforms end up inventing new paradigms, and they can be quick to embrace new ways to solve old problems, which over time allows these new platforms to differentiate themselves in multiple dimensions and eventually brings far greater functionality than the solution they followed to market.

At the same time, in the computer industry, it is rare for new solutions to fully eradicate the need for previous solutions. Indeed, if new entrants were to methodically chase down incumbents, it would reduce the agility and innovation in the new entrants and sentence them to early obsolescence. Instead, each new technology tends to both supplant and supplement existing solutions. There are parallels for this type of replacement/improvement cycle — it is not unlike how radio supplanted and competed with newspapers and how television subsequently supplanted and over time competed more and more directly with radio.

IDC segments modern computing into three separate paradigms:

 1st Platform: The 1st Platform is mainframe- and host-centric computing; user access is through fixed-function terminals. The 1st Platform dates back to the dawn of commercial information technology systems, emerging in the 1960s. As will always be the case, the emergence of subsequent platforms has not totally

disenfranchised the 1st Platform, and this solution continues to be a mainstream compute solution and is expected to continue to serve a critical role in the future. Today, it is possible to access 1st Platform solutions with modern devices including smart mobile devices, and in many cases, the application functionality still housed on 1st Platform solutions has been (or is being) wrapped in virtualized or cloud computing interfaces. Classic 1st Platforms included early mainframe-class systems and minicomputer-class systems designed for terminal-connected multiuser environments. Examples of classic 1st Platforms would also include IBM's System/36, System/38, and AS/400; DEC VAX/VMS; and even early Unix systems.

 2nd Platform: The 2nd Platform involves distributed computing systems, based on RISC, x86, and EPIC (Itanium-based) architectures, typically accessed by PCs. The 2nd Platform initially came to market as an extension to client-side technology but also leveraged many late-generation 1st Platform solutions including IBM z/OS, IBM i, and HP OpenVMS. But the 2nd Platform is more commonly associated with more recent platforms such as Unix servers, Windows Servers, and NetWare servers, all of which were usually paired with x86 PCs for primary access over local area networks built on Ethernet. The most recent entrant into the 2nd Platform world was Linux, which matured very late in the life cycle of that technology wave. Particularly in the case of Windows and Linux, these technologies followed a classic "innovator's dilemma" and came to market lacking the functionality, scale, and reliability/performance attributes that competitive environments offered. Yet by delivering good-enough functionality in a low-cost, good price/performance package, both products evolved into full-blown server platforms — first through scale-out deployments and subsequently to a mixture of scale-out and scale-up solutions that are deployed based on the application workload's scale requirements, the desired availability attributes, and the language that was used to construct the application itself. The access device of choice for 2nd Platform solutions is a personal computer, with access today quickly being extended to support smart mobile devices as well.

 3rd Platform: The fast-growing smart mobile device market — best illustrated by smartphones and highly mobile, always-connected tablet devices — represents the arrowhead of the 3rd Platform. But the 3rd Platform is not only about end-user access devices; it is empowered by a bidirectional value-add that these devices bring to the market. Typically, these devices are data consumers, frequently accessing resources hosted within cloud compute environments housed aboard server farms usually (but not always) located in some faraway locale, but they also serve as the hub for social networking. The cloud computing world also has to replicate serving in multiple sites (across regions) — to prevent slowdowns in performance that would otherwise impact the end-user experience. Then these same smart devices capture data — or have their activities captured — that is harvested and built into big data solutions that seek to predict consumer and business user behavior. These big data stores are mined through next-generation analytic tools and, in turn, rendered back to commercial and consumer customers through cloud services. The very nature of application development and deployment is heavily influenced by these new data sets and the application delivery paradigms that will dominate cloud solutions.

Figure 1 provides a graphical depiction of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Platform waves.

F I G U R E 1

T h e 1 s t , 2 n d , a n d 3 r d P l a t f o r m s

Source: IDC, 2013

As noted previously, for an emerging platform to be successful when compared with an incumbent platform, the new entrant must bring new thinking and different — usually less expensive — ways of solving both old and new problems.

Intelligent industry solutions

3rd Platform

Mobile devices and apps

Big data/analytics Cloud services Mobile broadband Social business

Trillions of Things

1st Platform

PC

2nd Platform

of users Thousandsof apps

Billions of users CIOs LOBs Enterprises SMBs SPs Consumers Emerging markets Millions of … Apps Services Information Content Experiences

T h e I m p a c t o f t h e 3 r d P l a t f o r m

The 3rd Platform is not specific to any size class of customers. Indeed, 3rd Platform deployment affects small and midsize business just as it affects large businesses and the datacenters those large businesses operate. What is different among the size classes is that small customers are likely to respond to the disruption caused by the 3rd Platform by migrating to software as a service (SaaS). Midsize organizations are likely to migrate some applications directly to a SaaS solution and maintain other solutions for a long time into the future.

