Cloud-Mobile Mega Trends Point to Need for Rapid, Radical Applications Transformation, Says HP

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how consumer-driven platform variety and advancing cloud services are requiring enterprises to transform and rationalize their applications portfolios.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the rapid and massive shifts confronting enterprises as they adopt more mobile devices and broaden their uses of cloud services.

In many ways, the mobile device explosion and the cloud computing ramp-up reinforce and support each other. Cloud services make mobile devices -- like smartphone and tablets -- more productive, while making users better connected to enterprise resources and work processes. On the other hand, mobile devices -- with their ubiquitous, non-stop wireless access -- make cloud-delivered applications, data, and services more relevant and more instantly available anywhere.

By leverging cloud and mobile, applications can be supported by a common, strategic, architectural, and converged-infrastructure approach. Furthermore, by making cloud-delivered applications and data context-aware, delivering enterprise applications to any device securely can then be done at a reduced cost (when compared to conventional applications infrastructure models). It therefore makes little sense to have unique stacks beneath each application for each application or device type.

So how do enterprises adjust to these mobile-cloud, dynamic-duo requirements in the strategic and a proactive way? How can they leverage and extend their current applications or identify which ones to fold and retire?

It’s clear that radical, not incremental, adjustment is in order to make sure that the cloud-mobile era is a gained opportunity and not a fatal or devastating misfire for IT operators -- and business strategists alike.

We're now joined by a guest from HP to explore the promises and perils of adjusting to the cloud-mobile shift. I'm here with Paul Evans, Global Lead for Application Transformation with HP Enterprise Business. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Paul. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Paul Evans: Hello, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: As I've mentioned, we have a lot of active trends unfolding, and we’ve talked about some of the shifts going on. But it seems that this combination of the move to mobile-device adoption and cloud computing is in some ways an enormous opportunity. Yet it’s also making people befuddled. They’re not sure how to tackle these both at the same time.

Radical transformation

Evans: I don't use these words lightly. We have to go through a radical transformation now in terms of our applications. There are these new technologies, part of the megatrends that are affecting organizations. These megatrends encompass things like evolving business models, a changing workforce, and the introduction of new technology.

And all of those are pressured onto an organization today. People are trying to figure out what’s the best route; which one should I ignore, which one should I exploit, and what should I be doing?

In the technological world, we have the world of cloud, and we have the world of mobile. We cannot ignore them. People can’t abdicate and say, "I'm not going to go do it." It's not going to be that way.

At the same time, the CIOs and senior stakeholders are looking outward and asking what are these new technologies, what could they do for me, how could they improve customer service, and what will my competition do?

They also look also over their shoulder and say, "I spend 70 percent of my IT budget keeping the applications I have today working. I probably don’t have enough budget or resource to do both. So the question is, which one of these should I spend more of my time on?"

The answer is that you really can’t afford not to spend time on either. So it's a balancing act between how I encompass the new and exploit it, and at the same time, what do I need to do with my existing applications.

Although we see the world of cloud and mobile as very new-age, very sexy, and all the rest of it, at the end of the day, people have to sit down and deal with what the environments they have right now. They may not be so exciting. They may not be so new-age, but at the end of the day, they make products, count money, and run the organization as it is today. They are the legacy applications.

Gardner: It also seems that they need to find ways to do this holistically. To go at it piecemeal almost subverts the total benefit, particularly if you look at it from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. Have you found in working with large enterprises, as I know you do, that those that attack this strategically or with a master plan, have an advantage?

Evans: Absolutely. It always pleases me when I sit down with a customer who says, "We have to take stock. We have to make a plan. We're not going to do this one day at a time or a week at a time. We have to appreciate how we are going to exploit cloud.

What applications that we have in the back-end server environments are we going to bring forward to the cloud to service a mobile environment? What we are going to do about the use of mobile within our organization and what we are going to do about serving our customers better through mobile devices and the technologies that go with them?"

Some big traps

It always pleases me when people want to make a plan. I may not be the most strategic person sometimes, but I appreciate it in this instance. There are some really big traps that people can fall into here doing something on the fly and then, in six months time, regretting they ever went down that route. Andy Grove, the former head of Intel said that this is a major inflection point.

This year people are predicting that if you count the amount of smart phones and tablets that will be shipped, i.e. bought, that it will be greater than the number of desktop, laptop, and network PCs. So we're tending now toward an inflection point in the marketplace that says more people will interact using mobile devices than they will static devices.

That trend isn’t just a blip for 2011. That continues as we accelerate, as people just get more comfortable with using that technology, as functionality improves, and security and manageability come under control.

We're at that point now. That’s why we use this term radical transformation, because for the people that really want to exploit this, they're making their plans, they're drawing up their action lists of what they have to do, both at the front end with the mobile and cloud environment, but also with their legacy environment.

Gardner: This is really a departure. In the past we've seen trends and rapid changes in IT, but I don’t think we have seen something that’s happened quite as wide spreading and globally. We're seeing this simultaneously in advanced economies across multiples verticals. It's as if even the organizations or regions of the world that may have been catching up in some other ways are leap-frogging and therefore adopting mobile devices even more rapidly.

This isn’t like, "I'll bring in some additional servers and move toward an n-tier architecture, bring in some applications, have coexistence and migrate them out to a branch office over a two- or three-year ramp up process." This is something that’s happening rapidly, more rapidly than we thought, and perhaps more pervasively globally than we thought.

