A new era of data center services

Viewpoint paper

the data center of the future by leveraging the expertise of an experienced provider.
Faced with todays data explosion and technology innovations, contemporary data centers are illequipped to deliver more and better services, drive stronger business results, and do more with less. Data center services can help organizations develop futureproof infrastructures, freeing executives to focus on innovation and business growth.

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Table of contents
IT facilities are undergoing a fundamental shift .............1 Why todays infrastructures are inadequate for tomorrows needs................................................2 Major business trends affecting the data center ............2 Factors to consider when determining data center strategies ...............................................6 Data Center Services help to answer next-generation business demands .............................7 HP Data Center Services provide choice and flexibility ..........................................................8 Conclusion .............................................................9 About the author ................................................... 10

The ever-increasing pace of change is creating new levels of complexity within, and greater expectations from, the data center. These changes are demanding new techniques to achieve business success.

IT facilities are undergoing a fundamental shift

In terms of complexity, there are so many more servers, applications, and vendors to manage, along with larger volumes of data and an always-connected global audience. And while innovations such as cloud computing, self-service, virtualization, mobility, thin clients, storage de-duplication, standardization, and consolidation have driven greater capabilities into the data center, theyve added greater implementation, management, and strategic challenges, too. Additionally, an unprecedented explosion in the growth of data is creating a labyrinth of IT sprawl, pushing data centers to the breaking point. And the expectationsto do more with less, deliver to ever-higher service-level agreements (SLAs), and drive stronger business resultswill only continue to increase at breakneck speed. These are among the factors forging a major fundamental shift toward where data centers are headed and the way in which executives are thinking about and managing them. In fact, data glutdriven in large part by the accumulation of so-called Big Datais forcing a transition all the way down to how IT is perceived in the first place. The focus on technology has been overtaken by the necessity to make the massive quantities of information more meaningful, actionable, aligned to the businessand in real time. Indeed, the I in IT is now far more important to an enterprises success than the T.

These challenges place a premium on planning and deploying the right data center strategies. If the data center is not optimized to meet business demands, then the enterprise is not maximizing its investment. In fact, it is costing more every day, and whatever competitive advantage an organization may have had rapidly dwindlesalong with its ability to efficiently serve its customers and/or citizens. As a result, forward-looking enterprises are looking more and more to outsourcing all or part of their data center deployment, implementation, and management to third-party vendors that specialize in data center services. These services include the people, processes, and technology needed to keep servers, storage, network, applications, and other key infrastructure running efficientlygiving the enterprise reliable access to information. This viewpoint paper will further examine trends affecting the data center, how they are driving a new era in data center services, and the increasing role that data center services are playing in helping enterprises modernize, improve utilization, and future-proof themselves to promote success for years to come.

