* Tips for cutting costs and improving enterprise agility next year
I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the road lately speaking with data center managers about their top issues for 2005. Broadly speaking, the issues fall into two main categories: enabling enterprise agility and reducing costs.
Enabling enterprise agility means acquiring and enhancing the ability to react quickly to changing market conditions. As one senior-level IT executive put it: “I need to be able to quickly determine which markets to get into, or get out of.”
When it comes to cutting costs, the focus is generally on structural changes that reduce long-term operational costs, rather than “quick hits” for cutting capital expenditures. Data center consolidation is an example of such structural changes; the adoption of open source technologies and storage virtualization are others.
Data center managers should assess their operations in two areas: technology and organizational/operational process. Technologies you should explore in 2005 include:
* Virtualization, particularly in the area of storage-area networking and network-attached storage. As previously noted, effective SAN/NAS deployment dramatically reduces costs and the time required to provision storage for users.
* Service-oriented architectures, particularly Web services, which can reduce development times and costs by up to 80%.
* Next-generation computing technologies, particularly grid and blade technologies. While fewer than 10% of participants in a recent Nemertes benchmark report using grid computing, those that are see improvements in agility coupled with cost reduction. And while blade computing is still generally proprietary – and can complicate facilities, power, and HVAC requirements – it holds promise as a way to virtualize computing hardware.
* Open source platforms and applications. You might be surprised at the number of name-brand organizations that have quietly begun moving to open-source implementations in 2004. Expect more of the same in 2005: open-source implementations can reduce costs by 20% to more than 90%.
Operationally, strategies to pursue include:
* Standardize. If you’re planning to consolidate, the best first step is to start by standardizing on a common architecture and set of platforms in every data center. Have a standard solution for each functional requirement. The trick lies in finding the balance between standardizing too far, thus force-fitting inappropriate technologies to requirements (“all servers must be HP-UX; all storage must be SAN”) and having an entirely ad-hoc environment. A good rule of thumb is to implement enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, etc., on a common Unix platform (increasingly, Linux) with file-sharing and PC applications on either Windows or (less likely) Linux. Similarly, store file-sharing data on NAS, and store record-sharing data on SANs.
* De-silo-ize. Storage virtualization is one of the “low-hanging fruit” enabling both agility and cost-cutting – but most organizations still don’t have a centralized storage team. One of the most significant steps towards a successful storage implementation is to assemble a small group that’s 100% focused on the storage strategy.
* Build bridges. In 2005, it will be key to build the right organizational bridges. The facilities and real estate manager and legal and compliance folks should be on the data center manager’s cell-phone speed-dial and instant messaging buddy lists.
