A new data center? Expect to sing the blues along the way.
You could almost hear the singing of the I.T. Blues coming from the audience at the afternoon keynote speech at Moscone Center.
These servers run hot. (ba-dum-ba-dum); Power costs a lot. (ba-dum-ba-dum)
The boss wants more space. (ba-dum-ba-dum) Finance says no way. (ba-dum-ba-dum)
New hires want Macs (ba-dum-ba-dum) but that takes us off-track. (ba-dum-ba-dum)
No Blackberry, they cry. (ba-dum-ba-dum) An iPhone they'll buy. (ba-dum-ba-dum)
OK, maybe no one was humming B.B. King riffs but the afternoon presentation at LinuxWorld was pretty straight forward. The corporate I.T. environment is changing along with the technology and the old school way of building, managing and maintaining data centers is, well, old. But jumping feet first into a new way of managing the corporate can also be scary.
At center stage, Rajiv Ramaswami, Vice President and General Manager at Cisco Systems, offered reassurances that a push into virtualization of the data center is not something that will happen overnight. It can happen in phases, the existing network infrastructure can help with the deployment and - most importantly - this transition doesn't just affect the hardware and technologies. People and traditional processes will be largely affected, as well.
Hence, the singing of the blues.
Most I.T. departments have an average of 5-7 groups - one for storage, one for security, one for applications, and so on. That's a lot of different groups - who tend to work in "silos" of sorts - that need to learn how to hold hands and work together. Eventually, as processes become automated, I.T. departments will also be forced into reorganization, as well.
But consider the long-term financial savings, he said. For example, the cost of a new 30 megawatt data center - not small but certainly not huge either - would probably cost about $250 million to build and about $25 million a year to operate, he said. There's a lot of wasted physical space and unused capacity because of the cooling demands. With consolidated storage, the efficiency increases and the life of the data center goes up, as well. In addition, it changes the amount of people power that's needed. Before consolidation, it takes about one person to manager 25 terabytes of storage, he said. After consolidation, that number grows to 750 terabytes.
Likewise, the simple task of installing a new server could involve as many of 7 or 8 people and could take weeks to deploy. Under a new approach, that install time could drop to as low as a couple of days because of the automation systems in place.
Ramaswami was quick to point out that many companies are still exploring the new data center idea and that many are finding that the process can be very complex. But, over a period of years, the savings of both time and money, as well as the increased efficiency will be worth the headaches - and the singing of the blues - along the way.