White
Paper
Transforming the Enterprise with a
Dynamic IT Infrastructure
By Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst
January 2015
This ESG White Paper was commissioned by HP
and is distributed under license from ESG.
Contents
Introduction ... 3
A Major Challenge for Businesses Today ... 3
Evolving IT Service Delivery Must Match Business Requirements ... 4
The Current Environment ... 5
Operational Overhead ... 5
The New Environment ... 6
Looking to the Future ... 7
Data Center of the Future ... 7
Convergence of Infrastructure, Management, and Operations ... 8
The Bigger Truth ... 9
All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.
Introduction
Imagine an environment where business decisions drive application choices and policy, with no regard for
infrastructure, where best practices are implemented based solely on business requirements—and a “guaranteed service level” means just that. The IT of the future will be an elaborate business operation unencumbered by past technology decisions, one capable of providing exact service levels to multiple constituencies while continually optimizing costs. In this environment, IT will evolve into an even more valuable “weapon” for the business, with the ability to react quickly and cost-‐effectively, to deliver a seamless user experience and become a true digital
enterprise that leverages digital technology as a competitive advantage in its internal and external operations.
A Major Challenge for Businesses Today
IT is central to the success of any business, and the IT organization has become a core part of enterprise operations today. But technology hasn’t kept pace with the continually increasing demands of the enterprise. Specifically, the major challenge confronting IT operations is the lag between the time a business sees an opportunity—when it wants to implement new services, either internal or external—and then having IT actually provide increased levels of performance in order to deliver those services quickly and efficiently, while maintaining existing staffing levels. Today, IT organizations are spending the majority of their time and resources on maintaining existing investments, putting out fires, and ensuring compliance and security. This leaves little time to undertake new technology projects, much less plan for the future. So, when a business “window of opportunity” opens, IT might not be adequately prepared to support the new workloads, or deliver the services necessary for the business to take advantage of the opportunity in a timely manner. The outcome is a shrinking window of opportunity, leaving the business with a much narrower timeframe to take advantage of the opportunity, and the possible loss of
competitive advantage.
Keeping pace with the business using legacy infrastructure and limited resources is a constant challenge for IT. ESG asked IT decision makers to consider their 2014 IT budgets and assign a percentage breakdown of spending that would apply to maintaining existing infrastructure as opposed to spending on net-‐new technology projects that advance the business. The results for 2014 were consistent with those of previous years, as respondents indicated that—on average—nearly two-‐thirds (62%) of the typical 2014 IT budget would be earmarked for the upkeep of existing infrastructure (see Figure 1). 1
Based on this ESG data, the majority of organizations still haven’t found a sustainable, cost-‐effective solution for maintaining the status quo as well as taking full advantage of new opportunities.
Figure 1. IT Budgets Still More Heavily Weighted Toward Maintaining Existing Infrastructure
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2015.
Evolving IT Service Delivery Must Match Business Requirements
Enterprises have continually tried to accelerate IT service delivery. Historically, they’ve tried to solve this by adding additional management layers to the infrastructure, delivering new services for cloud, big data, security, BYOD, mobility, etc., via infrastructure provisioning, virtualization, and application control. But as you add more layers, you also add more complexity, more overhead, and more investment—and you’re not necessarily solving the problem.
IT operations universally face external challenges that create revolving IT bottlenecks and challenges, which include:
• A continuously changing business environment. Today’s business environment is more challenging than
ever. Market conditions are subject to rapid change, and compliance and regulation issues continue to place new demands on IT. Within the data center, new composite applications capture data from a variety of devices and are driving new IT service delivery initiatives, which require unprecedented levels of information access and sharing. The rise of the Internet of things is driving big data, business intelligence, and data analytics to new performance levels while requiring IT to deliver on these requests in a timely manner.