They want to get things delivered. They want decisions made. More and more of the population has grown up with the ability to do things instantly.

Evans: The term that people are using is the consumerization of IT. I'm not quite sure what that actually means. To me, it’s driven by impatience and that’s not a negative thing. Impatience is not regional, and therefore, no matter where you are in the world, people want it now. They want to order things. They want to get things delivered. They want decisions made. More and more of the population has grown up with the ability to do things instantly.

Their impatience is forcing people to do things right now. Therefore, there's the expectation level of I expect, when I click on a device, I should get a response in an amount of time that may be immeasurable. If you wait a second or two, then people say, it’s running slow. You don't have to think really far back, that if you ordered something on the telephone, let’s say, then the normal period was that you will get it within 28 days. We accepted that. That's gone out of the window, gone.

That puts pressure on enterprises to deliver it, and the consumer is not acting alone. The consumer is saying, "I want you to send me a book. I want to download music. I want to order a holiday. I want to get a confirmation of a bank statement, or whatever it maybe, and I expect it right now."

Therefore, the systems that are serving up that information are the back-end systems. These are not new systems. These are the old systems. So, it’s this radical transformation. It’s dealing with the fact that we have to adjust those back-end systems to deliver up information to a wide plethora of different platform types, whether it will be smart phones, tablets, traditional notebook PCs, or desktop PCs.

This is going to be pervasive. This is the way we're going to do things for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if we don’t get it right now, we stand a risk of making decisions about platform types or architectures, or whatever it may be, that within six months, we’re going to say that it wasn’t such a good idea.

Never been here before

I meet so many customers now that are saying, "We’ve never been here before. We’ve never been with this volume of devices. We’ve never been through the fact that over half of our workforce now brings their own device with them into the office."

They're sending out policy documents that say, "you shall not do this," and it's totally ignored. The changing workforce has a totally different level of expectation as it were, of what's possible, just in terms of the amount of transactions that are performed over the net or 20,000 applications downloads in a minute.

These are transactional rates in volumes that we've never seen before. Despite a lot of our previous experience, you just can’t leave it and say, "It worked five years ago. It’s going to work for the next five years." That's what our customers are dealing with today.

Gardner: This isn’t just happening with applications delivered through an employee local area network (LAN), we’re talking about business-to-business (B2B) applications and data being served up, consumers increasingly being part of the revenue mix when applications are delivered through their mobile devices. It’s increasingly important for the organization to be delivering applications across different types of users, different parts of the globe, different types of device interfaces.

So it gets back to this common notion of a singular comprehensive infrastructure. We have mobile and shifting requirements and we’re also seeing the need for efficiency on how applications are served up.

One of the questions we get all the time is what percentage of my applications or products should I be moving to the cloud?

Paul, what are you seeing in terms of how organizations are putting the numbers together, and say, "What’s hybrid cloud or a hybrid cloud model bringing to the table in terms of how to solve this?"

Evans: There are two critical questions have to get answered. One is the organizations that are going to move applications to a cloud environment are not going to move all of them. One of the questions we get all the time is, What percentage of my applications or products should I be moving to the cloud? And of course the answer is ... It’s not a percentage thing. It’s the type of application.

It’s still formative times, but in HP’s view, clearly applications that probably are not embodying intellectual property would be a type of application that's well served moving into the cloud. And, any form of application including servicing, providing a service across a wide population of users as well, especially those who are obviously in a mobile environment; applications that are productivity-centric.

You really want to drive the cost down as low as possible for any of these productivity applications. There's no sense in running on aging infrastructure where the costs are high. You really want to be getting the cost down, because if it’s a productivity application, it doesn’t differentiate you. And if it doesn’t differentiate you, then why would you spend anything more than the minimal cost?

So put those productivity applications onto the lowest cost environment where you couldn't provision an infrastructure that has this elasticity that the cloud environment provides.

No clear line of sight

That's the first thing, organizations are focusing on and saying, "How are we going to start to bring forward some of our applications that we’ve had buried in the data center?" And some at extremely high-cost. We find working with people that there still are some applications where there may not be a clear line of sight into just how much that application is costing and the infrastructure it’s running on.

You might say we are spring-cleaning a little as we go into organizations and help them understand what are the top candidates for applications to move to the cloud. What we're doing is unearthing the portfolio of application through the work we do, and saying to the CIO saying, "Did you realize that you have this number of applications and that you're spending this amount on those?" Of course, the usual answer is, "No, I didn’t know I had that many." Usually, what we uncover is there is about twice as many as people thought.

They do consume a lot of cash. So, in this spring-cleaning. We're moving applications from back-end environment to the cloud. Then we have an opportunity to rationalize the portfolio. Rationalizing the portfolio had two big impacts. One, it takes cost out, which means that you can consider that as saved money or money that can reinvested in the mobile world.

But also you're taking out complexity. Every organization, I think, would agree at the moment that their environments are too complicated, and by virtue of being to complicated, it makes it difficult to change them, and people are looking for agility and flexibility.

So first things first. When we're talking to organizations, what we're trying to understand is what are the candidates that can move to the cloud, and that’s a big hot topic. A lot of our users and customers say, "We sort of get our head around cloud. That’s okay. We can see it’s a different paradigm. It has a different cost model. It helps me with provisioning. Life’s good."