their planning is limited to their immediate domain, resulting in IT and facilities aligning too slowly. These IT departments may also struggle to keep up Data center management used to be easy when there with the shift to Everything as a Service, leading was a lot less digital data in the world, growth was to a loss of competitive advantage and innovation manageable, workloads were predictable, and access for their enterprises. was limited. But that was years ago, when data Another conundrum adds considerable complexity centers consisted of walled-off, independent silos, and in the way IT executives determine their data center hardware was dedicated to single business processes strategies. Consider that in a typical environment, limited to specific technologies and isolated functions. technology changes every three years, but the data Even though this created islands of information, center facility lifetime lasts an average of 15 to 20 IT executives were able to accommodate their years. This means that nearly seven technology organizations needs via the time-honored tradition refreshes will be conducted over a 20-year span of buying more space and capacity when they but the data center infrastructure will remain largely ran out of either. But with the amount of cumulative unchanged. Organizations typically do not have digital archive capacity estimated to reach 300,000 the experience to create highly flexible data center petabytes1 by 2015, the potential of the traditional solutions, nor do they have the technical expertise to data center as a tool for productivity and growth has anticipate and plan for this type of future technology disappeared, along with the investment. change. The great unknown is this: How much Business technology today has become a complex impact will future technology refreshes have on a system of hardware, services, software tools, and facility infrastructure? applications, with many different approaches to reporting and tracking across disparate Major business trends affecting the departments and suppliers. Todays systems were data center built monolithically to a specific tier level, with all applications and hardware located together. Typically, More and more data is being used to provide complex services to consumers and clients, which these data centers were built at a higher tier level means organizations need better visibility into the endwith redundant systems in order to accommodate to-end environment. And with data becoming more the usually unnecessaryand costlyhigh levels and more important, data center strategy, location, of availability. Its important to note that it can cost and network connectivity become increasingly critical 2.5x as much to build a Tier 4 data center as a Tier components of the overall IT strategy. This includes the 1. Expressing these building costs per megawatt of need to combine strong security and governance to IT load, Gartner Research estimates that a Tier 1 allow for full visibility for both data at rest and data in data center costs $9 million on average, Tier 2$16 million, Tier 3$20 million, and Tier 4$23 million2. transit. For example, some countries require financial institutions to keep and process client financial data Simply put, data centers have become too expensive, inside the country where it originatesleading overly complex, and woefully unequipped to handle firms to operate in-country data centers for the task. contemporary demands. As a result of this capacity To comply with these regulations, enterprises are and maintenance nightmare, organizations have seeking to accommodate larger volumes of data often been forced to think in terms of limited choice. by enabling standardization, modernization, and The high cost of data centers is preventing them improved utilization. They are also adopting efficient, from expanding current businesses and exploring environmentally sound technologies as well as new ones. In other words, too much of the IT spend innovations such as cloud services. is devoted to maintaining existing systems, rather than investing in business innovation. Additionally, IT departments often consist of separate specialties such as network, storage, and server domainand staff has limited knowledge of business applications and hardware that dont apply to them. That means

Why todays infrastructures are inadequate for tomorrows needs

1 Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2010-2014 Forecast: Sowing the Seeds of Change for Enterprise Applications, IDC, May 3, 2010, http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22324610 2 Gartner Research, Best Practices for Data Center Costs and Design, David J. Cappuccio, John R. Phelps, Aug. 5, 2011.

Figure 1 Seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world

The Instant-On Enterprise at a glance

Everything and everyone is connected Everyone expects immediate gratification and instant results The enterprise and IT are one and the same Ability to respond to continuous opportunity and competition anywhere, any time, in every way

Jet EngineUnits of thrust Cell PhonesHeart monitor alert ManufacturingManufacturing as a service InsurancePricing based on behavior

Evolving Business Models Technology Advancements Changing Workforce

2 0 2 0

25M applications 4B people online 31B connected devices 1.3T tags/devices 50T gigabytes of data created

Social media Consumerization of IT Millennials Right info, right place, right time

Other major business trends straining traditional approaches to the data center include:
The move toward a truly connected enterprise, where everything is connected, mobile, and instantly available

HP believes that the instantly available, everythingconnected enterprise is where the ongoing alignment of business and IT is headed. This connected enterprise encompasses a much wider range of participants accessing many different devices; this includes employees, board members, and executives, and sometimes business partners and suppliers. In the connected enterprise, companies extend that visibility upstreambeyond adjacent links in the supply chainand downstream beyond immediate channel partners to find opportunities for growth. The degree to which the enterprise interacts with the external entities that compose its business ecosystem demands radical changes in the way data centers are conceived and deployed.

The steady demand for more and more IT services is only increasing the pressure to get the data center under control. At HP, this instantly available, everything-connected organization is called the Instant-On Enterprise. The Instant-On Enterprise is an approach to IT that calls for organizations to create new products and services that harness, manage, and arm enterprises to more efficiently access this onslaught of data. It is built on the principles of a converged infrastructure, which delivers a systematic approach to accelerate timeto-business value for IT organizations. It accelerates the provisioning of IT services and applications by integrating servers, storage, networking, security, power, cooling, and facilities into shared pools of interoperable resourcesall managed through a common management platform. The result is the ability to deliver any workloadanywhere, anytime to achieve better business results. A converged infrastructure helps to overcome the inflexibility and high costs created by data center, application, and IT sprawland to shift more resources to innovation.

