Figure 1: Infrastructure Transformation

This is because Infrastructure is the foundation that everything else ‘rides’ on top of. This is analogous to cruising a Mercedes Benz along a smooth flowing tar-surfaced highway versus the same car on a congested and pot-holed muddy road. You can have the best car (application or IT service) but the driving experience (IT service quality) is completely dependent on the road (Infrastructure) itself. However, this is not necessarily the easiest layer to start with. As you can imagine, making changes to the infrastructure requires significant planning, time, resources and investments.

The approach to transformation of the Infrastructure can take place over three stages. This is discussed at a high level in the following paragraphs.

Stage 1: From Silos to Consolidated Infrastructure

The logical first step to transforming the infrastructure is to consolidate and standardize the infrastructure to reduce complexity and IT costs; and improve efficiency and controls, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Stage 1 – From Silos to Consolidation

In this stage, there are three key strategies:

• Consolidate data centers: Data center consolidation has been elevated to the top of most CIOs’ agendas as they look to modify their data center facilities due to limits in power, cooling, efficiency and space. At the same time, there is a strong desire to lower facility costs and reduce operational expenditures by eliminating redundant facilities.

• Rationalize infrastructure: Most organizations spend up to around 70% of their budgets on maintaining existing assets. Rationalization strategies help reduce overlap, cut costs and add business value by aligning IT and investments that will contribute to business results.

• Virtualization: Virtualizing your data center is the first step towards achieving the flexibility and cost benefits of cloud computing. To realize the full benefits of virtualization, IT organizations must have an integrated virtual data center strategy that has integrated management of key operational processes and procedures, a flexible virtualized architecture, and support for mission critical applications.

Stage 2: From Consolidation to Shared Infrastructure

After consolidation, the next stage is to optimize and maximize the ROI and utilization of IT assets and resources. This can be accomplished via three methods as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Stage 2 – From Consolidated to shared Infrastructure

• Tier Infrastructure: Defining service levels and tiering the infrastructure according to the service levels provide businesses freedom of choice – to choose and pay for the quality, service level, performance and capacity they require. Virtualization allows IT to create Compute, Storage and Network resource pools which can be aligned to service levels by abstracting resources from the appropriate infrastructure tiers.

• Optimize Resources: Increase resource utilization and efficiencies through modern technologies such as automated storage tiering, capacity management, thin provisioning, deduplication and IO virtualization which help to reduce per unit costs by doing more with less.

• Integrate and Automate Management: Management of a dynamic and fluid infrastructure requires proactive, real-time and “intelligent” management across the multi-lT layers (e.g application, compute, storage, network) and across physical, virtual and legacy platforms (e.g. mainframe, midrange, physical server, virtual server). Management tools with build-in intelligence and analytics helps to cut through the complexity of the next generation infrastructure to reduce time to resolve and improve service availability and performance.

Stage 3: From Shared Infrastructure to IT-as-a-Service

The last stage of the Infrastructure Transformation is to take advantage of cloud computing and evolve towards IT-as-a-Service ((ITaaS). In particular, IT offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The IaaS service catalog may include services for compute (or server), storage, backup, disaster recovery, data center and network. As shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: Stage 3 – From Shared to Cloud and IT-as-a-Service

• Embrace Cloud Computing: Enterprises need to review existing IT portfolio and sourcing strategies and take advantage of cloud computing where it makes business sense. Cloud computing allows IT Organizations to build and own their own applications and infrastructure; or to procure these in the form of services from Cloud service providers. By understanding your core competencies and businesses, develop and implement a cloud strategy that optimizes the enterprise’s IT portfolio with a strategic-mix of internal and external vendors and service providers.

• Operate An IT-as-a-Service Model: IT organizations cannot effectively operate a cloud environment and deliver IT services if it continues to operate as the traditional infrastructure or technology provider. Using the Fast-Food Restaurant as an analogy:

• A customer orders a meal from a menu with clearly indicated pricing (service catalog)
• Customer may also go to an internet portal for ordering home delivery (self service portal)
• The order is taken and delivered within expected time duration and with consistent quality and service (orchestration, processes and roles and responsibilities)
• The customer is focused on the end-result – the meal of his choice is delivered within expected time duration and quality, he pays only for what he ordered and is served with a smile.