The technical challenge is to support this environment agnostically and say, 'We don’t care what you're using.'

So they can get their head around that, and as you can tell by just reading the press and listening to what goes on in the world, you would say people are on the move with cloud.

On the other hand, when they are looking from the outside in with mobile, there is less of a precedent there. The sharp customers that we are working with are saying, "We don’t want to fall into traps. We're going to build an environment that suits one type of mobile environment and we are going to be able to test it and manage it." They know that they don’t have that order of control. The days when it was, "You shall use this device, and that device we know how to work," have gone.

If you think back to mainframe days, people had to use a 3270 device. That was it. It was defined by IBM. That’s the way you're going to do it. And if you didn’t have one, then you didn’t get to participate. The world is now totally the other way around.

The technical challenge is to support this environment agnostically and say, "We don’t care what you're using." What we can do is understand how to manage and provide the right level of security to that device, whatever that device may be. Maybe you come inside the network and that’s going to be a high performance network these days, because of the whole issue of impatience.

As I said, the volume and the variety of platforms are unprecedented. Even though we had the PC world, the PC as the client was a single entity. It had some interesting characteristics initially, but there was one brand. What we're dealing with now is many different ways. Therefore, we have to understand this from an agnostic standpoint, so that the consumer can continue to use the device of their choice and can get the services they require from this new cloud and server environment.

Virtuous adoption

Gardner: I've been speaking to some organizations recently where, as they’ve moved to cloud to support these new requirements, they’ve also recognized that there is virtuous adoption benefit in terms of efficiency. As they solve some of these issues around wide area network (WAN), around converged infrastructure supporting applications, transforming applications from their older platforms into new modern ones. And they're also gaining efficiencies through virtualization, and higher utilization rates.

They're able to do disaster recovery more quickly. They're able to reduce the total amount of data, because they're consolidating and they're removing redundancies of data. They're able to remove redundancies of application instances. They were able to license at the data center levels, and so on.

Suddenly, they say, "We're doing more. We're doing it differently, but we're actually doing things at a far more efficient level, and therefore, our costs over time are coming down, particularly if you focus on the operational level." So is there is a daunting challenge to moving to cloud in order to support many different things, including mobile, but in doing so, are you setting yourself up for longer-term efficiency?

Evans: The sharp customers and the sharp organizations out there have realized that already. Over the last 30 or 40 years in computing it's been totally organic. Unfortunately, we as vendors keep bringing out new things. While someone is trying to work with the old, we bring out something new, and they say, "How on the earth are we meant to develop an architecture and understand how to get the best out of this?"

What's happening now is that by virtue of the tidal wave, computing is going to be pervasive. It’s not going to be just the realms with data center and the few selected people that used to get access. Everybody is going to have this. Then it’s not only everybody, but it’s also these 13 trillion devices that are going to be connected to the internet, that don’t have people attached to them at all.

As people look at things like cloud, they're beginning to realize the applications that they can class as productivity.

They are devices that are monitoring things, whether it’s energy usage or whatever and then pumping that data into the Internet. As organizations begin to realize that the world is going to change, their view is going to be "We need architecture."

By virtue of developing an architecture, people are beginning to realize, as they begin to take stock of where they have been spending their money, that they have in the past and may have an opportunity to drive more efficiency and effectiveness into that organization, whilst at the same time delivering innovation.

So I think this inflection point can have some really good signs about it. As people look at things like cloud, they're beginning to realize the applications that they can class as productivity.

We ask them where they run certain productivity applications And everyone would say HR. Invariably we get the answer that it runs on a mainframe. And we ask why they run the HR system on a mainframe? Well, because it’s important. Of course it’s important and it’s vital, but it isn’t differential. It doesn’t give you some competitive advantage in the marketplace. It’s definitely absolutely necessary as a core part of your business. Just provide that service, but it’s not core in the sense that it gives you differentiation.

So you're right. It’s forcing decisions on people now, because the people that appreciate that this radical transformation is something that they can’t stop and they should exploit, rather than trying to ignore. People are actually seeing that there are significant efficiencies to be gained from deploying these new technologies.

Radical nature

Gardner: Let’s revisit the radical nature of this response that organizations need to have. In order to appreciate how rapidly and radically they need to shift, they need to appreciate how their requirements and the demands and their expectation are shifting, and a very good example is the travel industry, because the vertical is clearly needing to respond.

All of us or many of us travel, some more frequently than others. And, we have a sense of how fast things are changing just in a matter of months. We've seen going to the gate at an airport become a different experience with different expectations. People are using mobile devices and not even going near paper anymore, recognizing that a scan device works just fine.

It’s amazing to me how consumers have adopted this very rapidly. They see something that works better and they go to it. It then becomes incumbent upon the airline businesses to support that.

So let’s look at an example of how things are shifting and let’s visit the vertical industry of travel. What would you see happening there that is a harbinger of what others might expect in other businesses?

Evans: What’s interesting is that there are always industry "skews" of technology. We have a tool in HP called the Business Value Framework. What that tries to do is interpret where the business wants to go.

If you can serve people better, if you can give them better information, then there is highly likely that they are going to come back as a repeat customer.

