Information transformation

Today's global organizations are inherently complex. Nowhere is this more evident than in an organization's data center. The scene is often chaotic: data centers with hundreds (if not thousands) of servers, storage units, multiple databases and dozens of operating systems - all needing to work together seamlessly to satisfy 24-7 user demands and business process application requirements. The problems faced by this major consumer goods manufacturer come as no surprise.

This organization needs to take a holistic view of its infrastructure and move to a flexible but secure utility-style computing model through an information transformation program. The company's objectives should be to gain control of its assets quickly, to improve its ability to support the business strategy, to reduce costs and self-fund longer-term IT-enabled improvements that will drive greater business performance. Here's a two-phased approach:

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Today's global organizations are inherently complex. Nowhere is this more evident than in an organization's data center. The scene is often chaotic: data centers with hundreds (if not thousands) of servers, storage units, multiple databases and dozens of operating systems - all needing to work together seamlessly to satisfy 24-7 user demands and business process application requirements. The problems faced by this major consumer goods manufacturer come as no surprise.

This organization needs to take a holistic view of its infrastructure and move to a flexible but secure utility-style computing model through an information transformation program. The company's objectives should be to gain control of its assets quickly, to improve its ability to support the business strategy, to reduce costs and self-fund longer-term IT-enabled improvements that will drive greater business performance. Here's a two-phased approach:

Phase 1 - IT consolidation program

This involves consolidating, standardizing and integrating a number of critical IT components including the data centers, networks, applications and workplace.

Doing this means starting with an infrastructure strategy and plan. The company can use such a plan as a blueprint for transforming the current environment to a utility-centric computing infrastructure through a number of structured and controlled releases.

One of the organization's key objectives should be moving to a smaller number of centralized and highly resilient data centers, with consolidation of most of its distributed servers within a smaller number of centralized servers. Typically we would expect a company such as this to reduce its overall server population by 30%.

Ideally the company also would undertake an application rationalization program. The program's intent would be to analyze the need for each application and to determine what additional initiatives can be undertaken.

The company should consider a Wintel rationalization program to categorize the servers and address consolidation and standardization by server category - for example, file rationalization or mail consolidation. The company also should consider virtualization software, such as that from VMware, the consolidation of business applications and the minimizing of remote servers. In addition, Unix-based servers should be categorized and analyzed for the type of applications being hosted and the development of a more consolidated environment. This would result in fewer platforms required for the same application portfolio.

For storage, this company should transition from its mixed environment to a tiered model that would enable it to provision, categorize and move data between tiers in a seamless manner. With tiered storage, the company would be able to maximize utilization and cost.

A pre-requisite to effective data center consolidation is a WAN with sufficient capacity and resiliency so the IT infrastructure can be centralized while effective network connectivity for user access is maintained. If the company had not already done so, it should move to MPLS for the WAN - achieving not only cost savings but also flexibility in terms of capacity.