Large organizations, which commonly have a far more substantial IT investment, including data and applications that are critical to the business itself, are usually left with fewer options for a short-term adoption of the 3rd Platform. Indeed, many large organizations are considerably more likely to make an evolutionary movement to 3rd Platform architectures for some applications while opting to modernize other workloads so they are compatible with an evolution to a virtualized, private cloud and, ultimately, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at some point in the future. Either way, large organizations are facing a wave of modernization that builds on a standardized software stack that is virtualized and increasingly modular in nature.

D a t a c e n t e r M o d e r n i z a t i o n

While datacenter modernization is a key step to a move to embrace the 3rd Platform, the reality is that datacenter modernization is an activity that has been going on for almost as long as datacenters have been in use. The precise activities that are being completed as part of a datacenter modernization project have changed over the years, and today's activities are heavily focused around consolidation and standardization. Datacenter modernization may include some or all of the following activities:

 Hardware standardization. In recent years, we have seen many organizations working toward standardizing their hardware on x86 servers in either rack-optimized or blade configurations. The belief among many organizations is that x86 offers good price/performance attributes. Availability and scalability of x86 servers trailed competitive offerings in the past, but today, Intel, AMD, and server OEMs are making good progress in closing the gap with competitive platforms. While we do not expect that x86-based solutions will ever fully match RISC- and EPIC-based systems in terms of scale and availability, customers are finding that with the right hardware architectural design and the right system software stack, they can achieve suitable levels of reliability and availability to meet the majority of their needs.

 Software standardization. Customers are realizing that software complexity leads to higher costs. The best way to reduce complexity is to reduce the variability of software installations. It is difficult — if not impossible — to reduce the number of software stacks to 2–3 combinations, but for many organizations where there may be dozens, if not hundreds, of combinations of infrastructure software stacks in use, even reducing that matrix down to 10 or 15 combinations represents a massive achievement. Organizations that are able to further standardize — for at least some layers of their software stack — are likely to see incremental benefits that pay back in meaningful ways.

 Virtualization standardization. Virtualization software has had a dramatic impact on modern datacenters. Today, most organizations have standardized on one or two hypervisors as the foundation layer for their deployments. The movement to virtualization software has the side effect of "standardizing" the underlying hardware since the hypervisor layer allows each server to appear identical to the operating system — assuming all the servers are uniformly either Intel or AMD based. The virtualization layer has also made it possible for organizations to physically or virtually standardize at other layers, including management and peripheral devices including network and storage.

 Operating system and infrastructure software standardization. An analog that is happening to virtualization software standardization is a standardization of related infrastructure software layers, including the base operating system. The use of a minimal number of operating system products (vendors), and even within a given vendor, a limited number of release versions, reduces the support matrix and lowers operational costs, reduces the difficulty of managing life cycles, and, in turn, standardizes layered software product selections.

F U T U R E O U T L O O K

One of the key trends over the past decade has been the continued growth of Linux server operating environment (SOE) subscriptions and deployments. Linux emerged in the 1990s and was initially avoided by many datacenter managers, but today, Linux has already become a key technology deployed in enterprise datacenters as well as in service provider datacenters. Customers are finding measurable business value from deploying Linux as one of their primary SOEs. IDC's primary research on operating environments finds that Linux has become one of two operating systems that will serve as the basis for most of the 3rd Platform deployments in the future.

C u s t o m e r U s e o f L i n u x

IDC interviewed the IT manager responsible for server and storage technology at a large United States–based manufacturing company that operates 100 sites, operates in 68 different countries, and generates $30 billion per year of revenue. As a manufacturer that specializes its products for various customer segments and markets, it sells a diverse collection of products that collectively make up 65,000 unique SKUs. This organization typifies the type of modernization activities that are going on today in many large IT consumers, and the IT manager is responsible for the operational aspects of the storage and server architecture used on the company's open systems.

The company's experience with Linux dates back about six years, when the IT team decided to migrate to Red Hat to simplify application certification. One key vendor, JD Edwards, helped precipitate that movement. Says the IT manager, "We tend to run pretty lean. If you look at a lot of companies our size, they tend to have a much bigger IT organization. We try and look at how cost effective we are, and a lot of times, we are told we are one of the most cost-effective teams they have seen."

Globalization of Corporate IT

But there is another driver, the IT manager adds. "Three or four years ago, we got a new CIO. At the time, the way IT operated was not global. We might have plant IT people doing their own thing — and we have 300 plants around the world. We might have salespeople and different business units doing their own thing. There has been a big focus over the past three to five years to globalize IT."

Another driver was the plan to do a global SAP implementation. The company has two main datacenters in the Midwest. Those datacenters are about a mile apart and are run as active-active configurations, synchronized over dedicated fiber that the company ran between the sites. The company standardized on blade servers four years ago and has been rolling out new deployments on that architecture. The two datacenters are used for mirroring, clustering, and replication and are currently provisioned to run at about 50% utilization. The datacenter includes HP hardware, NetApp and EMC storage, and Cisco switch technology. Today, there are about 2,000 employees around the world using the SAP system.

