Mr Warmenhoven: You won’t get the full benefits of server virtualisation unless you also do storage virtualisation.

The latest in the Infocomm Development Authority’s Distinguished Infocomm Speaker series took place on 16 January 2009 with Mr Dan Warmenhoven, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, sharing his views on how the future data centre can enable businesses to be more responsive. The following are excerpts from his presentation:

The times have changed
Every year I see at least 200 customers in their locations, to talk about their challenges. I’ve seen at least 50 in the last 90 days, and I can tell you it’s changed from before the day that’s generally referred to as “Lehman Monday.”

I believe that most IT organisations swing back and forth between two primary modes. Primary mode No 1 is expansion. Do business applications, business enablement, scale up, grow the business. The other is what happened after Lehman Monday. Look inward, think about how we can reduce the cost of IT operations. So the economic pressures lead to a whole way of thinking differently about how to deploy IT services, leads to thinking about outsourcing, or off-shoring, but at the same time there’s a mandate that the availability, the performance, the value delivery to the business cannot change. Businesses are going through a re-engineering to try to grow their revenues in the face of declining opportunity.

Crisis brings opportunity
There’s a huge opportunity out there for the data centre industry. Data centres are often thought of as places where you put assets and they depreciate. They’re not an active piece of the infrastructure. We should think differently. Instead of talking about maintenance and depreciation, we should be thinking of them as a facilitator to achieve some of their objectives.

Typically, when we have a business application, we put all the pieces underneath to implement that application. Everything is perfectly suited to the business application. The problem is that this gets very complex very fast. So we start grouping things together into categories in terms of business criticality – the most business critical system becomes the most customised, and the least critical goes into the most horizontal plane.

Improving storage efficiency
Maybe we want to think horizontally instead of vertically, application to application. When you organise your resources horizontally, you give up the notion that you’re going to have every single environment tuned perfectly, and say, “I’m going to build a network structure that can handle all kinds of applications, so it’s going to be very efficient and focused on cost. I won’t give up my service level, but I’m going to change the model for delivering the infrastructure.” Build one infrastructure to support all applications.

Server virtualisation is one of the key drivers behind this. It improves asset utilisation - most servers are under-utilised. It allows rapid commissioning of servers - I don’t need physical hardware; I can create a virtual server in a matter of seconds.

But you won’t get the full benefits of server vitualisation unless you also do storage virtualisation. If you really want to save power and space, you’ve got to do both. Storage is the second highest item on most IT budgets, after servers. For an asset that is that expensive, storage is terribly underused.The typical utilisation across most commercial environments is around 35 to 40 per cent.

Your budget is not going up, but the amount of data is. Also, the actual data growth is smaller than the data volume you have recorded because of multiple copies. You have to figure out how to get more value for your budget.

One way is to adopt space-saving strategies to increase utilisation, through thin provisioning. Most storage infrastructure is held in reserve. The idea behind thin provisioning is take all free space from all applications and put them in a single pool. That alone will result in about 30 per cent in space savings. Then there is thin cloning. When I make a copy of something, I won’t actually get a copy. It will act like a copy, but it won’t take up space. You take one copy and from that make multiple virtual copies so you don’t actually consume space unless you have something unique.

Don’t let fear dominate you
CIOs (Chief Information Officers) resist change because change implies risk. Many will not move as aggressively as they have to because of fear. As budgets are compressed and business requires more efficient delivery of service, you cannot use tomorrow the same strategies you used yesterday. Fear alone is an obstacle to progress. The first thing I’d recommend is: Get over it. You’re in a new reality, with a new level of spending, go figure out how to deal with it. Take the appropriate risk to do it.