A question of policy
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If data centres are to win favour within the business, they must improve utilisation rates and make management much easier.
Were it any other part of the business, the data centre may well not have a future, says Bill McColl, founder and chief technology officer at policy-driven data centre automation vendor, Sychron.
To many parts of the business looking in, the data centre is an anachronism - owning one is like the business running its own power plant. It sucks up disproportionate amounts of the corporate budget, its expensive equipment needs specialist housing and makes massive electrical and cooling demands, and yet it is under-utilised for most of the time.
"There needs to be root and branch change," says McColl. And two emerging trends appear capable of changing this: commoditisation and virtualisation.
First, the commodity servers that can be used to carry out complex enterprise computing tasks are becoming ever-cheaper. At the same time, the software capable of virtualising that environment is at last being now becoming viable after many years of over-hyping.
These changes provide the opportunity to reshape the data centre and drive up utilisation rates. But there is a third key element required in order to take control of data centre costs - one that will take longer to reach maturity, says McColl.
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Managing the disparate array of enterprise computing resources is key. For the enterprise to achieve maximum benefit, as much of the management as possible must be automated. The provisioning of capacity, for example, has to be automated and driven by policy-based management software, says McColl. "The policy manager takes the monitoring information and drives changes into the control side," he says. Currently, the two key functions within the data centre are disconnected: there is one set of technology for monitoring server utilisation and performance, and another set of controls governing deployments.
Policy-driven automation draws these two management functions together, producing a single interface to managing the infrastructure. The policy-driven automation can drastically reduce data centre costs, he says, but it can also be used to drive out costs in areas not usually associated with the data centre. One such example is desktop computing. "Everyone knows that desktop PCs are cheap, almost disposable like mobile phones. But the cost of managing these desktops is as large [a proportion of the IT budget] as it could possibly be."
The current practice of providing each employee with a desktop PC is incredibly inefficient - the utilisation rate of the processors is hugely wasteful. Building a virtual desktop grid, where computing resources are allocated on the basis of policy would revitalise desktop computing, says McColl. "Not only will it enable the desktop infrastructure to be allocated more effectively, it will simplify the problems of patch management and upgrades," he says.
Through an automated policy-driven approach to the provisioning of desktop resources, companies could expect to save as much as 50% of current spending, says McColl. However, there is one potential fly in the ointment: software licences.
For policy-driven automation to deliver such savings, software has to be charged for on a pay-per-use basis; current models of charging per user or per processor look extortionate for a virtual desktop grid. "Today's applications weren't designed with this model in mind. You really need the [shift to desktop grid] software to be neutral to get the maximum benefit," says McColl.
