Current trends in data centre transformation

BANGALORE, INDIA: The data centre in modern IT organizations is going through a transformation.

Fuelling this change, is the revolution in cloud infrastructure, storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning  which is seeing wider acceptance by CIOs and CTOs and is enabling organizations to more effectively deal with their ever increasing pools of data.

Also Read: India data centre services market to grow at 23pc



A great deal of thought has gone into increasing the performance and efficiencies of today’s data centres and of the IT infrastructures that they support. Towards this end, organizations are increasingly looking at new technologies that help address these requirements while simultaneously reducing the cost of energy utilization.

Here, we look at the Top 10 trends that are currently driving the transformation in the data centre:

1.Acceleration of storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning acceptance as the foundation for cloud and for dynamic, high availability data centres - Storage virtualization provides the ability to non-disruptively migrate data and eliminate the costly down time required to refresh storage systems.

Dynamic provisioning enables storage to be provisioned in a matter of minutes enabling on demand capacity for an agile storage infrastructure.

2.Closer integration of server and storage virtualization as a pre-requisite to increase the adoption of data centre virtualization - Server virtualization has matured beyond the cost reduction phase and is currently poised to support tier 1 application servers.

Going forward, server virtualization will require closer integration with enterprise storage virtualization to meet the demands of hosting enterprise tier 1 applications.

3.Adoption of virtual tiering  for data life cycle management - Virtual tiering or dynamic tiering has the ability to assign a volume to a pool of storage and has the intelligence to move parts of that volume to different tiers based on access counts. This is done automatically without the need for users to classify and move volumes from tier to tier.

4. Acceptance of SSD for higher performance and lower cost in a virtual tiered configuration - More organizations are realizing the benefits of a multi-tier storage pool that contains a small amount of SSD offset with a large amount of lower cost SAS and SATA drives. This combination would cost less than a single pool of SAS drives with the same total capacity while providing four to five times greater performance.

{#PageBreak#}

5. Adoption of serial attached SCSI (SAS)  for increased availability and performance in enterprise storage systems -  Unlike fibre channel (FC) loops used in older storage systems, SAS uses point-to-point protocol. SAS has a clear performance advantage over FC with its faster speed and point-to-point access and is also compatible with SATA.

Drive vendors are now quickly converting to SAS, for lower costs, performance and reliability.

6. Increased prevalence of small form factor drives (SFF) for their power and cooling efficiencies - SFFs are 2.5 inch drives, which consume about 6 to 8 watts of power, as compared to Large Form Factor (LFF) 3.5 inch drives, which consume about 12 to 15 watts. This has a dramatic reduction in power and cooling, with an additional saving of floor space.

7. Acceptance of cloud as a valid infrastructure model - Although some hype is still associated with the “cloud,” there are now enough proof points in favour the concept. Organizations are going through increased cloud adoption with providers offering greater transparency and clearer SLAs which help to mitigate risk and offer a smooth and seamless transition into the cloud.

8. Increased convergence in the data centre - The convergence of server, storage and network infrastructure is making it simpler and faster for organizations to deploy applications. The use of server, hypervisor, storage, and network virtualization will be crucial to providing an open platform to ensure investment protection and customer choice.

9. Increased application transparency in storage virtualization and cloud infrastructure -  Without this transparency, application users will not know if their service level objectives are being met, how to determine chargeback, how to plan their utilization, or the health of their infrastructure.

Management software should provide a business unit or application dashboard that clearly defines and monitors health and utilization for the organization over a selectable time frame.

10. Provision of remote managed services - For the past 10 years, the mandate for IT has been to do more with less, and operations staff within organizations is overworked just to maintain more of the same.

In order to transform the data centre, IT staff must find the time to train, plan and execute. A group of IT experts operating out of a service operations center using remote management tools can leaverage their skills across multiple installations at a very reasonable cost and drive higher and quicker return on asset investments.

While the adoption of new technology may seem a daunting prospect at first, these new technologies are seeing steady traction and are allowing organizations to make a quantum leap forward in their quest to tackle increasing data growth.

Early adopters of virtualized, automated, and cloud ready solutions have seen clear and measurable results through reclamation of storage, lower maintenance and operations costs, and higher energy efficiency, all of which have helped them increase their business agility and performance.      

The author is VP & GM of Hitachi Data Systems India.