Everything as a Service and the cloud

As with virtualization, cloud computing has triggered a massive, fundamental shift in how the data center is conceived, how it functions, and, in fact, how enterprises conduct their business: Cloud will be part of every organization. Because there exists an ever-increasing need to bring products and services to market fasterand to meet the increasing demands from citizens and governmentsthe shift is from delivering by technology towers to managing enterprise services. If technology is unable to deliver to meet business needs, an organization is bound to suffer from lost opportunities and lost business. Cloud computing promotes better ways to source, deliver, and govern highly flexible, scalable businessdriven services. Since cloud will become part of all enterprises, its crucial for them to implement a data center model that supports hybrid delivery, including a combination of private cloud, shared private cloud, public cloud, traditional IT, and in-house solutions yet most existing data center designs and the tooling controlling them do not anticipate or enable this hybrid system model. Because this movement entails a shift of focus from technology to services, organizations must move beyond the data center and up the stack to include applications and business processes to achieve greater value from their IT. This implies, naturally, that the infrastructure components need to be managed and operated even better and more efficiently as they form the foundation for the more value-added areas of applications and business processes. Thats where the cloud and Everything as a Service (XaaS) comes in. The cloud enables the access and use of low-cost, easy-to-use, and flexible hardware and software components via Internet technologies. Through the cloud, everything will be delivered as a service, from computing power to storage to business processes to personal interactions. After all, applications are what run the business, and there is a need to provide a seamlessly integrated end-to-end view of all the infrastructures applications, infrastructure, and management capabilities. In other words, organizations can no longer just focus on their IT. It is really more about what they do with IT: providing services to their consumers and customers. Thats because, more and more, they are consuming services instead of IT. For proof, simply consider all of the applications stores that have materialized in the past several years.

The business benefits of cloud computing and XaaS include low cost, ease of use, and flexibilityallowing organizations to: Respond automatically to consumer or constituent needs Scale assets automatically, either up or down Eliminate unused assets and maximize utilization Serve multiple needs for multiple users Take advantage of different pricing models such as pay-as-you-go, free, or advertising supported Achieve anytime/anywhere service access Reduce time to launch new services Deploy standardized environments Increase the focus on self-service models The issue is that no organization can instantly and completely move to cloud computing. No single cloud type, solution, or delivery approach can possibly satisfy all enterprise requirements. Executives need to consider what works for their organizations now and what will work best in the future as part of a hybrid delivery approach and an integrated seamless solution stack.
The rise in Big Data

Enterprises have an increasing need to gather insights from a wider variety of structured and unstructured data sources inside and outside the enterprise. This includes new data types such as voice, video, photos, and genotypes. The challenge is not just gathering and using this informationits making sense of it, sometimes even in real time (an example of this is conducting facial analysis of video feeds). That means pulling together massive amounts of data from disparate sources and forming a contextual picture on which to make decisions. Right now, this decision-making is still predominantly manual in most organizations. It takes weeks, if not months, for enterprises to respond to critical business events. In the future, more organizations will need to drive action through predictive insight in real time, making decisions operational in focus. They will rely on insights from analytics running against a mass of internal and external data. This will allow them to begin reacting quickly to events, then predict likely outcomes and adapt processes to achieve preferred results.

