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IT management in today’s environment is under intense pressure to manage costs and improve

services. Business users are making greater demands on IT to be more responsive. Technological advancements are driving changes in the way hardware is designed, installed and impacting the underlying architectures.

New computing paradigms such as cloud computing also present challenges for

resource-starved organizations, especially since IT budgets are not increasing at any appreciable rate. So how can IT managers ensure that the services they provide can evolve at the rapid pace that business demands, and yet ensure the budget contraints are taken into account?

Contents

This newsletter series will try to address some of these issues for IT managers, and especially those in midsize organizations where there is an incremental challenge in terms of available resources and headcount. Key topics that will be covered include:

Data center Virtualization Efficiency and optimization Cloud computing Infrastructure management Data management

The first of this series will focus on the data center of the future, which will be shaped by virtualization and help address today’s IT challenges.

www.dell.com/learn

Intelligent BusinessThe smart way to grow your business

How can midsize organizations leverage the latest IT trends to help grow the business intelligently?

Aligning IT management with business priorities

02 Q&A:

Data centers

of the future:

Considerations for

midsize organizations

07Case study:

Orion Health

virtualizes data center

to ensure hitch-free

business growth

05Feature:

Using the data

center to drive business

growth

2 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1

Q&AIDC Analyst Connectionwith Simon PiffDirector, Enterprise Infrastructure Research, IDC Asia/Pacific

Data centers of the future: Considerations for midsize organizations Advances in areas such as virtualization and storage management have accelerated the pace of technological change and nowhere is it felt more than in the data centers of midsize businesses. In this segment of the market, the demands on IT are not hugely dissimilar to the demands of larger enterprises. However, research shows that midsize businesses have greater restrictions when it comes to human capital, leading to significant challenges on their part with regards to maintaining a competitive edge by keeping pace with the changes.

Although midsize businesses generally have fewer IT personnel, their IT requirements are just as demanding as those of larger businesses.

The following questions were posed by Dell to Simon Piff, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Research, IDC Asia/Pacific, on behalf of Dell’s customers.

What are the main goals for midsize businesses?

Businesses of any size are generally focused on the same goals, with scale being the

main difference. In today’s environment, where the economy is just recovering from the global financial meltdown, businesses are refocusing much of their efforts on areas such as increasing income and revenue, reducing costs, improving profit margins and ensuring customer satisfaction. Many of these were neglected or compromised during the crisis.

When thinking about their IT infrastructure, what are the main issues?

The scale of the issues for midsize businesses are magnified due to a greater

restriction on available resources, especially in the area of manpower. Although midsize businesses generally have fewer IT personnel, their IT requirements are just as demanding as those of larger businesses. Overwhelmingly, midsize businesses’ main desire is to reduce the total cost of their IT systems. In a 2010 survey of companies within the 100-499 employee range across the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region, IDC found that after overall cost reduction, the next two priorities are aligning with the business processes and creating better tools to enable management to make better business decisions. Consequently, IT managers in midsize businesses face a conundrum due to limited headcount: The need to better align IT to the business and to better enable the business with more information and decision-making support while concurrently reducing the overall cost.

How can midsize businesses benefit from the current IT market trends?

Clearly, any technologies that can meet the key business and IT requirements of

reducing cost will be of keen interest to IT management. The major trends that are currently driving the IT markets are virtualization, primarily of the x86 server environment and in turn, a drive to networked storage and storage virtualization, but also the desktop environment to a certain degree, and the more widely

3 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1

Q&A

Advances in the technologies now make networked storage highly accessible to all organi-zations, and is a necessity if the full benefits of the economies of virtualization are to be realized.

discussed cloud computing environment. There are several steps that midsize businesses can take to enable themselves to leverage these technologies, all of which can drive improved IT economics.

Start with server consolidation. Upgrade server infrastructure as it reaches

its end of life to larger and more robust machines that can provide a platform for multiple applications.

Deploy server virtualization software incrementally. Such software has been shown to radically reduce server costs.

