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Home Vision Public sector issue 02 A unified future

A unified future

To maximise the ROI from new integrated datacenter solutions, organisations need to understand current and future costs and take a phased approach to adoption

The virtualisation of the datacenter is entering a new phase founded on integrated infrastructure stacks, which are designed to unlock even greater financial and agility benefits.

Unified Computing Systems (UCS) provide the hardware foundations for Virtual Datacenters (VDC) acting as a single platform for controlling and managing multiple datacenter assets.

Adrian Foxall, Computacenter’s Director of UCS Solutions, comments: “Server virtualisation was the first step towards creating a more flexible datacenter operating environment. IT departments now need to extend this approach to other infrastructure assets through the adoption of UCS and VDC.”

By bringing together computing, networking and storage resources with virtualisation and management software in a single integrated platform, UCS and VDC solutions allow businesses to break free from the limitations imposed by traditional IT infrastructure ‘silos’.

Understanding the cost base

Although the concept of converged datacenter solutions has been maturing over the last five years, there are still a number of challenges that can prevent organisations from realising the expected return on investment.

Benchmarking current operational expenditure and future costs is imperative for understanding what an adoption of UCS hardware and the development of a VDC could mean to the company’s bottom line and whether it merits investment.

“To establish a successful VDC strategy, organisations need to consider a number of cost levers associated with implementing and operating infrastructure capacity,” comments Adrian. “These are principally focused on datacenter facility costs, provisioning additional capacity, service automation as well as simplified and integrated systems management solutions.” UCS hardware and VDC solutions from the likes of IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco and NetApp seek to address some of these challenges with in-built management modular tools that offer standardised configuration options and specific application outcomes. This approach guarantees service levels while significantly reducing solution design, migration and implementation costs through standardisation.

While these tangible benefits are easy to demonstrate in a business case, other VDC advantages, such as accelerated change and disaster recovery, are harder to quantify.

“In today’s cost reduction climate, justifying capital expenditure on new technologies requires a watertight business case,” comments Adrian. “By working with an experienced UCS and VDC partner, organisations will find it easier to not only articulate but also achieve the expected benefits of an integrated datacenter infrastructure.”

For BAA, the benefits of deploying a VDC were considerable with overall savings of £1.8 million as well as increased IT performance and business agility. The airport operator’s VDC is designed to provide a minimum of 99.99 per cent system availability and is used for critical workloads and applications, such as invoicing systems, databases and CCTV footage.

Overcoming migration challenges  

As with the adoption of any new solution, organisations must also consider the costs of migrating to their selected UCS platform and development of VDC, in terms of the skills and ongoing support needed, especially in terms of change management.

Although the leading VDC and UCS solutions from IBM, Cisco, HP,EMC and NetApp promise compelling returns significantly above conventional virtualisation strategies, these advantages will be lost if organisations have to invest in additional skills and support resources.

Such considerations and challenges are hindering the adoption of VDC solutions, which means organisations are delaying their ability to take advantage of the associated financial and efficiency gains.

“As with cloud computing, the use of UCS to create an VDC requires a change in the IT mindset,” adds Adrian. “Operational considerations, coupled with the current depreciation of complex and capital-intense network, storage and datacenter assets are often seen as major adoption barriers – although these concerns can be overcome.”

Enabling a risk-free transition

Computacenter helps organisations by providing pragmatic support throughout the transformation and migration, for example identifying the most appropriate UCS hardware platform. The first stage is to assess the current operational state and capacity of your organisation’s datacenter along with future requirements.

“An independent assessment will simplify and rationalise the potential options and identify where and how your organisation can exploit UCS solutions to achieve maximum benefits,” comments Adrian.

Computacenter used best-practice methodologies to help BAA validate each system’s suitability for virtualisation prior to migration to a VDC environment.

By combining automated discovery with a physical audit and IT team interviews, Computacenter was able to obtain a comprehensive understanding of BAA’s datacenter systems, their criticality and the interdependencies between them.

Terry Fusco, Head of IT for Heathrow at BAA, comments: “The project has been recognised as a resounding success throughout BAA, and has a predicted return on investment of less than 24 months. Computacenter demonstrated exceptional technical skills and communicated risks, issues and challenges as they happened, which enabled us to resolve them quickly as a team.”

For many organisations, VDCs will co-exist with traditional datacenters in a hybrid model with less critical workloads being the first on the migration list. VDCs can also be managed as part of a private cloud strategy both on or off-premise.

“VDCs are not nirvana for the datacenter,” comments Adrian “Organisations need to take a phased and pragmatic approach to their UCS hardware adoption to ensure they don’t cut costs at the expense of service levels.”

BAA makes cost savings of more than £1.8 million with agile virtualised datacenter
Read the full case study