An eye on the clouds

Weera Areeratanasak

Today's environment has businesses clamouring to get products released faster with lower upfront investment, lower unit costs, nonstop infrastructure, greater flexibility and the ability to scale rapidly with minimal notice. This alone is difficult. But adding fuel to the fire, enterprise IT is also struggling with overloaded data centres, unprecedented mergers and acquisitions, unpredictable demand, silo application environments, difficult-to-schedule application outage windows and demands for greater efficiency and green initiatives.

Forward-looking enterprise IT groups are building their data centres on a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI). A service-oriented infrastructure includes all configurable infrastructure resources such as compute, storage and networking hardware and software to support the running of applications. By providing internal cloud services to meet the needs of most applications and using external clouds for lower-value applications and data, these organisations are able to slash costs, time to market and risk.

So you're probably wondering: what has been the path most commonly travelled? The consensus seems to favour the following modular approach:

Each step is taken with big picture design in mind and will generate significant benefits. The five-phase adoption to the dynamic data centre involves: centralising management of IT to gain visibility of costs, taking control of the IT offering, gaining economies of scale and beginning the journey to SOI.

The offering should be standardised, based on key business requirements. Attempting to support custom solutions for each application puts a burden on resources. Consistency is the key to improving both quality and provisioning times, as well as reducing support costs and risk. Standardisation is a prerequisite for successful consolidation and automation.

Then virtualise and consolidate the physical infrastructure, which will drive up the utilisation of your assets. Along with NetApp storage efficiency, the savings are huge. Virtualisation happens at each level of the infrastructure stack: unified storage, unified fabric, virtual servers, increasing asset utilisation and simplifying asset lifecycle management through mobility of applications and data. With pooled resources come a much faster time to market and considerably lower overall cost structures, and these require a nonstop infrastructure - 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now you've got the basis of SOI.

Once the offering and processes are standardised and infrastructure virtualised, then it is possible to automate the environment. Automation tools increase abstraction and provide simplified controls for overall workflow management.

Handing back control is evidence of a successfully deployed SOI model. Allowing application administrators and owners the flexibility of scaling on demand, choosing different levels of performance and data protection as required and automating recovery from application errors are all possible through application integration and self-service capabilities, making the jump from SOI to internal cloud services.

A dynamic data centre requires partnering across your organisation to help move through each of these phases. We can guide you to a proven service-oriented architecture and services management framework that is in use for thousands of applications and hundreds of petabytes in customer deployments around the world.

Weera Areeratanasak is country manager of NetApp Thailand.