Adopt a networked approach to storage. To fully leverage server virtualization, it is necessary to have the storage networked – an aspect often overlooked by midsize businesses. IDC Asia/Pacific data shows that for many midsize businesses, there is still high tendency to procure storage internal to the server. While this may appear to be a cost-saving approach, it actually denies the ability to use storage in any meaningful manner in a virtualized server environment and limits scalability. Historically, networked storage was both complicated and expensive, requiring dedicated storage area networks running different protocols from the rest of the IT network. Advances in the technologies now make networked storage highly accessible to all organizations, and is a necessity if the full benefits of the economies of virtualization are to be realized.

Explore possibilities in cloud computing. Although in its nascent stages in Asia/Pacific, there are already various services available through cloud service providers. These services can help midsize businesses manage some of the more resource-intensive internal processes, thereby addressing both the cost and headcount issues at the same time.

What are the major issues midsize businesses need to consider when embarking on any of these projects?

Due to significant technological advances in both the areas of hardware and

software, the classic method of IT resource

provisioning – where multiple servers, each running a single application with its own internal storage – is considered archaic. The data center of the future will be one with highly virtualized x86 hardware connected to some form of networked storage environment.

Reconsider the IT operations. To reap full benefits from a virtualized data center, IDC believes that IT management processes, especially existing “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs), need to be updated and evolve to keep pace with technological changes.

Craft an IT roadmap. As many IT departments were built out in highly tactical modes, it is still common to find multiple single-instance servers and few resource- sharing or optimization opportunities. This needs to change before moving to a highly virtualized environment. IT needs to craft at least a five-year IT roadmap, preferably

4 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1

Q&A

Analyst bioSimon Piff has more than 17 years of regional experience in the IT industry, serving in various sales and marketing management roles for hardware, software, services and online businesses. As Director for IDC’s Asia/Pacific Enterprise Infrastructure Research Practice, Simon is responsible for the execution and delivery of the program in the Asia/Pacific region focused on providing advice around the technologies that define Enterprise infrastructure: Servers, Storage, Networking and Infrastructure Software and areas as security, private cloud and virtualization.Simon can be contacted at spiff@idc.com

longer, with the critical understanding that in five years, there are likely to be some major changes in technology direction. Naturally, this will require the plan to be updated. But most importantly, the plan must be aligned with the business aspirations. Else, IT will end up spending much of its time in “catch-up” mode and will eventually fall back to the tactical approaches that make much of today’s IT highly inefficient.

Revamp storage provisioning. Today, much storage is under-utilized as dated SOPs allocate storage to an application based on what the application is expected to consume. This approach naturally leaves some unused space for the application to consume at a later date. As more applications are provisioned, more storage is provisioned and more of that space is unused, but – and this is critical – unusable by any other application. The end result is that much of the storage that organizations have deployed is unused and unusable as it is allocated to an application that has yet to make use of it. This is a highly inefficient process in today’s world where technologies such as thin provisioning and storage virtualization allow IT departments to dynamically provision storage requirements for applications. Furthermore, other storage technologies such as de-duplication and compression also contribute to improving the overall efficiency of the storage layer.

Deploy networked storage. Networked storage will be the key to leveraging benefits of server virtualization and several options are available to midsize businesses. In the past, networked storage was synonymous with Fibre Channel networks, which was a major challenge to midsize businesses in terms of cost and complexity. Advances in iSCSI storage technology and increases in the underlying Ethernet networks have since eroded much of Fibre Channel’s technological advantage. This development opens up a lower-cost alternative for midsize businesses, which can immediately leverage the benefits of a highly virtualized, de-duplicated iSCSI storage environment without the need to invest in new storage networking protocols or train storage

networking professionals. This also eliminates the need to create a separate storage networking tier and any additional hardware.

Is there anything else a midsize business should consider?

As IT vendors spend billions of dollars every year on R&D to improve their

products, it is important for businesses to fully understand a vendor’s offerings and reap benefits from their R&D investments. No two vendors are exactly identical and each comes to the market with a specific charter. Understanding this can help an organization select the right primary vendor with whom to align. For midsize businesses, there is also a need to engage a local systems integrator or partner that can help with service requests as well as installation and commissioning.

Understanding the right type of technologies is another critical area for midsize businesses. As mentioned previously, x86 servers are now sufficiently powerful to undertake even the most demanding tasks. In addition, virtualization adds to the levels of high availability that can be provided, and the increase in storage network speeds negates much of the need for a Fibre Channel storage network; understanding what is current and what is next in terms of product roadmaps to ensure a vendor’s vision aligns with the long-term vision of the business will be very helpful.