• A static IT infrastructure that impedes service performance and delivery. By its nature, a static IT
infrastructure is unable to react to rapid fluctuations and changes in the business. It is process oriented, and interdependent on numerous “moving” parts. This complexity translates into slowed performance and delivery, negatively impacting prospective opportunities—and an organization’s bottom line. IT
organizations are looking at new infrastructure architectures, simplified management tools that deliver operational excellence and, in some cases, looking to get out of the hardware maintenance business altogether. Maintaining exisfng infrastructure, 62% New technology projects / purchases, 38%
Approximately what percent of your organizaIon’s 2014 IT budget will be spent on new technology projects and purchases, as opposed to the percent spent on maintaining
The Current Environment
While companies are setting their goals and expectations higher, they’re also spending less. The IT organization is no stranger to this situation, locked in a continuous cycle of maintaining the status quo and putting out fires, which leaves few resources available to focus on new opportunities. Some all-‐too-‐familiar characteristics of today’s data center include the following:
• Highly inflexible legacy infrastructure. Data center architecture and operations are constrained by a legacy
infrastructure that is highly inflexible due to the one-‐to-‐one relationship that exists between specific applications and the infrastructure upon which they reside. This type of environment is generally quite inefficient and requires increasing levels of capital and operational budget in order to scale. Typically, business units are held captive for long periods of time waiting for the necessary infrastructure to be provisioned before they can reach a higher level of productivity.
• Difficulty maintaining high levels of availability and disaster recovery. With this type of architecture, it is
difficult to maintain high (or even adequate) levels of availability and disaster recovery, which is due to data growth that continues to tax existing capabilities. Further interdependencies and complexities are
introduced as new technology, infrastructure, and business applications are added. By propagating strategies developed in a very different past, we have boxed ourselves into a problematic future.
Operational Overhead
As legacy infrastructures expand to accommodate growth, they inherently become more complex. This is
compounded by the fact that many of these application infrastructures leverage different technologies and require specific skill sets. As previously mentioned, it is challenging to create a high level of expertise within the IT
organization when IT staff is spending a majority of its time maintaining the status quo and putting out fires, while trying to handle requests for new services.
Diminished efficiency and lost opportunities. IT deals with tactical, time-‐consuming, repetitive, and manual tasks (e.g., provisioning and backup, and updating firmware and drivers because of interdependency issues), which dramatically reduce staff efficiency. Each year, IT’s efficiency is further diminished because it must support more equipment to handle additional applications and the subsequent data growth—with no increase in the number of IT resources. Despite this, IT is expected to deliver higher levels of service without negatively impacting the budget. This may be accomplished through individual acts of heroism from the IT staff, but this “model” will prove
unsustainable. And even if additional resources were added, continuing to use and expand a legacy infrastructure still would not be a scalable solution.
In most cases, the cost of managing complex environments far exceeds equipment acquisition costs. The opportunity costs of not being able to leverage information have never been higher, and will only increase with time. Efficiently managing IT operations helps avoid downtime, improves time to production, and can exponentially improve business results given an environment that can adapt to change.
Ongoing disconnect within IT silos. Complexity of the infrastructure has forced IT specialization, which in turn has caused huge gaps in understanding between IT functions. The result is an environment where one IT area has no visibility into other IT areas, and certainly no visibility into the holistic “service” being delivered to the business. For instance, application specialists don’t understand database specialists who don’t understand file system specialists, and so on. Is it any wonder the business is disconnected from IT, when there are so many disconnects within? To become a true strategic player in the enterprise, IT and the infrastructure it controls must become “fluid” and dynamic by actively and transparently manipulating the infrastructure, in near real-‐time, to deliver services at the pace the business requires. What is ultimately required is a more dynamic IT infrastructure and orchestration capabilities that can react to quickly changing conditions and requirements as well as unpredictable amounts of growth—while simultaneously providing unprecedented data access and business intelligence to the organization.
Figure 2. Infrastructure of the Future
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group and HP, 2015.
The New Environment
Modern data centers are designed to operate in a highly dynamic environment that is subject to change at a moment’s notice. In this new environment, applications are no longer coupled to a specific CPU core or memory bank on a server. Instead, an application consumes resources based on policy, and the infrastructure automatically responds to accommodate the request. While some of the process may be performed on existing IT infrastructure investments, it’s vital for IT professionals to consider software-‐driven emerging technologies, and map them to the new services IT needs to deliver to the business. Automation and orchestration offer the vehicles for enhanced operational efficiency, IT performance, and service delivery.
Software-‐defined infrastructure provides the means for IT to:
• Respond to business unit requests immediately. • Manage rapid data growth easily and predictably. • Simplify and automate manually-‐intensive tasks. • Transparently scale the infrastructure as needed.
• Create economic efficiencies with new consumption models. • Gain significant operational leverage.