Summary

Hopefully this blog has provided you some high level ideas for transforming your infrastructure. More details can be obtained from the EMC Cloud website here.

The reason why people are reading this blog post is because IT Transformation has become inevitable to a certain extent for many IT organizations.  Do a quick scan of major IT vendors’ websites — everyone is talking about IT Transformation and offering services and solutions to support organizations embarking on this initiative.

It could be the pull factor due to the attractiveness of Cloud Service Providers being able to help IT deliver services cheaper and faster, or the push factor of a CEO telling the CIO: “What are you doing about it?”.

The key to a successful IT Transformation is a holistic strategy and good tactical plans. Like playing chess, you need a good strategy and tactics.

So how do we start to develop a holistic IT Transformation Strategy and Tactical Plan? If someone approaches a consultant for help, 9 in 10 of them would probably say, “Let me do an assessment of your IT environment first”. More likely than not, they will also conduct assessments on People, Processes and Technology (Infrastructure and Tools).

There is a gap with this approach. Liken this to the blind men and the elephant story (Figure 1), the assessment results will depend on where the consultant (or you) looks into; or in some cases, where the Consultant wants to dig deeper.

Figure 1: Blind Men & An Elephant

IT is like the big elephant. You cannot see the complete IT Transformation picture unless you explore all the different parts of the elephant. Being tactical, focusing on one area and ignoring the other relevant parts would be a huge and costly oversight of any IT organization.

The IT Transformation Picture Puzzle consists of 9 major pieces as shown in Figure 2. Each puzzle piece rightly is entitled to its own transformation strategy and tactical plan. For example, one can define an Infrastructure Strategy through virtualizing all servers; or a DR (disaster recovery) strategy with an Active-Active or Hot Site disaster recovery configuration.

Figure 2: IT Transformation Puzzle

As part of good governance practice, you need to align and prioritize all the individual strategies. They should not be developed and implemented in isolation. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon practice for organizations to go for a piecemeal-strategy approach.

Yet there is more to Figure 2, as well. It does not mean that an organization embarking on IT Transformation has to develop 9 different strategies and transform each layer. In fact, it is unlikely that any organization will want to concurrently transform all 9 layers in the model. A more likely scenario would be an organization looking at transforming the Infrastructure, Data/ Information, Applications or End User Computing layers, not necessary all at once.

Imagine yourself walking on the red arrow line in Figure 2. Stop at the box you want to transform, for example let’s choose Infrastructure.  As you develop your Infrastructure Transformation Strategy, remember to look to the boxes on the left and right. The strategy should also consider impacts to Data, Applications, End Users, Security & Compliance, DR, Backup, Automation and Operations & Business.

The same holds true when developing a transformation strategy for End User Computing. We need to take into account the impact to the other pieces both to the left and right.

In summary, IT Transformation starts with a holistic strategy that takes into account all 9 layers as shown in Figure 2. And as in Sun Tzu’s quote, it is not enough to have a strategy, you need also have the accompanying tactical plans to translate strategy to actions.

Why does IT need to transform and why now?

We can look at this from several perspectives.

Global Economy

Recent spates of global financial crisis and recessions reinforce the facts of a global and connected economy which one cannot fully shield from the effects thousands of miles away. Businesses are under pressure to reduce costs, do more with less and streamline their operations.

In order to emerge and survive from the crisis, organizations have to become more agile and innovative in producing products and developing services. Time to market is crucial as well. Businesses rely on Information Technology to help them gain this capability.

IT has a mammoth challenge on hand to meet these escalating business demands.

Mobile Computing

Walk anywhere these days, you see people staring at the screens of their smartphones, tablets and notebooks.  People just love these devices which help to keep them connected and informed anywhere and anytime. Social networking applications like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are increasingly being accessed not just by individuals for their own personal use, but also by organizations as advertising and marketing tools to reach a wider audience than ever before.