Finally, a long-term vision for IT is required. For some businesses, IT is the lifeblood and can drive many of the processes that a business is built upon. In such cases, a robust long-term IT strategy is critical. For other more service-based businesses where “people power” is the driving force, IT is an enabler and can enhance productivity. Businesses need to understand where IT fits for them, what level of criticality is required and, working closely with a vendor or a channel partner/systems integrator, develop a long-term plan for how the data center will evolve to the highly virtualized data center of the future that seems the most probable outcome for midsize businesses.

5 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1

In the global e-world in which businesses now operate, technology lubricates virtually every business process and data informs almost every decision. Given the key role technology plays in modern businesses, it comes as no surprise that many are looking for ways to enhance efficiency with the help of IT.

Boosting efficiency is not just about trimming IT costs. It’s about investing in the right technology with the future in mind, and cleverly using this technology to drive business and organizational success. Many businesses, however, spend far too much time and effort on working around inefficiencies in their data centers to be able to properly plan how to construct and leverage their IT assets.

This is especially true of midsize businesses*, which typically find themselves locked into proprietary technologies that contribute to increased TCO and limit future choice, and have disparate resources acquired over the years that cannot be managed together as complementary parts of a larger cohesive whole. Also, a majority of midsize businesses have small IT teams that are too occupied with maintenance, fire-fighting and other non-strategic tasks to be able to spend time architecting data centers and ensuring their effective use.

Three key elements

In an effort to tackle their data center challenges, an increasing number of midsize businesses are turning to virtualization and consolidation, mostly for servers and storage. While these can go a long way toward improving data center efficiency, they are just

Imagine a data center where computing muscle, networking resources, and storage assets can be rapidly provisioned to meet dynamic business needs, and where intelligent infrastructure and optimized storage are the norm. Pipe dream? No. It has become a reality.

the beginning. To gain further benefit, midsize businesses also need to look further. Here are three key elements to consider when planning to revitalize an existing data center or when planning a new one:

Optimize existing infrastructureThe first step in the journey toward IT and enterprise efficiency is to optimize existing data center infrastructure, with the goal of achieving uniformity and cutting costs. Common platforms, standards-based tools, and unified network fabrics can contribute to these efforts. The goal: To eliminate proprietary legacy architectures, like RISC and SPARC-based UNIX systems, and replace them with a scaled x86 architecture running Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems to help lower costs and reduce management oversight.

Simplify technology infrastructureNext, simplify the technology infrastructure. Using proven approaches such as virtualization and storage consolidation, organizations can consolidate or unify redundancies to help ensure that they are getting the most out of their data center resources. Rationalizing and reducing the number of applications also enhances the flexibility to easily remove and repurpose servers.

Implement best practicesAfter the data center has been standardized and simplified, enhanced levels of automation can come into play. The third step is to implement best practices that help reduce manual intervention and boost productivity, together with cloud-based delivery models (where appropriate) that help reduce the administrative burden on IT staff and enhance application availability. Managed service options also allow organizations to combine 24/7 monitoring, alerts and reporting with expert analysis and advice.

Dell’s Efficient Data Center model

Dell offers a model for midsize businesses to tackle their data center challenges and build a solid foundation for enterprise efficiency that does not lock them into proprietary solutions. Called Efficient Data Center, it can optimize the existing data center, maintain choice in vendors and technology, and allow incremental implementation as time, internal resources and budget permit.

Purpose-built to lower costs and increase IT efficiency, Efficient Data Center takes the three elements mentioned above into consideration. In it, an efficient data center is built on four key pillars:

Pillar 1: Intelligent infrastructureIntelligent infrastructure is designed to automate frequent tasks to drive down TCO, rapidly respond to change requests, and help administrators anticipate issues and proactively respond. It comprises advanced servers, networking equipment, and storage that are designed and purpose-built to help reduce acquisition and operating costs, with the goals of i) reducing the number and types of devices to manage, ii) racking and cabling once, iii) taking advantage of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and iv) maintaining the flexibility of a multi-vendor approach.

Using the data center to drive business growth

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* The typical midsize businesses has more than 100 but fewer than 500 employees.