The new IT paradigm includes:
• Infrastructure that is optimized and decoupled from specific applications and workloads, and managed as pools of highly utilized resources. IT can leverage the same infrastructure for a variety of workloads that range from core IT services to highly transactional systems, enjoying the luxury of an agile environment that is ready to meet business requirements.
• Dynamic allocation of resources and policy-‐based automation that simplifies IT operations. Mundane and routine tasks are automated through the use of intelligent tools designed to provide recommendations to IT professionals while also offering the option to fully automate system changes. The shift in operations
requires infrastructure and orchestration tools that are designed together, and engineered to share intelligence.
• Emerging technologies that, in some cases, radically differ from legacy infrastructure investments. These technologies consist of innovations at the chip level, with memory, and variant storage technologies that leverage the onboard storage capacity on the server. Networking also changes as eastbound and
westbound traffic are captured through a virtualized platform driven by software designed to capture network traffic and maintain connection as workloads traverse the system.
• Embracing a DevOps culture to accelerate IT service delivery. In many enterprises, DevOps is driving the
business application development. This group requires IT agility, simplicity, and a full service orientation. To be effective, IT Operations is all about infrastructure being a big self-‐service pool, with Development and Operations teams working in tandem and creating the future of business applications.
As mentioned earlier, existing legacy data center environments are not capable of providing the sustained dynamic growth that today’s business climate demands. What’s needed is a new, highly optimized infrastructure—but the eternal question remains: Where to begin? Companies need to quickly find a viable solution to transform their legacy infrastructures into more efficient and dynamic platforms before it’s too late.
Looking to the Future
Data Center of the Future
Virtualization exists at every layer within a single system, as well as in different pockets throughout the distributed infrastructure. Until we address out-‐of-‐the-‐box and cross-‐box dependencies, we will not see the dramatic leap in business value that virtualization can ultimately deliver. Nor will we see the fundamental political shift within the enterprise that makes IT truly strategic. And though we are beginning to see examples of “outside-‐the-‐box” virtualization manifest themselves, even these instances tend to be restricted to their “virtual domains.”
Consider the data center of the future: Here the data center infrastructure itself becomes the virtual orchestrator, with a collection of processor, memory systems, and server nodes connected to central caches, which, in turn, are connected to various I/O channels connected to various storage devices, and which are all connected to networks, applications, and users. The orchestration controls the movement of resources, creating logical pathways
connecting all the elements to perform a tactical application function in the most efficient and resilient manner possible—and then releasing the underlying components back to their respective “pools” until the next iteration occurs.
Management: Instead of multiple points of management that operate independently from one another, with each possessing a dedicated console, IT operations will strive for a single control plane and single pane of glass for IT operations. Systems will actively share real-‐time intelligence, and IT administrators will control systems from a central management point that acts based on predetermined policy. IT organizations that have streamlined IT processes through the use of management tools are able to reduce the time it takes for common provisioning tasks, eliminate mundane routines that require the cross referencing of various systems, and capture improved visibility to proactively help with infrastructure planning and predictable performance.
Abstraction: The abstraction of the hardware driven by software-‐defined controls will enable application-‐driven control of the environment. If an application requires additional resources, it can seamlessly receive them, as well as return them if necessary. Data protection, disaster recovery, and security can be applied at the application level and changed at a moment’s notice. The disaggregation of resources removes the rigidness, and helps synchronize workload demands with infrastructure in a highly utilized and optimized fashion without major hardware upgrades. This abstraction enables IT to react quickly to change, and efficiently apply and modify policies without having to submit requests to various teams. The efficiency amongst teams gives IT management the ability to examine existing skillsets, explore career development opportunities for their staff, and maximize the effectiveness of
Transient State: In a highly virtualized and optimized environment, workloads always consume an optimized set of resources that may change on a regular basis. Resources are returned to the pool when they are no longer required and associated back to the workload when demand arises. Workloads are no longer statically placed on a specific server or storage system—they move based on policy and the overall efficiency of the system. The system takes into account the needs of the applications and the interdependencies of the infrastructure. The transient state of applications has profound benefits in an application development team that codes and develops an application on one platform, tests on another, and deploys on yet another. As the applications traverse the environment, they are consistently managed and monitored with a common set of tools, IT processes, and infrastructure that can
accommodate the specific needs in the application lifecycle.