Figure 2 Big Data and Analyticssystem and benefits

Seamless Integration for loading/ querying

Manage, monitor, and Manage, monitor, and maintain your data maintain your data storage, access, and storage, access, and analytics analytics Parallel real-time in-database analytics

Backup, DR, Snapshot

Real-time Analytics

Fault Tolerant

Scalability Fast Time-to-Value Simple to Use

Speed

Social computing will continue to generate massive amounts of new data in the coming years, bringing with it the need to understand deep, continuous, intimate information about clients and partners. It will be up-to-date, not static, information. Much of it will contain embedded intelligence that generates location-specific interactions with the physical world, and it will foster the continuing need for a predictive more than a reactiveapplication of analytics. Of course, these types of analytics are far from problem-free. Organizations often lack the massive, highly flexible computing resources they need to process the exploding volumes of data. This alone makes data analysis difficult. Whats more, enterprise information architectures generally are not designed to enable real-time analytics, and security features need to improve as technology moves mainstream. Effective data center services provide the necessary compute power, architecture, and set the stage for analytics. Even soin what is perhaps the biggest obstacle of allcultural and organization norms are challenged by moving to data-driven decisions, which delays adoption across the board.

Rising security threats, exacerbated by myriad mobile devices

With everyone connected, engaged, and using a wide range of devices not supplied by the organization, security must be robust and fail-proof to allow interactions to occur at volumes beyond the transaction levels we see today. Enterprises with flexible solutions will actually enable secure access to the correct information in the context of the decision being made. These organizations will make better and faster decisions based on more data and trusted analytics through advanced tools both inside and outside of the organization. However, while organizations are developing new security tools with more investments, they are trying to catch up to increasing, sometimes advanced, cyber threats. More sophisticated, concerted threats are targeting more interaction pointsand enterprises are making compromises instead of additional investments of organizational resources. Failure to protect operating environments in the data center and beyond can result in loss of revenue, customers, and brand reputation.

As data volumes increase and data types become more varied, data must be protected at rest and in motion. The (business) value of data increases when combined with other structured and unstructured data sources, and data centers need multilevel security and advanced tools for logging, tracking, monitoring, reporting, and automation to enable this workload. Comprehensive data center security needs to include data and content security while focusing strongly on business continuity and recovery. And when securing the data center, there can be no room for shortcuts or shortsightedness. Everything needs to be considered, from the actual physical design (security landscaping, fire prevention construction, and so forth) to the use of advanced biometric identification and multilevel card access that ensures only authorized personnel are allowed to enter the facility. An end-to-end security framework, such as that offered by HP, encompasses the entire data center, network, applications, and end points in order to: Manage information risk in the era of mobile, cloud, IT consumerization, and social media Protect against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats Improve reaction time to security incidents Reduce costs and spend wisely Achieve compliance in a predictable and costeffective way For example, HP network security solutions are designed to ensure application availability, reduce the risk of network intrusions, and increase the efficiency of the network. HP application security solutions encompass design, development, testing, and deployment while promoting reduced cost associated with application vulnerability. HP end-point security solutions emphasize central management and the consolidation of tools with the objective of securing all end points regardless of their location.

achieving a significant return on investment that focusing on a broad data center strategy can easily distract the attention of an organizations leaders. These considerations include: PeopleThe key to effective and efficient use of people in a world-class data center is through leverage, reuse, and adoption of best practices. TechnologyA world-class data center will deploy proven, leading-edge technologies to provide a competitive advantage to the clients being served. ToolsThe selection and implementation of tools should support areas such as intelligent operations, exception management, automation, and outage prevention. NetworkIn the current networked environment, the network (and the associated network latency and connectivity) is critical, not only in the day-today operations of the data center, but also in the tactical and strategic decision process for data center placement across the globe. LocationCritical factors include availability of power, people resources, network connectivity, and infrastructure availability. Data governanceOrganizations require the control of and visibility into how data is stored, managed (operationally and life cycle), operated on, and transmitted. Compliance concerns are especially complex when data is exchanged globally via the cloud. CostDeveloping a data center of the future demands careful analysis of the benefits derived from any investments targeted at improving the level of service the data center provides. Service level managementExecutives need the ability to monitor and report the health of systemlevel and business-level metrics. StandardizationAll processes executed in support of the data center should be standardized across the entire organization. Real-time business viewAll information related to the health of the data center must be available in a real-time mode. This implies data can be displayed in real time, and that there is a drill-down mechanism for any problem that arises.

