Target: the new data center

Scott Hopkins, vice president of technology planning for Harte-Hanks, shares his road map for an entirely virtual new data center.

Scott Hopkins always has one thing on his mind: how to make IT flexible enough to grow and shrink to match business goals. As vice president of technology planning at Harte-Hanks, a direct marketing services company in San Antonio, Texas (best known for its PennySaver publications), Hopkins ensures that business drives technology initiatives such as virtualization of storage, network and server resources. Hopkins says he'd like to see the lines between those distinct technology worlds blur so he can create one dynamic pool of data center resources. From the company's Billerica, Mass., data center, Hopkins shared his vision of utility computing with Network World Senior Writer Denise Dubie.

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Scott Hopkins always has one thing on his mind: how to make IT flexible enough to grow and shrink to match business goals. As vice president of technology planning at Harte-Hanks, a direct marketing services company in San Antonio, Texas (best known for its PennySaver publications), Hopkins ensures that business drives technology initiatives such as virtualization of storage, network and server resources. Hopkins says he'd like to see the lines between those distinct technology worlds blur so he can create one dynamic pool of data center resources. From the company's Billerica, Mass., data center, Hopkins shared his vision of utility computing with Network World Senior Writer Denise Dubie.

We've heard a lot about the intelligent, automated data center of the future. How do you define the new data center at Harte-Hanks?

The new data center, or the utility model that I talk about, is looking at IT from the shared resource perspective and not necessarily how you pay for that resource. It's a different way of looking at the resources and putting them to use for your business. To have a utility model, you need to have virtualization capabilities, and those virtualization capabilities cannot be segmented by tiered technology. When they can all be brought together, then we can achieve a truly dynamic data center.

In the past, data center managers would be very concerned about what servers they had, what technology they had vs. looking at the data center as a utility model and being able to combine resources to provide a service. We don't look at just servers. We don't look at just the network, and we don't look at just the storage environment. You have to really look at all of that as a whole, and as a utility that has the ability to provide a service to the customer, whether it be internal or external.

Do you use virtualization today?

Right now, because of the technology and because the data center is separated into tiers - storage, server and network - we are only using quasi-virtualization. We use virtualization in the storage environment today. We also use resource management tools on the servers as well as the network through virtual LAN-type technology. And we use quality-of-service (QoS) tools to better use our virtualized network resources.

What are the advantages of using virtualization in these technology silos?

On the server side, we've been able to share more resources. Being able to logically provision server resources protects us from a security perspective and from a performance perspective. If we have multiple activities occurring on one server, none of those activities overrides the others from resource use. That's given us a lot of flexibility.

From the storage side, we have been able to reclaim a significant portion of our storage environment just by having the capability of provisioning. We went from a direct-attached environment to a storage-area network that allows us to do 'grade school' virtualization. We're not in 'college' yet, but we can better use those resources to provision storage based on business needs. If we were in college, we'd be able to allow much more sophisticated and complex virtualization to help us manage storage resources.