Outsourcing your datacentre operations can set your organisation free, allowing it to become more agile and effective
“We are seeing a strong
momentum among our clients
towards far more virtualisation
of their servers and
infrastructure”
To support the business and compete effectively in a fast-changing market, organisations need to ensure their datacentre operations and management are as efficient, secure, cost-effective, resilient, scalable and highly available as possible. But to create and manage such an optimum facility in-house is not always practical. It requires you to have access to the latest technologies and skills, as well as the ability to adhere to best-practice principles governing service delivery, process management and security.
A significant number of top-tier organisations, particularly the large financial institutions, have already embarked upon, or completed, major projects to consolidate and virtualise their datacentres. However, for many other businesses the complexity and extensive upfront and ongoing costs of such projects is leading them to look at outsourcing some or all of their datacentre operations and/or management functions.
Traditional datacentre outsourcing often offered little more than what analyst Gartner termed “your-mess-for-less” solutions. Contract and billing structures were fairly rigid and there was generally little consideration of how datacentre management would meet the real needs of the business going forward in the most efficient way possible.
But today, providers of datacentre services are responding to customers’ needs for more flexible, business-focused arrangements by offering a gamut of outsourcing and managed service options. These range from full datacentre hosting and management at one end, through co-location, disaster recovery and backup services, to remote management of systems availability and of discrete, day-to-day operational functions such as release, change, configuration and capacity management.
WHY READ THIS?
- You want to make your business more agile
- You need maximum efficiency and minimum costs in your datacentre
- You need flexibility in how you outsource IT operations
As a result, the huge unwieldy outsourcing deals of the past are giving way to smaller, more strategic contracts made up of a range of physical and operational elements. Perhaps most exciting of all, we are beginning to move into the world of true utility computing, where outsourcers will be able to offer customers processing power, storage and management services on a true pay-as-you-use basis.
The question is, how do organisations decide which elements, if any, of their datacentre operations and/or management they should put in the hands of thirdparty providers?
Clear picture
Developing an effective strategy first requires that you have a solid understanding of both where you are now and what you want to achieve. Neil Meddick, director of remote services for Computacenter Services, says: “The first thing organisations need to do is ensure they have an effective picture of what applications they are running, which business processes they are supporting, and how important they are to the business’s objectives. Secondly, they need to establish who is using those applications, when they are using them and what the underpinning infrastructure looks like in its entirety.”
This can be a mammoth task in itself. Meddick continues: “The real challenge for many organisations is that historically they’ve been quite inefficient. They’ve probably had more servers than they knew about and very little control over those servers, with each department having its own application development team and infrastructure.”
Once you have a clear picture of what you’re dealing with on the ground, the key to optimising these unwieldy, ad hoc estates (as we detailed in the previous issue of Briefing) is to standardise and virtualise operations on primarily Intel-based blade servers running Windows or Linux. This allows organisations to pack much more processing power into far less physical space. In addition, whereas previously a single application would sit on a single server (often constituting a huge waste of unused processing power), virtualisation means that the allocation of processing power, storage and bandwidth can be provided to those applications that need it, when they need it.
Meddick says: “While the day of the virtual desktop PC is still some way away, we are seeing a strong momentum among our clients towards far more virtualisation of their servers and infrastructures. However, delivering release management, change management and configuration management becomes much more difficult when you have multiple line-of-business applications cohabiting on the same infrastructure.”
He continues: “A good service provider will recognise there may well be a need to consult at these initial stages, when an organisation starts designing its virtualised datacentre. When we consult with our customers, we want them not only to optimise their technology, but their processes as well.”
Camilla Sunner, head of proposition development for Computacenter Services’ Managed Services division, adds that considering your key business requirements is also crucial when designing the datacentre. “For example, for a commercial bank those requirements might be speed-tomarket with a new web interface, effective security and ensuring that whatever the customer does is reflected in the back-end systems. Organisations and their datacentre service providers need to understand how those requirements map onto business processes, how those business processes map onto one or a number of different business applications, and how those in turn are supported by the middleware and infrastructure applications running on the hardware.”
Best practice principles
Once organisations have designed and set up their consolidated, virtualised datacentres, managing them effectively and securely — in a way that continually reflects and supports the changing needs of the business — requires access to the right technology and technical skills. Crucially, it also requires strict adherence to bestpractice principles, such as those outlined in the service management standard ITIL and the international security standard ISO-7799.
In this regard, for many organisations there is an increasingly strong business case for at least outsourcing the ongoing datacentre management, even if they decide to retain control of their physical assets. Partnering with the right third party can give your organisation instant access to the required technologies, skills and best practice, which might otherwise be prohibitively costly and timeconsuming to acquire and retain in-house. Datacentre management could be on a traditional co-location basis, where you retain ownership of your systems but they sit in the third-party’s facilities, or they could still physically reside in your own datacentre and be managed remotely by your service provider.