Ignore the technologies for a moment. Where are the line-of-business people wanting to drive their business going forward? If you're in a business where it's relatively difficult to differentiate yourselves, where it’s more commoditized -- and you could argue the airline industry is relatively commoditized -- then what people are going to look for is how we're going to have that small differentiation that makes us better than the rest of the world.

When you look at this business value framework and you look at things like services and transportation, what comes through very loudly is customer service and customer satisfaction is key. If you can serve people better, if you can give them better information, then there is highly likely that they are going to come back as a repeat customer.

You don't want to spend a truckload of money dragging people to your airline and then displeasing them, so they go to somewhere else, because that's makes the whole initial effort worthless.

What people are looking for is obviously loyal and devoted customers who come back and back and back, and that all comes down to deliver customer satisfaction. One of the customers we've been working with, Delta Air Lines, has really put that at the forefront. They can provide very rich, very high quality information, so that people know what's going on.

Range of devices

Working with Delta, they've been providing to a range of mobile devices, like smart phones, tablets, etc., but also to traditional desktop environment, rich information, not only when you're waiting for the plane, but also when you're on the plane by virtue of seat-back videos screens so that people get a continuous feed.

If you're flying from A to B to C, you're going to change planes in the middle. If you're going to miss your connection, you usually sit on the plane, knowing you're going to miss your connection, and then what are you going to do? That means you get off the plane, queue with 500 other people, and then you eventually get another plane -- eventually -- all the time trying to figure out how you can tell your family why you are late and rest of it.

Delta is trying to provide an environment that says while you're on one of your airplane, it's already working out the next connection and it will give you that information on the plane. It will give the e-boarding card. It will send you the vouchers that would allow you to get some refreshment, all to your mobile device, so that all of that stress and angst that you’ve had traditionally gets taken out. In a commodity industry that's the sort of thing you have to do to be different from the rest.

We see that in a number of industries. We see people today delivering and developing mobile applications, particularly in the commodity world, to deliver up a much higher level of customer service and satisfaction.

That's the thing that means we're going to go back again and spend our money with them again, as opposed to a competitor, because in this world of internet it's so easy to switch. Brand loyalty, customer loyalty, may not be things of the past, but something you have to work incredibly hard to achieve. That's what people are utilizing these new technologies for predominantly.

What they value are things like structured workshops, to have an open debate between technology and business.

Gardner: So to recognize that convenience is the killer application, the ability to serve up the data in real-time to any device, to allow the participants in a business process to interact with that process, to make changes, basically what we would call change management, for a consumer is simply convenience.

This requires an awful lot to happen in the back end. What is HP bringing to the table to help organizations like Delta or others that don't have a precedent to fall back on that are finding themselves faced with fairly complex challenges and looking for that strategic view? How is HP adjusting to the market itself in order to accommodate these kinds of clients?

Evans: What we are definitely doing in some respects is using the experience we built up in dealing with people's legacy environments and understanding what they value. What they value are things like structured workshops, to have an open debate between technology and business that says who is leading, who is following, where are we going, and what do we need?

A lot of the things we do in terms of those initial services set the scene, so that we just don't leap in and decide, "Well, we're going to support X device. We're going to provide this app on it." And then, six months later, we're struggling with how we're going to deploy that app over multiple platforms and how we're going to use new technologies like HTML5 etc. to give us that agnostic approach?

It’s this convergence between the mobile world and the traditional world, because we believe that’s the big thing. We can talk about the sexy front end, the smart phones, the pad environment -- and it's great to talk about those -- but at the end of the day, those devices only really get to do what they are paid to do, when they connect to rich and meaningful information at the back end. So for this convergence we sit with users, sit with the CIO, and understand what is it that they're going to be converging in terms of information from the back end and the utilization of the mobile device on the front end.

Put into context

Then, how do we connect those together? How do we sit down and say, "What sort of speed of transaction, what volume of information are we talking about here," and obviously understanding that. That information has to be put into context now for the device of the front-end. If you're delivering this to a smart phone, it has to be represented in a totally different way than if you were going to deliver it to a desktop PC or, in the middle, a pad.

So the point being is we've got to be aware of those. We’ve got to be aware of the user’s context and understand what we can and cannot deliver to them. But I think behind the scenes, and of course, this is where the consumer says, "I don’t really care," but the whole management and security that you put in place, and HP has spent a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and a lot of money in acquisitions and development of technologies that allow people to manage and also provide a secure environment, to those devices that are at the front-end.

Gardner: Of course, this does require the complete view of network storage, hardware, software, integration, hybrid cloud development. It’s really astonishing to me how this really impacts just about everything when it comes to IT. This is not something that’s a bolt-on type of affair.

Evans: Absolutely not. As I said earlier, those are sort of the quick wins that people are saying that you can just bolt-on. "Oh well, we used to send out data to desktop PCs and then laptops or whatever. This is just an extension." This is not. This is different. This is a paradigm shift. This is an inflection point. Whatever managerial business term you want to use, this is a big deal in their mind.

There are serious challenges. I wouldn’t for a second say this is a piece of cake. Just ring us up, and 30 days later you get a solution. It is not like that. This is a big deal. There are serious challenges and therefore they need serious people to fix them. We're into understanding how you get this end-to-end view, because if you only look at a piece of the puzzle, you aren’t going to build what is absolutely necessary.