6 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1F

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Dell’s approach to enterprise efficiency takes advantage of the hardware and software already in the data center while also incorporating purpose-built hardware. With the right mix of blade servers, rack servers, towers, and custom form factors, midsize businesses can achieve optimum levels of IT resources to help meet specific enterprise needs and prepare their data centers for the future.

Pillar 2: Simplified infrastructure management

Data center infrastructure has traditionally been associated with management complexity. It need not be so. Consolidating, streamlining, and automating the management of servers, networks, and storage enable these resources to be managed as a common pool, one from which the appropriated resources can be rapidly redeployed to help meet dynamically changing business needs. Dell’s Efficient Data Center model focuses on providing comprehensive, streamlined support for the range of platforms already at work in enterprise data centers. This approach helps to deliver dynamic workload flexibility, enable automated deployment, and support highly efficient operations management, with a single comprehensive view into IT infrastructure.

Pillar 3: Streamlined application and workload management

Midsize businesses can reduce the time and manual intervention required to allocate resources to applications by automating and standardizing the way IT resources are deployed. This can be achieved by using the right tools for monitoring workload, services and underlying physical and virtual platforms, freeing IT staff members to focus on strategic projects that add value by advancing business goals and organizational objectives.

Tools can also be used to tier infrastructure to create uniformity and facilitate cost containment and chargebacks.

Pillar 4: Intelligent data managementBy automating management of data through predictable, scalable, and open data storage, midsize businesses can move toward maximizing the value of their data. Strategies for intelligent data management can include i) using tiered storage infrastructures that match data value with storage platform cost, ii) automating manual tasks through policy-based de-duplication, archival, and search of structured and unstructured data, iii) deploying storage arrays optimized for virtual

environments, and iv) leveraging Fibre Channel and iSCSI network protocols to reduce fabric complexity, streamline maintenance, and simplify cabling configurations.

Together and separately, these strategies can help businesses control their data storage costs while providing almost limitless storage capacity scaling.

A broader focus

Efficiency has become a basic tenet of business survival, and the relentless drive to increase efficiency is leading to a widespread transformation of the IT infrastructure. While businesses are searching for the best way to increase efficiency and, in turn, competitive advantage, a large chunk of the IT budget is still going to fixed expenses that maintain the status quo.

The Dell Efficient Data Center model goes beyond the efficiency basics of standardization, simplification, and automation to unlock the business value of enterprise IT investments. By implementing the four key pillars of the Efficient Data Center model – intelligent infrastructure, simplified infrastructure management, streamlined application and workload management, and intelligent data management – businesses can create an open and affordable approach to infrastructure that increases flexibility, reduces costs, and shifts the focus to how IT can help meet strategic enterprise goals.

Pillar 1Intelligent

infrastructure

Pillar 2Simplified

infrastructure management

Pillar 3Streamlined application

and workload management

Pillar 4Intelligent

data management

• Dell PowerEdge servers • Dell Data Center Solutions • Dell PowerConnect switches• Dell Lifecycle Controller

• Dell EqualLogic PS Series• Dell PowerVault• Dell/EMC SAN

• Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager• Dell Management Console

Four Pillars: Building the Efficient Data Center

Article edited by Soum Mukherjee with permission from Dell Power Solutions magazine 2010, Issue 2.

Virtualization-readyinfrastructure forrapid deploymentand optimizedoperations• Optimized server platforms• Efficient I/O fabric

Automatedmanagement ofdata throughpredictable,scalable, and open data storage• Efficient object storage• De-duplication• Unified and tiered storage

Tools for managingand deployingphysical, virtual,and logicalinfrastructure• Policy-based updates and configuration• Management of servers, networks, and storage in a single pool• Physical servers and Microsoft Hyper-V™, VMware®, and Citrix® XenServer™

virtualization platforms

Rapid deliveryof strategic ITservices withgroundbreakingcapabilities• Drag-and-drop image creation• Self-service workload deployment• Advanced monitoring

7 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1

This robust growth, however, created challenges in the data center. There was no central management of the server environment, and all data was stored on local servers. As a result, IT team members had little visibility of where available disk space was located, and limited flexibility to move workloads and optimize resources. The need to add more servers as the company grew also led to a shortage of floorspace in the data center.