Factors to consider when determining data center strategies

An optimized data center is as critical to an organizations success as its focus on innovation, business growth, and vision of the future. But so many factors are involved in developing a flexible infrastructure to accommodate future needs while

Additionally, capitalizing on services innovation is no longer good to haveits essential. And in a hybrid delivery environment that promises greater control and flexibility, enterprises should examine such offerings as cloud types and services based on functionality and fit, and deploy those that deliver the desired business outcomes. These considerations must be applied throughout the traditional IT, cloud, and even in-house solutions that an enterprise deploys.

Data center services are also guiding organizations to respond to the business trends discussed earlier, by: Providing an end-to-end view that incorporates the IT Information Library, consistent and standardized IT Service Management, and other best practices to focus on service delivery and operational excellence. The goal is to coordinate and provide full visibility into an organizations IT service providers so that a consistent, secure, and global IT services delivery modelblended with the right combination of automation and virtualizationcan be implemented. Improving collaboration between development and operations professionals, and integrating people and processes between applications and the infrastructure. Effective IT organizations have fostered this type of alignment for years and innovations such as the cloud and associated ondemand infrastructures, self-provisioning resources, and elastic application architectures make strong interaction and integration between developers and operations even more of a requirement. Still, as cloud-based services continue to grow, operations professionals will need to find different and more innovative ways to work with developers with less physical intervention.

Data Center Services help to answer next-generation business demands

The data center of the future will focus on effective and efficient service delivery, with business objectives supported in a timely and high-quality fashion and at the lowest possible cost. Todays supplier- and commodity-based environment will transform into a business-partner relationship devoted to the delivery of managed business services in support of business functions. The focus will be on delivering services to the client according to pre-established business levels. The client will be able to view, in real time, its business and IT systems, and there will be an integration of support and functions to drive competitive advantage orin the public sectorimprove services for citizens.

Providing modeling and simulation/analytics that [HP has] invested in a highly automated, can scale, analyze, and manage large amounts of standardized provisioning model to deliver datapredicting, rather than reactingthereby optimal business results and economic value to handling the upcoming shift to sense and respond. the client. Its revolutionary because it enables This is based on the assumption that organizations the CIO to provision technology in days or need to gather the right information at the right time in even hours rather than weeks or months, the right format to take the right action. More informed reduces the cost associated with overcapacity, decisions predicting outcomes can be achieved and provides the ability to expand or shrink through playing through various what-if scenarios. the IT footprint with the business. Forward-looking, effective data center services enable Pete Karolczak, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ITO, HP Enterprise Services organizations to understand the entire stack as well as the interconnection among different components. This provides the ability to design the data center of the Enterprises are increasingly embracing data center future with the flexibility to allow for future growth and services from third-party vendors to transform and changes without disrupting the underlying architecture optimize their infrastructures, and to accommodate of the infrastructure. Data center services can also help and embrace innovations such as cloud computing. organizations create solutions that: These servicessuch as those offered by HPcan also Combine traditional IT, private cloud, hybrid (or include standardization, rationalization, consolidation, shared private) cloud, and public cloud solutions as and virtualization strategies as well as the application part of an integrated seamless solution stack and business-process layers, providing added value by embracing the total stack of technologies within the Consolidate, combine, process, extract, and distribute large volumes of information from multiple sources data center. (traditional IT, private, shared, and public cloud) Focus on service delivery Automate infrastructure and application testing Deliver an end-to-end view of business processes and ITs impact on these processes

 Leverage application and IT information and share resources to reduce cost and promote faster time to delivery Develop a cloud environment that allows for faster speed to market through the deployment of a complete solution stack Promote a lower cost of entry that shifts capital expenditures to operating expenditures Provide a robust enterprise management solution that offers an integrated view across applications and infrastructure Leverage consolidation and virtualization expertise to optimize the IT environment and increase utilization while reducing cost