There are serious challenges. I wouldn’t for a second say this is a piece of cake. Just ring us up, and 30 days later you get a solution. It is not like that.

Gardner: Before we sign off Paul, are there some salient resources to which you could point people to acquaint themselves more with what we've been discussing, particularly on how to solve some of these issues?

Evans: On hp.com -- if you type in hp.com/go/applicationtransformation, there are a plethora of different links there for people to read up on things, watch videos, whatever. We're also developing a digital repository for predominantly video material. We find that our customers are very clear in telling us that they like watching short, sharp pieces of materials that are being videoed, so they can get the message quickly and get offline.

Maybe the days of reading a 20 page white paper are gone, which I am not sure is true, but definitely our clients told us very clearly that they like watching videos. So we're developing a whole series of video-based material, whether it's on application rationalization, application modernization, mobility in the enterprise world, or infrastructure.

The intention here is not to hear from HP, because we will do what we're paid to do, which is trying to convince you we have some very smart people in technologies and products, but also hear from industry experts, hear from our customers about what they're doing, how they're doing it, and the sort of benefits.

So if you stay in touch through hp.com/go/applicationtransformation, we'll always point you to materials that in some instances are not being delivered by HP, but just hear from our customers and hear from industry analysts about really what is now possible.

Gardner: Well, great. You’ve been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the rapid and massive shifts confronting enterprises as they adopt more mobile devices and also broaden their uses of cloud services. We've heard ways of the cloud mobile era is a potential opportunity, but also has some pitfalls in terms of how to approach this and that are comprehensive and strategic overview, seems to be working for many of the early adopters that are succeeding.

So I want to thank our guest, Paul Evans, Global Lead for Application Transformation at HP Enterprise Business. Thanks, Paul.

Evans: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how consumer-driven platform variety and advancing cloud services are requiring enterprises to transform and rationalize their applications portfolios. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Deep-Dive Discussion on HP's New Converged Infrastructure, EcoPOD and AppSystem Releases at Discover

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction HP Discover 2011 on how HP's converged infrastructure strategy supports data center transformation and applications modernization.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today we present a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas.

We’ll explore some major news around converged infrastructure and data center transformation, and learn how these strategic business goals of enterprises are more tightly aligned than ever to how IT infrastructure modernization takes root.

Until fairly recently, large IT organizations were grappling with a lot of unknown unknowns when it comes to the rapidly shifting requirements for their infrastructure and facilities. There was a sizable risk of locking in too quickly or in adopting unproven technology -- and then paying a dear price later, either in wasted investments or ending up with insufficient resources.

But now, after a series of rapidly maturing trends around application types, cloud computing, mobility, and changing workforces, the proper IT requirements mix seems much clearer. In just the past few years, the definition of what a modern IT infrastructure needs and what it needs to do has finally come into focus. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We know, for example, that we’ll see most data centers converge their servers, storage, and network platforms intelligently. We know that we’ll see higher levels of virtualization across these platforms and more applications, and that, in turn, will support the adoption of hybrid and cloud models.

In just the past few years, the definition of what a modern IT infrastructure needs and what it needs to do has finally come into focus.

We’ll surely see more compute resources devoted to big data and business intelligence (BI) values that span ever more applications and data types. And of course, we’ll need to support far more mobile devices and distributed, IT-savvy workers.

There is no longer a lot of risk in describing the quintessential data center of today and tomorrow and in recognizing that it will need to be highly energy efficient, automated, flexible, and modular. It will need to scale up and down and to adapt without complexity, delay, or undue waste.

How well companies modernize and transform these strategic and foundational IT resources will then hugely impact their success and managing their own agile growth and in controlling ongoing costs and margins. Indeed the mingling of IT success and business success is clearly inevitable.

So, now comes the actual journey. At HP Discover, the news is largely about making the inevitable future happen more safely by being able to transform the IT that supports businesses in all of their computing needs for the coming decade. IT executives must execute rapidly now to manage how the future impacts them and to make rapid change an opportunity, not an adversary.

How to execute

We're here with a panel of HP executives to explore the how -- no longer dwelling on the why or when -- to best execute on converged infrastructure and data center transformation. Please join me now in welcoming our panel, Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Helen.

Helen Tang: Thanks, Dana. Great to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with Jon Mormile, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Performance-Optimized Data Centers in HP's Enterprise Storage Servers and Networking (ESSN) group within HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Jon.

Jon Mormile: Thanks, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: And, we're here with Jason Newton, Manager of Announcements and Events for HP ESSN. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Newton: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Brad Parks, Converged Infrastructure Strategist for HP Storage in the HP ESSN organization. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Parks: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Helen, let me start with you. You've been looking at these trends, and we’ve summed up a little bit of the urgency, but also the clarity when it comes to what’s needed. You’ve done additional research leading up to the Discover conference here in Las Vegas. What are some of the findings, and how are the trends from your perspective coming together to make this IT transformation inevitable?

Tang: Last year, HP rolled out this concept of the Instant-On Enterprise, and it’s really about the fact that we all live in a very much instant-on world today. Everybody demands instant gratification, and to deliver that and meet other constituent’s needs, an enterprise really needs to become more agile and innovative, so they can scale up and down dynamically to meet these demands.