“High availability was also becoming an issue. Using traditional manual failover processes, there was the possibility our developers could be impacted by simple storage failure,” says Paul Cunningham, Systems Engineer, Orion Health.

Consolidate, virtualize

To address these challenges, Orion Health’s IT team decided to first centralize and virtualize its server environment. With help from Dell consultants, the team consolidated more than 100 servers onto about 10 Dell servers using VMware ESX technology. In addition, Dell recommended that Orion Health also centralize and virtualize its storage to get the most out of virtualization, including improved hardware utilization, failover protection, and a reduction of physical space needs.

With input from Dell, Orion Health eventually chose an iSCSI storage array over one using the Fibre Channel protocol as it is more cost-effective and leverages the IT team’s existing Ethernet expertise and familiarity with IP connectivity. Now, with its Dell storage area network (SAN) in place, Orion Health can easily shift its storage from individual host servers onto the centralized storage pool.

Incorporating SAN and virtualization technology into its data center has enabled Orion Health to raise the efficiency of its IT operations. And thanks to centralized management capability, the IT team can now easily monitor server and storage capacity. Having visibility means the company’s developers can configure and deploy servers faster, thus benefiting Orion Health’s healthcare industry clients. The virtualized environment also allows IT administrators to migrate running workloads without interruption, helping to trim downtime and boost productivity.

Worldwide, healthcare organizations are finding that increased and smarter use of IT can help improve patient care and satisfaction, staff efficiency, and clinical outcomes. For Orion Health of New Zealand, this recognition of technology’s beneficial role is good news. The midsize company helps healthcare providers around the globe improve their IT infrastructures, and has been chalking up growth of 30 to 40 percent each year.

Orion Health virtualizes data center to ensure hitch-free business growth

Customer profileCountry: New ZealandIndustry: HealthcareFounded: 1993Number of Employees: 300

www.orionhealth.com

ChallengeOrion Health was running out of data center space due to high business growth, and was unable to meet its storage demands because all data was stored on local servers. High availability was also a concern.

SolutionVirtualizing on Dell PowerEdge servers and implementing a Dell EqualLogic SAN enabled Orion Health to consolidate servers, centralize storage, and help the business grow.

“High availability was also becoming an issue. Using traditional manual failover processes, there was the possibility our developers could be impacted by simple storage failure.”Paul Cunningham, Systems Engineer, Orion HealthC

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8 October 2010

Intelligent Business Issue 1

Greener data center

Virtualizing and consolidating the server environment has also resulted in an eco-friendly data center. Instead of three racks, Orion Health uses only a single rack for its host servers, the SAN, the blade server enclosure, and switchgear. Besides freeing up floorspace, the reduced number of physical machines also requires less power and cooling.

Another key advantage of the new environment is its ability to keep Orion Health’s computing network running in the event of a disaster – the Dell SAN array came preloaded with replication and snapshot capabilities for backup and recovery. Should the power fail, the IT team can use backup power to run a small number of critical servers and recover replicated data.

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Solution set• Dell EqualLogic SAN• Dell PowerEdge

blade server• Dell PowerEdge

blade enclosure• Dell PowerEdge servers• VMware ESX• VMware vMotion Services• Dell ProSupport

Benefits• Lower downtime,

higher productivity• Centralized management

of server and storage resources

• Reduced data center floorspace needs

• Lower cooling and power requirements

• Facilitation of disaster recovery

• Quick server deployment• Support for future

business growth

“Business continuity is an important issue. All critical servers can be kept up and running on the Dell blade server and EqualLogic SAN while other servers are shut down,” says Paul Cunningham.

Ready for growth

With the new virtualized Dell infrastructure in place, Orion Health is confident that its future growth will not be, like previously, constrained or made challenging by its IT resources. The Dell EqualLogic SAN is based on an expandable, flexible architecture and allows the IT team to add new SANs and hosts – without paying additional licensing fees. The Dell blade server enclosure also provides an easy and affordable expansion path for the future to accommodate significant business growth.

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© Dell Inc. 2010. All Rights Reserved

“Business continuity is an important issue. All critical servers can be kept up and running on the Dell blade server and EqualLogic SAN while other servers are shut down.”Paul Cunningham, Systems Engineer, Orion Health