HP Data Center Services can transform data centers with shorter planning and implementation periods. Our capabilities include being able to run an organizations data center technologies (servers, applications, and so forth) from our leveraged facilities, which includes refreshing technologies over time to meet new demands. HP Data Center Services provide low-cost, easy-to-use, and flexible solutions that: Optimize the return on IT investments through cost efficiency, improved productivity, and alignment to business needs Reduce the risk of business interruption with guaranteed computing uptime Enhance business continuity through best-in-class operational processes and leading security and data protection capabilities Enable organizations to pay only for what they need when they need it Enable compliance with industry standards and through provable processes and procedures Increase responsiveness through an infrastructure that reconfigures to quickly meet changing demands Efficiently handle increasing volume and storage requirements for an era of Big Data When choosing a partner to provide data center services, consider the following: HP manages more than 80 leveraged data centers for more than 680 clients worldwide. HP manages more than 100 petabytes of online primary data and more than 400 petabytes of backed-up data in 60 countries.

HP Data Center Services provide choice and flexibility

HP considers data center services to include the people, processes, and technology that organizations use to keep their core IT infrastructure of servers and storage systems runningand to deliver reliable access to data and applications. As part of a broader IT strategy, data center services are considered crucial to every organizations success. The critical factor here is that organizations are provided with choice and flexibility. For HP, this means organizations can select and mix the delivery models that best suits them: traditional outsourcing, cloud options, and even in-house. HP offers the complete range of data center services and support for all the strategies
3

According to a recent Gartner survey , a total of 46% of our respondents report that they will build one or more new data centers in the next two years, and 54% HP manages more than 250,000 mainframe MIPS. expect that they will need to expand an existing data HP is positioned as a Leader in the Gartner center in that time frame. Using HPs service offerings, Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and clients can realize faster implementation times and Infrastructure Utility Services in Europe (2011)4. lower costs to expand their computing capacity. HP is rated as a Leader in the Gartner Magic HP Data Center Services fully leverages HP Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and technology, the innovations of HP Labs, and the Infrastructure Utility Services in North America (2011)5. IT services leadership of HP Enterprise Services to modernize, improve utilization, adopt secure cloud services, and even go green at the source of an organizations biggest emissions.

3 Gartner, Inc., 2009 U.S. Data Center Conference: Data Center Build Expansion Update, Mike Chuba, April 20, 2010. Conducted with approximately 80 respondents from North America.

4 Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Infrastructure Utility Services, Europe, Claudio Da Rold, Gianluca Tramacere, Frank Ridder, July 12, 2011. 5 Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Infrastructure Utility Services, North America, William Maurer, David Edward Ackerman, Bryan Britz, Helen Huntley, July 20, 2011.

Conclusion
Driven by the digital revolution and the ubiquity of mobility, enterprises need to work faster, anticipate and accommodate changing volumes and demands, and adjust quickly to meet new opportunities. If their data centers are not optimized to support these changes, enterprises are not maximizing their investments. In fact, its costing them more every day. The concept of the data center as a mainframe in the basement has become obsolete. Data centers are now multifaceted infrastructures that include server and mainframe management, hosting, storage, network, and performance optimization. Data centers are also critical for organizations to expand and enhance their options. More and more, enterprises of all sizes are embracing data center services to help them modernize, improve utilization, and future-proof themselves to promote business success for years to come.

About the author

Ren J. Aerdts, Ph.D.

Dr. Ren J. Aerdts is an HP Fellow. He is part of the Office of the CTO for HP Enterprise Services. Dr. Aerdts is the chief technologist and leader of the Automation Chief Technology Office. He directs a team of architects to drive the enterprise strategy for automation, leveraging technology to improve business outcomes by increasing speed and agility, driving down cost, and improving quality. The title of HP Fellow is awarded to the corporations most innovative thought leaders in recognition of their exceptional achievements. As an HP Fellow, Dr. Aerdts helps develop enterprise-wide initiatives that shape the HP future.

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Copyright 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 4AA3-8498ENW, Created December 2011