A Change in the Paradigm: The Rise of the New Enterprise Data Center

The paradigm for the modern enterprise data center, which has served businesses admirably for many years, is looking increasingly brittle. The strains posed by disruptive technological innovations and ever-changing service demands required by business units, coupled with budgetary pressures as well as increasing requirements for security, resiliency, and performance have pushed the data center quite literally to the breaking point.

Like a juggler with too many balls in the air at one time, today's data center executive feels like he or she can barely manage to keep a data center running, much less develop a vision for tomorrow's data center architecture.

It is not surprising, then, that only 28% of CEOs feel that their IT leaders provide proactive leadership in creating business innovation, according to surveys by Forrester Research. Moreover, only 30% of CEOs believe that IT executives are offering leadership to improve business processes.

Justified or not, those opinions are understandable, given what has happened to data center spending. IT operational overhead is now at an all-time high of as much as 70% of the IT labor budget. Power and cooling costs for data centers have swelled 800% since 1996. Server management and administration costs have grown four-fold since 1996. And over the next five years, it is expected that most U.S. enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy costs as on hardware and twice as much as they currently do on server management and administrative costs.

Manage Data Growth with Open Standards and Automation

Despite the evident frustration, IBM's own surveys indicate that 60% of CEOs recognize that information is the key to innovation. Yet, 53% of senior finance executives say that, while plentiful, most data simply isn't focused, relevant, or actionable. The challenge for IT executives is to find more effective ways to manage data growth.

The simple fact is that IT executives have been too busy keeping pace with today's demands to be able to plan strategically for the data center of tomorrow. On top of all this, the growth of applications and workloads due to applications already in place will require even more resource in the future. New technologies need to be factored in as well, such as Service Oriented Architecture, virtualization, web 2.0, and cloud computing concepts, which IT executives are expected to understand and exploit.

To break through, a new model is needed, one that moves IT beyond the operation-centric model to a strategic, service-oriented model-one that can respond more appropriately and more efficiently to business needs. As companies define and evolve their data centers, IT-business alignment is essential going forward. The rewards will be the ability for all of IT to participate in the ongoing innovation of the business in a responsive and timely way.

The New Enterprise Oriented Data Center

In IBM's vision, the New Enterprise Data Center features the following hallmarks:

• Unprecedented levels of new economics: Virtualization with optimized systems and networks to break the lock between IT resources and business services
• Rapid service delivery: Service management enables visibility, control and automation to deliver quality service at any scale
• Aligned with business goals: Real-time integration of transactions, information and analytics to support business growth

The journey to the New Enterprise Data Center begins with establishing a new economic foundation in the current environment and then working with the business toward a business goal-driven environment. In so doing, the entire organization is able to transcend today's operational issues and envision a more dynamic infrastructure that extends beyond IT to all points in the IT supply chain.

Once aligned, the business follows three stages of New Enterprise Data Center adoption:

• Simplified. Initial implementation steps include virtualization and consolidation of data centers and physical infrastructure including storage, servers, and networks. Management systems can also be simplified by breaking down silos of similar management tools and deploying end-to-end systems and network management tools, which lead to the simplification of data center management. The data center becomes more resilient and secure. Many large enterprises (an estimated 30% to 50%) have consolidated or are in the process in consolidating their data centers, and a smaller percentage have engaged in virtualization to varying degrees.
• Shared. In this stage, infrastructure and services are deployed with highly virtualized resource pools, optimized networks, automated service management, and an underlying energy efficient design that supports expansion and transformation. A few companies, including IBM's own IT environment, are currently moving to this environment.
• Dynamic. Business goals are driving IT at this stage with highly virtualized IT services, such as "ensembles" (groups of compatible systems that can scale efficiently and quickly) and computing "clouds" (heterogeneous versions of ensembles). This stage is further characterized by green operations across converging IT and physical assets, embedded supercomputers and real-time processing. Business rules define process-driven service level management.

Transformation to the New Enterprise Data Center also requires changes in the skills and behaviors of IT staff. Instead of an operations orientation (fix-the-breaks), IT professionals need to think in terms of disciplined and repeatable processes and policies that enable automation and to organize around IT service delivery instead of technology silos. As the burden of operations is reduced, some IT staff can expand into the role of IT business analyst to help drive new business services and innovation.

IBM provides not just the vision that will allow IT professionals to extract themselves from the day-to-day IT operational issues but that delivers the services, products and solutions to create a clear, reliable roadmap toward the New Enterprise Data Center. IBM's track record for transitioning data centers to new levels of reliability and performance is well documented. Whether it was IBM's pioneering leadership with Linux, e-business or grid computing, IBM has collaborated with clients to lead the way in innovations for enterprise clients that have become widely emulated within the industry. For instance, as of the end of 2007, IBM was engaged in more than 700 energy-efficient data center, 10,000 IT optimization, and 5,500 Service Oriented Architecture projects.

The results are tangible and meaningful. In its own data center evolution, IBM has reduced its operational costs by $1.5 billion a year and will be able to double its computing capacity by 2010 with no planned increase in energy consumption or footprint.

As customers can attest, IBM is committed to accountability that the New Enterprise Data Center will work as described, a single reference point to answer questions and resolve issues in the event they arise, and a tight connection between new business processes and technological solutions. There is a way out of the data center treadmill where progress is sometimes fleeting, and the IBM New Enterprise Data Center offers the right, trusted roadmap.