DATA ISSUES
There is still some resistance to wholesale outsourcing of datacentre facilities, as opposed to just their management. And the biggest reason for this is the reluctance of some organisations to give up the retention of their data to a third party. Certain organisations — often because of compliance or regulatory issues — are very reticent to outsource their data storage.
But this attitude is beginning to diminish as the shape of the workforce changes. “As the younger generation rises in the ranks, things are changing,” says Computacenter Services’ Camilla Sunner. “They don’t have the same resistance to outsourcing data as their predecessors, because they understand that just because data resides at their own premises doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe, or that it’s unsafe when it’s off-site. They know that the integrity of their data depends not on where it sits physically, but on the security technology and processes that surround and protect it.”
Even where organisations are still keen to keep their prime data in-house, they are becoming increasingly comfortable with outsourced backup facilities. Today’s organisations are increasingly looking at co-synchronous replication across dual sites. And the secondary site is being outsourced more often than not. One key driver is the ability to free up real estate in high-value areas such as central London.
Meddick says: “We’re seeing a lot of commercial and corporate organisations in sectors such as legal and professional services, and financial organisations outside of the tier-one, City-based organisations who understand the cost savings that consolidation and virtualisation can bring. But they say the key issue is the ongoing management of these facilities, and realising the business benefits from them.”
For such organisations, engaging a qualified service provider to manage availability and/or the day-to-day operations of their datacentre can provide far more benefits than simply ongoing cost efficiencies. “Once organisations have consolidated and virtualised their datacentres, they find they may have succeeded in cutting costs and drastically reducing their footprint, but they then face the thorny issues of what to do next,” says Meddick. “In many cases, we don’t think that is being addressed effectively. They need to be looking at developing true service-based propositions that support the business and help it maintain agility, which is where access to the skills and best practice of a managed service provider can really be of benefit to their businesses.”
He adds that a service provider can also help to improve organisations’ business agility by freeing up in-house resources so they can concentrate on true business enablement.
Step by step
Some organisations may find that a strategy of cautious, step-by-step outsourcing gives them the confidence to divest themselves of ever more of their non-core activities. “Many customers want to dip their toes in the water before making any major commitments,” says Meddick. They will perhaps initially look at outsourcing a single application which sits on its own and if that works it may well drive their decision to move the next app then the next and perhaps eventually move towards a virtualised datacentre where all the applications are cohabiting. “That certainly applies to a certain government customer,” he adds, “where we started off managing a very small part of their infrastructure but where now every time they have a new project or launch a new system or website, it simply bolts on and builds on their infrastructure.”
POWER MANAGEMENT
Freeing up space is one major cost advantage of outsourcing datacentre facilities, but it’s not the only one. In addition, high-density datacentres have enormous power and cooling requirements. It’s now commonly recognised that the power requirements of blade servers is massively higher than predicted — there are horror stories about 20-kilowatt racks instead of the normal 1 or 2 kilowatts. And once you’ve got the power to your racks, you then have to figure out how to cool them.
As well as these ongoing burdens, building a highdensity datacentre may cost somewhere between seven and ten times as much as building a normal datacentre
When an organisation outsources, it doesn’t have to cover these enormous upfront costs. And by adopting a flexible, utility-based approach, companies can reap all the benefits of a virtualised facility without continuous overheads — they pay only for these high-value capabilities as and when they use them.
As well as cost savings, another crucial benefit of outsourcing both datacentre operations and management is the increased business agility that comes from the ability to turn processing power and storage on and off as needed, and to pay only for what you use. While the socalled utility model isn’t quite there yet, service providers are seeing increased demand for usage-based billing and all the analysts are predicting that it will eventually become the dominant model.
Meddick says service providers such as Computacenter will increasingly be able to offer such utility-style datacentre services, even for purely managed services. “Our view of utility is that it simply sits above everything else. You could for example, deliver a managed datacentre service that's located in either the customer's own environment, or one of Computacenter's datacentre facilities, but only charge customers on the basis of their usage of the infrastructure, or even by transaction.”
Pragmatic approach
Whichever datacentre outsourcing or managed service route your organisation chooses, you need to be sure you select a service provider that exhibits a pragmatic understanding of your business requirements and can offer you the necessary efficiencies and flexibility.
Above all, you should ensure you select practitioners with a proven track record and accreditations for best practice in service management and security. This guarantees their commitment to a service-oriented, business-focused approach and continual process improvement, as well as mitigating much of the risk around data security. The added value such providers can offer your organisation goes way beyond cost efficiencies. They can give you access to the very best skills and processes, which can help you transform your own organisation by ensuring your datacentre and processes are truly working in support of the business.