As the rise of the technology savvy individual consumes information technology and services confidently, in turn the performance and service level expectations of these products and services have continuously risen. It’s this quickly multiplying group of people that bring the same habits and expectations to their workplace and corporate world.

IT has an increasing challenge to meet the rising expectations of these new users.

Cloud Computing

Enter Virtualization and era of Cloud Computing which promises to equip IT with capabilities to meet the growing and fast changing demands of the business and users alike.  Virtualization started the evolution of transforming traditional IT infrastructure silos to resource pools which provided IT the powers of mobility, scalability and high availability, all at a fraction of original costs. Cloud computing is the next wave after virtualization that takes IT closer to providing IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS). As the cloud computing industry matures and greater numbers of service providers start to improve their service offerings, this perfect storm starts to threaten traditional operations of internal IT organizations.

Status quo is not an option for IT.

The Next Generation IT

There is no better timing for IT to embark on a transformation program. With the above challenges which IT has on hand, it is inevitable. Some IT organizations have taken a decisive approach of using this opportunity to clean up its fragmented and legacy environments.

What does transforming IT entail? It involves transforming the IT infrastructure, disaster recovery, backup, applications, information & data management, end user computing, automation, IT operations and business model.

I plan to discuss these topics separately in  my next blog.

This scenario probably resonates with some other organizations too.

Unfortunately, I think these organizations have probably missed out on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and instead they are settling for short-term benefits. However, they could continue the virtualization initiative to drive more efficiency, improve service levels and accelerate into the next computing era that is dawning on us – Cloud Computing.

Virtualization is not just about server consolidation to save on physical equipment, power and data center real estate. After reaching maturity on virtualization, companies should be looking at how to enhance IT services to better improve business results. IT organizations can use the virtualization platform as a springboard to:

• improve repeatability and predictable service levels
• provide faster, highly available and cost competitive services
• be able to scale and adapt to changing business conditions and requirements
• provide better security and compliance
• integrate with external and internal Cloud services to provide mobility and enabling IT services to be available when it is needed and accessible anywhere.

Virtualization has motivated IT to embark on its pilgrimage to IT-as-a-service (ITaas).  However, IT should not be giving up after reaching the first summit.

“Have you evaluated and assessed the impact to your operations and processes as you virtualize more business applications?” I asked.

“Yes. We already have change management processes and we follow them when we migrate,” was one of the responses I got.

“How long do you take to provision a VM (virtual machine) – starting from initiation of request until it is completed?” I asked again. There was some silence. I prompted “3 days? 5 days? or 1 week?”

Then someone bravely responded with “3 days”, another murmured “5 days.“

Incidentally, before my presentation, the group was getting quite excited about how easy and fast the new vSphere 5 can provision VMs and ESXi hosts – with a snap of the fingers. We were talking about seconds and milliseconds, mind you. But what difference does it make when it still takes 3 or 5 days to get your VM provisioned?

“Technically you can now provision VMs faster, how does that help the business?” I asked. “To the business, it’s still going to take 3 or 5 days for a VM to be ready. Why should they invest money in the technology?”

I was hoping that these questions would be able to impress on the techies that it is important for their virtualization or cloud program and projects to do a review of the IT operations and processes. Virtualization and Cloud are technologies that enable business agility and flexibility. But if nothing above the infrastructure layer changes – such as operational processes, governance, organization, etc. then we are not getting the maximum benefits and doing justice to the deployed technology.

I think some of the audience got the message, some didn’t.

Similarly, you can use these same factors to develop the financial model and business justification for Public vs Private cloud.