In order to get answers straight from our customers on how they feel about the state of agility in their enterprise, we contracted with an outside agency and conducted a survey earlier this year with over 3,000 enterprise executives. These were CEOs, CIOs, CFOs across North America, Europe, and Asia, and the findings were pretty interesting.

Essentially, there were three buckets of questions asked in the survey titled "The State of Enterprise Agility." The first set of question was, "How important do you believe agility is in the enterprise?" Not surprisingly, over 95 percent of respondents said, it's very critical. It’s important to their overall enterprise success, not just in IT.

The second bucket question was, "If that’s the case, how agile do you feel your current organization is?" Less than 40 percent of our respondents said, "I think we are doing okay. I think we have enough agility in the organization to be able to meet these demands."

Not surprising

So the number is so low, but not very surprising to those of us who have worked in IT for a while. As you know, compared to other enterprise disciplines, IT is a little bit more pre-Industrial Revolution. It’s not a streamlined. It’s not a standardized. There's a long way to go. That clearly spells out a big opportunity for companies to work on that area and optimize for agility.

The last area or bucket of questions we asked was, "What do you think is going to change that? How do you think enterprises can increase their agility?" The top two responses coming back were about more innovative, newer applications.

But, the number one response coming from CEOs was that it’s transforming their technology environment. That’s precisely what HP believes. We think transforming that environment and by extension, converged infrastructure, is the fastest path towards not only enterprise agility, but also enterprise success.

Gardner: Let’s look at some of the news. There are various parts, and they are related. If we take them into certain order, I think we can then look at why this whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Let’s start with Brad Parks. Looking at the Storage Foundation, HP Storage, tell me how we got here. Why has storage been, in fact, fractured, difficult to manage, and quite expensive. And then, what have we done now here at Discover to help bring that together and make that part of a larger converged infrastructure?

Parks: A couple of years ago, HP took a step back from the current trajectory that we were on as a storage business and the trajectory that the storage industry as a whole was on. We took a look at some of the big trends and problems that we were starting to hear from customers around virtualization or on the move to cloud computing, this concept of really big everything.

We’re talking about data, numbers of objects, size, performance requirements, just everything at massive, massive scale. When we took a look at those trends, we saw that we were really approaching a systemic failure of the storage that was out there in the data center.

The challenge is that most of the storage deployed out in the data center today was architected about 20 years ago for a whole different set of data-center needs, and when you couple that with these emerging trends, the current options at that time were just too expensive.

They were too complicated at massive scale and they were too isolated, because 20 years ago, when those solutions were designed, storage was its own element of the infrastructure. Servers were managed separately. Networking was managed separately, and while that was optimized for the problems of the day, it in turn created problems that today’s data centers are really dealing with.

Thinking about that trajectory, we decided to take a different path. Over the last two years, we’ve spent literally billions of dollars through internal innovation, as well as some external acquisitions, to put together a portfolio that was much better suited to address today’s trends.

Common standard

At the event here, we're talking about HP Converged Storage, and this addresses some of the gaps that we’ve seen in the legacy monolithic and even the legacy unified storage that’s out there. Converged Storage is built on a few main principles we're trying to drive towards common industry-standard hardware, building on ProLiant BladeSystem based DNA.

We want to drive a lot more agility into storage in the future by using modern Scale-Out software layers. And last, we need to make sure that storage is incorporated into the larger converged infrastructure and managed as part of a converged stack that spans servers and storage and network.

Gardner: Looking at some of the specifics, it seems as if cost is a big issue here. You've done a lot to bring cost down, going standard, and making utilization of storage more integrated into the other facets of the infrastructure. What sort of cost savings are we looking at, when you really do this well and when you look at it strategically?

Parks: There are really different aspects to cost, thinking about first capital expense. When we're able to design on industry-standard platforms like BladeSystem and ProLiant, we can take advantage of the massive supply chain that HP has and roll out solution that are much lower upfront cost point from a hardware perspective.

Second, using that software layer I mentioned, some of the technologies that we bring to bear are like thin provisioning, for example. This is a technology that helps customers cut their initial capacity requirements around 50 percent by just eliminating their over-provisioning that is associated with some of the legacy storage architectures.

One of the things we've seen and talk about with customers worldwide is that data just doesn't go away. It is around forever.

Then, operating expense is the other place where this really is expensive. That's where it helps to consolidating the management across servers and storage and networking, building in as much automation into the solutions as possible, and even making them self-managing.

For example, our 3PAR Storage solution, which is part of this converged stack, has autonomic management capabilities which, when we talk to our customers, has reduced some of their management overhead by about 90 percent. It's self-managing and can load balance, and because of its wide straightening architecture, it can respond to some of the unpredictable workloads in the data center, without requiring the administrative overhead.

Gardner: I suppose there's a bit of a catalytic effect, when you do the storage properly or with more of a modern architecture. You start to be able to move to a greater efficiencies in terms of the data lifecycle, managing data with an intelligent path in terms of where it's used and not used. Is there a larger role here for data that also plays into BI, at least addressing data as a lifecycle, rather than a problem asset?

Parks: One of the things we've seen and talk about with customers worldwide is that data just doesn't go away. It is around forever and that has contributed to this massive amount of data growth. So, one of the things we're looking at within HP Converged Storage portfolio is how do we not only help customers store that information -- for example, the ability to you have to look across up to 16 petabytes through a single pane of glass, that management view across that massive amount of information -- but how do they extract more value out of it.

