Asset Utilization in Data Centers

Creating a green data center has been the topic of several symposiums and
seminars over the past few months. This was also the theme for the Data Center
2009, a conference that was held in Mumbai recently, with an objective to
educate trade visitors on how to have environment-friendly data centers within
their organizations.

Over 13 representatives from IT companies spoke during this event and talked
about how green data centers are the need of the hour.

Some of the topics that were covered at the event were, 'Enabling innovation
of data centers', 'The choice on data centers', 'Greening the data centers', 'IT
Operations and Visualization', 'Business continuity plan and disaster recovery'
and 'Best practices one could get from using the data centers'.

In sync with biz plans

The first speaker at the event was Sanjay Sharma, IT Advisor, IDBI, and MD &
CEO, IDBI Intech, who spoke about how data centers need to meet the business
plans of an organization. He said, “Data centers should have the flexibility to
support new technology. By going green, we can also reduce the harmful impact on
the surrounding atmosphere.”

Agreeing with him was Suresh Menon, Head-Storage and Solutions, Dell India.
“It's very important for data centers to be efficient which can be achieved
through cutting capital and operational costs, and controlling the automating
quality of services,” he said. He added that there should be an independent
network team whose mission should be to ensure the highest level of efficiency
within the data center.

The underlined objective of any data center should be to increase the
productivity of network users. But to do this, the data center should be
scalable and cost-efficient as well, which can be best achieved if its
infrastructure is virtualized. But it is not the only answer to all the issues
that are cropping around data center efficiency.

Sanjay Lulla, Director-Technology Solutions, India and SAARC, EMC Corporation
stressed on the fact that adopting virtualization will herald server
consolidation, infrastructure optimization, reduce the physical infrastructure
and bring about cost reduction with improved operational facility. But at the
same time, there are many challenges around that still need to be worked upon.
These challenges emerge because there is too much complexity involved in the IT
infrastructure today. According to the speakers present at the event, one answer
to this challenge could be the creation of private clouds of applications.

Disaster management at the onset

Another topic that was discussed was that of disaster management. According
to Prashant Joshi, Technical Consultant Platform, Wipro, organizations should
start adopting the Write Order Fidelity (WOF) pattern while planning disaster
management. WOF is defined on various websites as a process 'for totally-active
implementations, wherein a plurality of access nodes at geographically separated
sites can concurrently read and/or write data in a totally active fashion on a
distributed data system.'

“Whenever an enterprise formulates a business project, they should factor WOF
as part of their data disaster recovery plan to ensure that business continuity
is maintained,'' said Joshi. In fact, he placed a huge onus on having strategic
business continuity plans which should include procedural and technological
moderation and a disaster recovery plan.

This lead to the topic for the next session which was about outsourcing of
processes and applications where PJ Nath, Executive President-Enterprise
Solutions, Sify Technologies explained how such a policy can benefit many data
center managers. Companies which can better leverage these benefits are those
who seek high security of their systems, better network connectivity with
telecom operators or have presence in multiple cities and would like to have a
choice in local hosting.

Jayabalan S, CTO, Netmagic Solutions too advocated outsourcing. But he
advised CIOs that the best practice is to have a game plan about the choice of
the vendors available as well as the location of data centers.

“It is necessary to have the right outsourcing partner with controlled
environment and continuous power, which is safe, secure and flexible,” he said.

This aside, CIOs should also check whether the data center provider is good
at delivering the service promised and his adherence to service level
agreements. More importantly, the data center provider should be able to
demonstrate the value he is offering to the CIO effectively.

Matching customer expectation

Customer expectations from a data center are far and varied, and meeting
them can be quite a task, especially with the emergence of next-generation data
centers. ''Our customers expect the next-generation data center to be reliable,
optimized and that it should offer capital continuity, cost maintenance and
environment friendliness. We have to reach their expectations,” said David Winn,
Managing Principal, HP CFS. He also stressed on the business priorities for the
new data centers like reducing the cost of operations and providing better
differentiation.

Commenting on the trends in next-generation data centers, Gaurav Sethi,
Network Consultant, Extreme Networks added that IT products today are powered by
servers and are used to do multiple chores. Since these products are bound to
data center, the latter has assumed critical importance in the market.

This is why other speakers stressed on the need to have storage optimization
strategies and matching storage assets which will ensure data security as well.

To help customers manage their storage network better, Shrikant Chakrapani,
Director-Enterprise Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems suggested various ways to
allocate resources as per their needs.

The message that came out from the conference was that data centers can be
automated to make them flexible which will give users maximum speed, especially
if a modular approach is adopted. But at the same time, it is difficult to
predict whether the organizations would accept this modular approach for green
data centers, especially given the current market situation.

MINAKSHI SHETTY

minakshis@cybermedia.co.in