1. Cost of hardware is probably the easiest to tackle. One can calculate and compare the cost of computing power (CPU), memory (GB), storage (TB), bandwidth (Mbps), etc. in a private cloud and prices from a cloud service provider.
2. Cost of software licenses is quite a difficult area to tackle as there will be costs associated with planning and negotiation as cloud-friendly software licensing is still a long way to go. Most of it will be written on the fly. In addition, cost of software licenses has a lot to do with the consumption pattern of cloud services and service level requirements. Hence, there could be significant differences in Private and Public Clouds.
3. Cost of Security and GRC will not go away. There may be investments needed to update/upgrade or put in new security and GRC solutions for your private cloud. Similarly, in the public cloud, you may have to subscribe to these services, including eDiscovery, data preservation and production. Lastly, when comparing costs between Public and Private, don’t forget to factor in costs of providing this capability in house vs. outside; as well as cost associated with the risks.
4. Cost for Service level guarantees – costs will go up with higher service levels, be it Private or Public Cloud. However, as in previous case, you need to compare cost of providing the same service level in house vs outsider, and the time frame (opportunity cost), to build and deliver the service level.
5. Cost associated with specific needs of applications include application development, replatforming or modernization to make applications cloud ready and portable. Also there will be costs to integrate the applications and data with the rest of the enterprise business processes.

There will also be other factors that you want to include into the financial model and business justification such as flexibility and agility. In the Public Cloud, one could easily scale back the Cloud service, but for Private Cloud, the idle resources in your data center will be a cost burden if not checked. Size of the organization and how services are being consumed will have impact to the costs as well.

When building their business case, organizations need to take into account a whole picture and not just take a myopic view – hardware and software costs. You may be surprised by the end result.

In short, an organization needs to take a holistic cloud strategy that optimizes the cloud deployment model of all applications that collectively will provide the maximum return and TCO savings to IT.

This EMC Consulting whitepaper provides great insight on the parameters of The EMC Cloud Advisory Service, which enables organizations to determine what application or set of application workloads is best suited for which cloud model (Public, Private, Hybrid) through  a lens of trust, economics and functionality filters.

To some, the above sentence may sound trivial.  But if you try to pose those questions to different experts and gurus, it is likely that you will get varying responses and definitions.

I always go back to the definition of Cloud Computing provided by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), because in my opinion this is currently the most authoritative definition.

Here is a brief summary -

• The Cloud environment that you are building needs to have 5 essential characteristics:
  • On-demand self service:  This means there should be some form of self service portal with service catalog that can automatically trigger workflows for routing, approvals and automated provisioning
  • Broad network access:   Service is accessible via internet or company network (private cloud) using various devices such as thick/ thin clients, laptops and mobile devices
  • Resource pooling:  This implies timesharing of abstracted IT resources (compute, storage, network) from underlying hardware via various enabling technologies such as virtualization
  • Rapid elasticity:  This requires one to dynamically increase or decrease IT resources provisioned, according to changing demands, where possible, automatically
  • Measured service:  This means that capacity and utilization is being monitored and reported for capacity planning, demand and forecasting. It also includes monitoring and reporting service usage for the purpose of chargeback or showback.
• The Cloud service should be implemented using one of these deployment models — Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, or Community Cloud models:  This drives the enterprise architecture and infrastructure designs, implementation and sourcing strategy
• Each Cloud service which you are offering to your users/customers should eventually fall into one of the three main service models — IaaS, SaaS or PaaS: The key point here is that you are offering IT as a Service which implies transforming IT to become an IT service provider and sometimes IT service broker (for the case of ublic and hybrid cloud deployment model) with the necessary service management and governance processes.

Going back to the earlier example of a client who has virtualized a good number of servers.  Is the organization running a private cloud?

My answer would be that it has started to build out a private cloud infrastructure, but we need to look at the other things listed above to see where the company is at with its cloud maturity or readiness before we can conclude if it is really running and operating a private cloud.

I hope you can see the difference between having a Private Cloud infrastructure and running a Private Cloud – the latter includes how you organize, operate and deliver your IT services from your Private Cloud infrastructure. An analogy would be if you see a chauffeur picking you up with the latest and most expensive car, it does not automatically mean that he is a good driver and will be able to provide you excellent service.