122 Part IV: Nitty-Gritty Service Management
As long as hardware, energy, and physical space were relatively cheap, no one really bothered to think about the need to manage data center resources closely. If something broke, replacing it often was easier than figuring out where the problem was. If performance slowed, adding a couple more servers was a simple way to keep users from complaining. Over the past couple of years, however, three events changed everything:
Data centers became expensive in terms of space and energy.
The number of servers and other devices in use grew very large, making management of data and applications more complex and labor intensive.
Compliance requirements, both external and internal, made oversight a business requirement.
Taken together, these events shifted organizations’ approach from management of individual application silos (which could be added to the data center as new applications were requested) to overall management of data centers, based on the need to consolidate a broad set of services.
Organizations always had an incentive to optimize many aspects of data center activity, but the focus now is on managing a data center as a single coherent set of resources. This approach means managing a broad but poorly integrated IT ecosystem that spans the corporate supply chain from suppliers to customers while attempting to satisfy a series of competing demands, from the directives of corporate governance to energy efficiency.
Seeing the Data Center As a Factory
In many ways, you can think of a data center as being a factory. It resembles a factory in the sense that it has staff members who need to carry out regular, well-defined activities. It also has purpose-built machinery for processing a regular scheduled set of work. From an organizational perspective, the management goals include ensuring the quality of processes, having very few breakdowns, and holding down costs. The efficient and effective operation of the factory is critical to the success of the business.
Differences exist between a data center and a traditional factory, however. Specifically, in a data center the raw material being processed is information, and the mechanisms that process this raw material are business applications. All the activities of the data center involve catering to the needs of those business applications so that they perform as expected and are available when needed. The various types of management software are the tools that help data center staff keep the production line in good order.
Chapter 11: Managing the Data Center 123
Figure 11-1 illustrates this idea, with the data center running various workloads. Because this figure fundamentally depicts how a data center operates, it may make managing a data center appear to be relatively easy. A multitude of processes are involved, however.
Ultimately, what a data center does is run workloads. A workload is what it sounds like: a set of tasks required to meet customer or user demand (or possibly to complete tasks behind the scenes). As with everything else in the complex world of the data center, you find different types of workloads:
Continuous workloads keep important business applications running all the time. An application that manages the transactions from hundreds of ATMs, for example, must run all the time.
Scheduled workloads are put in place for tasks such as backups.
Unscheduled workloads are intended to run only when a user requests service.
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124 Part IV: Nitty-Gritty Service Management
Optimizing the Data Center
Optimization is a balancing act. If you want to provide a specific service level for an application, you must devote enough resources to ensure that the service level will be met. If you provide too many resources, however, you waste some of them. If you had no financial constraints, you could provide all the resources anyone could possibly need to cater to every possible level of application activity. In such a world, every server could have a duplicate server just in case of an outage. You could give every department twice the storage it needed just in case data volumes grew at dramatic rates.
That approach wasn’t feasible even in the days of siloed computing, however, and it isn’t at all desirable if you want to get the best possible value from the computer resources that are deployed.
Optimizing an entire data center is far more complex than optimizing for a specific application. Many things can be optimized in a way that provides adequate support for defined service levels yet keeps costs down.
Figure 11-2 represents the service management processes or activities that inevitably take place in management of the corporate IT resource. The processes shown in the figure are the ones that are relevant to optimization activity.
The figure separates these processes into groups, or layers, that can be considered together. We drew the figure as though it were a network connecting many applications, because it is quite likely that service management applications will relate to most of the processes depicted here and connect with one another via integration infrastructure.
Optimizing the data center as a whole is complicated because all the capabilities — facilities, workloads, hardware environments, data resources, software environments, and the infrastructure itself — have traditionally been handled as independent disciplines. The data center is rarely managed as a single unified environment, and the different areas typically don’t orchestrate their activities.
The lack of integration generally is the result of explosive growth. IT management never expected that data centers would grow so large, and many of the problems that now exist were mild irritations or nonexistent when data centers were much smaller. The structure of the IT organization, combined
with the service management software in use, reflects this lack of integration. Just as there are application silos, there are service management silos. This reality is compounded by the fact that many data centers are running out of space or seeing their costs escalate uncontrollably.
Figure 11-2:
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Several distinct factors mandate a holistic approach to data center management:
Compliance, governance, and security requirements emanating from multiple sources
Escalating power requirements and inefficient hardware use
The advent of compelling virtualization technologies coupled with the need to implement them effectively to improve resource productivity