Technology will come in the form of management tools that enhance orchestration, embrace automation, and simplify IT operations. Infrastructure will not be procured in pieces. Certified, scalable units of infrastructure will seamlessly be added based on capacity and performance requirements, and the infrastructure will operate under a highly utilized state.
The data center of the future will be the catalyst that helps to align business goals and objectives with the IT organization. This new data center will free IT from labor-‐intensive and time-‐consuming tasks, allowing it to focus on quality and speed of service delivery—and ultimately giving IT the opportunity to play a strategic role in growing the business.
Convergence of Infrastructure, Management, and Operations
HP pioneered converged infrastructure, bringing together server, storage, and networking in a modular system. The next wave of efficiency is derived from bringing together management systems using a single control plane rather than hierarchical management. This single control plane is built on a self-‐synthesizing infrastructure that creates its own unique resource set for exact workload requirements.
The infrastructure of the future includes:
• Advancing infrastructure convergence. Hyper convergence interest and adoption is growing as IT
professionals look beyond server, storage, and networking by converging management and operations through a single management control plane for full infrastructure provisioning and simplified infrastructure consumption models.
• Software-‐defined resources. Server, storage, and networking pools of resources enable IT operations to
quickly synchronize infrastructure to workload requirements. This enables a dynamic infrastructure that eliminates the static mapping of hardware resources.
• Automation and orchestration. Business orchestration is operated through a single collaborative
management platform to provide IT operations with the visibility, monitoring, and serviceability characteristics in a highly dynamic environment.
In essence, the primary goal is to arm the IT organization with enhanced automation and orchestration capabilities for increased operational efficiency, giving IT the ability to turn on services more rapidly than ever before, enabling them to take advantage of the window of opportunity the moment it opens.
These transformative technologies provide IT with the freedom and the agility, coupled with performance efficiency—not just in raw application performance but in service delivery performance—to bring together IT service delivery and business success.
For many HP customers, the first step in this journey is with HP OneView, a single, converged management platform. HP OneView streamlines your IT services with unique automation simplicity. Across both physical and virtual environments, and in conjunction with third-‐party solutions, you can take a software-‐defined approach in a human-‐designed interface.
The Bigger Truth
Being able to manage IT operations, specifically infrastructure operations, as a true service, has been a long-‐ standing goal of enterprises across the board as they strive to evolve into a true digital enterprise. But looking at the practical reality of any of these initiatives, it will not be possible to truly guarantee delivery of IT infrastructure services without the ability to change, and to ensure that the effects of that change occur without negative impact to IT and the business. The only way to eliminate infrastructure-‐affected change from impacting IT is via enterprise infrastructure abstraction; and the only way to reach that goal is to push the concept of IT service delivery forward to achieve a level of excellence in the digital enterprise environment.
When looking at transformative IT services, it’s appropriate to address short-‐term, tactical pain. Virtualization as part of a transformation initiative can usher in extremely significant cost and revenue benefits, no matter where it is implemented. Moving the abstraction layer higher within each infrastructure layer enables even greater benefits with a software-‐defined strategy orchestrated through automation and management tools.
However, it’s important to understand that transformative services are not point products unto themselves that exist in a vacuum. IT transformation needs to be viewed from the standpoint of a holistic enterprise infrastructure taking into account the different abstraction layers and transient nature of the environment. This means
understanding where your proposed solution is going, and how it will fit into the larger picture—extending across your server, network, and data layers. Eventually, it will be paramount that your server layer seamlessly co-‐exists with the network and data layers, so that changes in one area can be efficiently addressed in other areas that encompass a software-‐defined architecture.
The benefits of integrating the various layers of infrastructure are incalculable. Tactical implementations will yield significant benefits, but when layers are tied together in a true enterprise infrastructure-‐abstracted architecture, IT will finally be free of the tactical handcuffs it currently wears—and ultimately be able to act strategically.
When the business is no longer concerned about the minutia of IT and can rely on the expectation that when it presents a requirement, that requirement will be met—at a known cost, at all times—IT will have confirmed its permanent place as a true peer in the boardroom. Enterprise infrastructure abstraction, virtualization services, cloud consumption, and, perhaps most importantly, orchestration tools are the enablers of that transformation.