In parallel with the move to the blade architecture, the company implemented a virtualization strategy, and now, it is about 70% virtualized, accounting for 300 physical servers of the company's overall inventory. Today, the company has three primary operating systems in use, with the most heavily used products being Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server 2008.

The company's modernization efforts have heavily landed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Where Linux accounted for about 50 servers four years ago, today, the company is at 1,400 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, including both virtual and physical instances — thanks in part to the SAP rollout. In the corporate datacenter, the company has just under 5,000 virtual and physical servers in use, while globally, the number expands to a total of 8,000 servers. "In general, we try and stay fairly current operating system–wise," says the IT manager.

Linux Forecast: Growing Strong

Both Linux and Windows installations will grow, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux growth is on a faster trajectory — thanks to the SAP rollout. The company expects to add 1,000 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers in the next year, primarily intended to support the SAP workloads. Longer term, Linux growth will scale back to a more sustainable rate.

While the company never forgets that it is a conservative manufacturing company, IT adoption does not lag in the past. Says the IT manager, "My philosophy is that you don't want to be on the latest version, but we do want to stay current. We do have legacy, but it's because we can't get the applications to move. Part of our job is to look at new technology." He adds, "Being on more current releases saves money over the long term. It costs us a lot more when we have old hardware."

According to the IT manager, the company has a long-term vision, but the length of the timeline is "probably not as far out as a lot of people would want to think. For real detailed planning, it's about a year at a time, because of our internal budget planning. We do speculate on where we will be in three to five years. We were just asked how much we were going to spend out to 2022; that is pretty difficult when it is 2013.

Anything beyond two years is pure speculation." Storage is a little more predictable, if not robust, with growth running at about 50–60% year over year.

Cloud Use Is Clear

Today, the modernization efforts are heavily focused on reducing the application sprawl and on consolidating on two major operating systems running on a virtualized infrastructure. Some business units are consuming SaaS offerings from Siebel CRM Systems, although those units will eventually be consolidated on the SAP implementation. The overall goal is to standardize on SAP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as broadly as possible.

In addition, there are divisions that develop software products, and those software products are delivered as software as a service.

In a third dimension of cloud adoption, the company has built a private cloud offering for internal customers. The cloud offers two operating system options: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Windows Server 2008. Customers that request Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are handled individually, so IT can determine why an earlier-generation operating system is being requested.

The IT department recognizes that it has to be competitive to win next-generation deployments, and it views Amazon and Windows Azure as competitors against which it needs to measure itself. "We are trying to show where the costs are going. We are competing with Windows Azure and Amazon." The IT manager adds, "Typically we are lower cost than them."

C H A L L E N G E S / O P P O R T U N I T I E S

Datacenter modernization is a logical goal to pursue, but logic and practical realities are not always one and the same. Challenges and opportunities associated with datacenter modernization include:

 Standardization requires change. The end game of a standardized software stack, running on a standardized virtual machine, offers lower capex and opex costs. However, there is cost associated with migrating to a standardized infrastructure. There is opportunity for customers in that there is a payback associated with an investment in infrastructure improvement and modernization.

 A modernized infrastructure is more compatible with public cloud. When going to a service provider for an IaaS or a PaaS solution, the more modern and standard that a company's IT is, the easier (and less expensive) it will be to move to a public offering. While not every organization is in a rush to move to public cloud infrastructure, having the technology in place to do so when the time comes can be an advantage.

 It is about more than the OS. Standardization and modernization apply to the hardware, virtualization infrastructure, and operating system. But modernization can go well beyond those basic infrastructure layers. Modernization means deploying modern application frameworks, management tools, and cloud system

software for cloud orchestration and management. Today, the industry is increasingly moving toward open source–based application frameworks and open source cloud system software layers such as OpenStack and KVM.

 Modernization requires discipline. As the customer case study presented in this paper indicates, it is not enough to just offer automated provisioning in a private cloud infrastructure. It is important to encourage internal customers to move to the most current operating systems, and if internal customers make a request for an aging solution, it is important to maintain the discipline to move them to the right solution.

C O N C L U S I O N

IT modernization extends the capabilities and boundaries that a platform can support. But it also extends the flexibility and applicability of a platform's future use scenarios. IDC believes that as the industry evolves, progressive customers will modernize and, in the process, standardize their IT infrastructures.

A modern IT infrastructure is better aligned with cloud computing and is more able to move to a PaaS or an IaaS deployment scenario, when and if an organization wants to move there. Modern IT infrastructure is more likely to support key technologies such as datacenter-to-cloud VPN connectivity, directory federation, and storage migration.

For most datacenters, the path toward tomorrow's compute paradigm mandates some investment — and frequently significant investment — in standardization and consolidation as well as a more robust adoption of enterprise virtualization software, along with cloud system software to extend that virtualized infrastructure into a true private cloud environment.

Linux has emerged as one of the key elements to a modernization program for a datacenter. The role Linux plays is one of cross-architecture standardization to a single operating system as well as a target platform for migrated workloads from Unix and other operating systems. Organizations that have aging infrastructures need to be considering the necessity — and urgency — of IT modernization.

C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e

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