At Interop, Best Practices for Data Center Standardization

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At Interop, Best Practices for Data Center Standardization
By David Rubinstein

May 1, 2008 — LAS VEGAS—Standardization within the data center has to occur in both the physical infrastructure as well as the logical sense. Two speakers with very different sets of problems laid out what they called best practices for achieving uniformity.

Speaking about the logical side was Dave Leonard, CTO of an IT infrastructure outsourcing company called Infocrossing, which was acquired by Wipro in 2007. The company faced the problem of having five data centers, added via acquisition, that each had its own tools, sets of processes and team structures. Leonard said the first steps the company took were to break the ties to geography and technology, so any person could manage any device from any location.

Things working against standardization were the employees, who had their own fiefdoms and who also feared job loss through consolidation; access to the network and devices, along with security and rights management issues; the fact that knowledge was local; and the installation of different hardware infrastructures in the different locations.

But by getting the employees to buy in to the plan and empowering them to work at a higher level, their productivity and satisfaction went up, Leonard said. By standardizing the tools in use throughout the organization—after determining they were affordable, could do the job and the employees would actually use them—purchase and maintenance costs dropped significantly.

Meanwhile, Carl Cottuli, vice president of customer projects at hardware provider APC, focused on power, cooling and management standardization. The obvious benefits, he said, are reduced downtime, better business agility and decreased cost of ownership. However, there also are gains to be had by making the data center predictable, increase the amount of human learning, and relieve the confusion and fear of change.

Old data centers were custom-designed, made up of components from many suppliers and involved complex integrations to get the components to work together. This process was slow and error-prone, and led to many defects, Cottuli said. By contrast, today’s data centers are moving toward a modular row model, in which power, cooling and the management infrastructure are included in a self-contained unit that can be deployed anywhere in the data center on demand. “Unique data center designs created unique problems,” Cottuli said, that people could not learn from to anticipate future failures. “Standardization,” he added, “eliminates one-time engineering.”

Coming Out
Eaton Corp. announced the Power Xpert Server Solution, which it says provides visibility into electrical power in the data center. The solution includes a traffic light-like power quality meter that can be viewed in any browser, an Ethernet switch and a current transformer, according to the company. The solution helps companies see and act on power events, and to manage energy consumption while tracking power loads and trends, according to the company.

Claiming it can offer a four-times increase in storage performance for the same dollars companies are now spending, Salt Lake City startup Fusion-io showed its entry into the solid-state storage market, ioDrive. The company is looking to solve the performance problems created when processing power and I/O speeds are out of balance, creating bottlenecks at one end or the other. The data acceleration drive, according to Fusion-io CTO David Flynn, has the capacity of disk drives but the performance of random access memory. The ioDrive uses 200 pieces of NAND Flash running in parallel on a single card to provide storage capability equal to 1,000 disks—but consuming nowhere near the tens of thousands of kilowatts those disks would require. The drive plugs into PCI-Express x4 or wider peripheral slots, so it sits closer to memory and can handle 100,000 reads/writes per second, Flynn said. CEO Don Basile said this memory approach is different than the tack taken by industry leaders EMC and IBM, who Basile said still work with storage protocols and buses for their solid state solutions.

IP performance testing company Ixia introduced IxYukon, which does load testing for 10Gb switches and routers. The appliance can help companies lower energy use and costs for cooling. Along the same lines, Ixia showed a proof of concept of its IxGreen solution, which creates different kinds of loads—video, peer-to-peer and multicast, for example, to test the infrastructure and measure power usage. A green index is generated, as a function of load and power usage, to help companies operate in an optimum manner, according to Atul Bhatnagar, Ixia’s president and CEO.

Systems management company ScienceLogic demonstrated version 5.1 of its EM7 monitoring and management solution. The company was retained by Interop organizers to manage the miles of fiber used at the show. “There are a huge number of network infrastructure elements here,” said company president and CEO David Link. The new version of the EM7 appliance has an auto-discovery feature that allows it to find all network relationships and automatically changes the graphical representation of the network when an element changes. The biggest addition the EM7, Link said, is a virtualization component that helps organizations understand what’s happening in VM environments in the field.

Related Search Term(s): Data centers, power, storage hardware, systems management, testing & troubleshooting

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