Jason might talk a little bit more about the Vertica AppSystem solution, but within the storage domain, we're looking at building in intelligent search capabilities into these solutions and automated tiering to move data around either by physical location or physical tier to get more efficient and to extract more value out of that content.

Gardner: Let's now move to Jason Newton. Jason, tell about the big converged system’s portfolio news and perhaps a bit more about that AppSystem that was referenced by Brad.

Converged Infrastructure

Newton: We're really excited about this announcement. If you've heard anything from HP over the last few years, you've certainly heard a lot about the Converged Infrastructure and our strategy. In 2009, we started looking at the sprawl that customers were dealing with and the impact it was having on their business and environment. We saw that if you look ahead 5 or 10 years, convergence is a dominant trend.

That's the direction that things were going. We felt like we were in a great position as HP to be the ones to deliver on a promise of converging server, storage, network, management, security application all into individual solutions.

So, 2009 was about articulating the definition of what that should look like and what that data center in the future should be. Last year, we spent a lot of time in new innovations in blades and mission-critical computing and strategic acquisitions around storage, network, and other places.

The result last year was what we believe is one of the most complete portfolios from a single vendor in marketplace to deliver converged infrastructure. Now, what we’re doing in 2011 is building on that to bring all that together and simplify that into integrated solutions and extending that strategy all the way out to the application.

If we look at what kind of applications customers are deploying today and the ways that they’re deploying them, we see three dominant new models that are coming to bear. One is applications in a virtualized environment and on virtual machines and that have got very specific requirements and demands for performance and concerns about security, etc.

Security concerns also require new demands on capacity and resource planning, on automation, and orchestration of all the bits and bytes of the application and the infrastructure.

We see a lot of acceleration and interest in applications delivered as a service via cloud. Security concerns also require new demands on capacity and resource planning, on automation, and orchestration of all the bits and bytes of the application and the infrastructure.

The third way that we wanted to address was a dedicated application environment. These are data warehousing, analytics types of workloads, and collaboration workloads, where performance is really critical, and you want that not on shared resources, but in a dedicated way. But, you also want to make sure that that is supporting applications in a cloud or virtual environment.

So in 2011, it's about how to bring that portfolio together in the solution to solve those three problems. The key thing is that we didn't want to extend sprawl and continue the problem that’s still out there in the marketplace. We wanted to do all that on one common architecture, one common management model, and one common security model.

If you look at this trend toward integration and convergence, and you see some of the answers out there in the marketplace, you’ll see, for example, unique architectural stacks dedicated to a data warehouse environment or a BI environment. Then, you’ll see a completely different physical and software architecture for a virtual environment.

Then, if you look at cloud, you see a whole other island of different tools, different parts, different pieces. With our converged infrastructure strategy, we had the opportunity to do something really special here.

Individual Solutions

What if we could take that common architecture management security model, optimize it, integrate it into individual solutions for those three different application sets and do it on the stuff that customers are already using in the legacy application environment today and they could have something really special?

What we’re announcing today at Discover is this new portfolio we called Converged Systems. For that virtual workload, we have VirtualSystems or the dedicated application environment, specifically BI, and data management and information management. We have the AppSystems portfolio. Then, for where most customers want to go in the next few years, cloud, we announced the CloudSystem.

So, those are three portfolios, where common architecture addresses a complete continuum of customer’s application demands. What's unique here is doing that in a common way and being built on some of the best-of-breed technologies on the planet for virtualization, cloud, high performance BI, and analytical applications.

Gardner: This is an example where truly converged infrastructure has now gotten us to the level where we’re looking at not quite business process, but certainly a solution set and some very powerful capabilities now being executed on at that level.

Let's just quickly dig into one of those levels because it intrigued me. It was from the Vertica acquisition. We now, basically have a data warehouse, big data, real-time crunching capability, and a modern architecture designed just for that, but placed on the converged infrastructure. Tell me why that’s important and why that could be a game changer when it comes to analytics?

With the demands of big everything, the speed and scale at which the economy is moving the business, and competition is moving, you've got to have this stuff in real-time.

Newton: There are a couple of things. You hit on two points there. One is Vertica software, in and of itself. The architecture is one of the most modern architectures out there today to handle the analytics in real time.

Before, analytics in a traditional BI data warehouse environment was about reporting. Call up the IT manager, give them some criteria. They go back and do their wizardry and come back with sort of a status report, and it's just looking at the dataset that’s in one of the data stores he is looking.

It sort of worked, I guess, back when you didn’t need to have that answer tomorrow or next week. You could just wait till the next quarterly review. With the demands of big everything, as Brad was speaking of, the speed and scale at which the economy is moving the business, and competition is moving, you've got to have this stuff in real-time.

So we said, "Let’s go make a strategic acquisition. Let’s get the best-in-class, real-time analytics, a modern architecture that does just that and does it extremely well. And then, let’s combine that with the best hardware underneath that with HP Converged Infrastructure, so that customers can very easily and quickly bring that capability into their environment and apply it in a variety of different ways, whether in individual departments or across the enterprise.

Real-time analytics

There are endless possibilities of ways that you can take advantage of real-time analytics with this solution. Including it into AppSystem makes it very easy to consume, bring it into the environment, get it up and running, start connecting the data sources literally in minutes, and start running queries and getting answers back in literally seconds.

What’s special about this approach is that most analytic tools today are part of a larger data warehouse or BI-centered architecture. Our argument is that in the future of this big everything thing that’s going on, where information is everywhere, you can’t just rely on the data sources inside your enterprise. You’ve got to be able to pull sources from everywhere.

In buying a a monolithic, one-size-fits-all OLTP, data warehousing, and a little bit of analytics, you're sacrificing that real-time aspect that you need. So keep the OLTP environment, keep the data warehouse environment, bring in its best in class real-time analytic on top of it, and give your business very quickly some very powerful capabilities to help make better business decisions much faster.

Gardner: Very good. Jon Mormile, tell me a bit now how these developments we’ve heard from Brad and Jason now come together and are supported by the news around the data center transformation here at Discover.

Mormile: Thanks, Dana. First of all, when you talk about today’s data centers, most of them were built 10 years ago and actually a lot of our analyst’s research talks about how they were built almost 14-15 years ago. These antiquated data centers simply can’t support the infrastructure that today’s IT and businesses require. They are extremely inefficient. More of them require two to three times the amount of power to run the IT, due to inefficient cooling and power distribution systems.

These antiquated data centers simply can’t support the infrastructure that today’s IT and businesses require. They are extremely inefficient.

In addition to these systems, these monolithic data centers are typically over-provisioned and underutilized. Because most companies cannot build new facilities all the time and continually, they have to forecast future capacity and infrastructure requirements that are typically outdated before the data centers are even commissioned.

A lot of our customers are facing similar challenges. As I mentioned, we're talking about the ability to accommodate today’s IT, and there's the lack of scalability. But, they also have other driving factors that are affecting your businesses, such as the ability to build scalar facilities quickly.

They need to reduce construction cost, as well as operational expenses. This places a huge strain on companies' resources and their bottom lines. By not changing their data center strategy, businesses are throttled and simply just can’t compete in today’s aggressive marketplace.

Gardner: What are you doing to help them with that? What’s coming out? I'm intrigued by the EcoPOD, but there is more to it than that.

Mormile: As I mentioned, for some of these challenges that customers are facing today, HP absolutely has a solution. It’s basically surrounding our modular computing portfolio and it helps to solve these problems.

Modular computing

Our modular computing portfolio started about three years ago, when we first took a look at and modified an actual shipping container, turning it into a Performance Optimized Data Center (POD).

This was followed by continuous innovation in the space with new POD designs, the deployment of our POD-Works facility, which is the world’s first assembly line data centers, the addition of flexible data center product, and today, with our newest edition, the POD 240A, which gives all the benefits of a container data center without sacrificing traditional data center look and feel.

Also, with the acquisition of EYP, which is now HP Critical Facilities Services, and utilizing HP Technical Services, we are able to offer a true end-to-end data center solution from planning and installation of the IT and the optimized infrastructure go with it, to onsite maintenance and onsite support globally.

Gardner: So, we really have a continuum here. We're talking about AppSystems, where we've got appliances running specific apps, some of the Microsoft SQL databases, some of the SAP, ERP implementations, and then we are going in a concerted fashion down into the infrastructure, talking about virtualization, and then right into the facilities, where we have these PODs and modular approaches with efficiencies built in for cooling and energy conservation.

It's sort of end-to-end, but what’s fascinating to me, and I'd like your take on this, Jon, is that it doesn’t have to be adopted all at once. This is something that you have many different entry points.

You're talking about taking that IT and those innovations and then taking it to the next level.

Depending on the specifics of your enterprise, your service provider, whatever stage of development and maturity you are at, there is a way for you to jump on board, but at least you can start taking action. That, I think, is the key here. Jon, can you speak about the ability to jump in at any point, but still makes a significant progress?

Mormile: That’s basically the whole basis of a modular computing portfolio and converged infrastructure. HP can deliver the server, storage, and networking solution. We actually offer these solutions to 8 out of the 10 leading social media companies.

When you combine in-house rack and power engineering, delivering finely tuned solutions to meet customers’ growing power and rack needs, it all comes together. You're talking about taking that IT and those innovations and then taking it to the next level as far as integrating that into a turnkey solution, which should actually be a POD or modular data center product.

You take the POD, and then you talk about the Factory Express services where we are actually able to take the IT integrate it into a POD, where you have the server, storage, and networking. You have integrated applications, and you've cabled and tested it.

The final step in the POD process is not only that we're providing Factory Express services, but we're also providing POD-Works. At POD-Works, we take the integrated racks that will be installed in the PODs and we provide power, networking, as well as chilled water and cooling to that, so that every aspect of the turnkey data center solution is pre-configured and pre-tested. This way, customers will have a fully integrated data center shipped to them. All they need to do is plug-in the power, networking, and/or add chilled water to that.

Game changer

Being able to have a complete data center on site up and running in a little as six weeks is a tremendous game changer in the business, allowing customers to be more agile and more flexible, not only with their IT infrastructure needs, but also with their capital and operational expense.

When you bring all that together, PODs offer customers the ability to deploy fully integrated, high performing, efficient scalable data centers at somewhere around a quarter of the cost and up to 95 percent more efficient, all the while doing this 88 percent faster than they can with traditional brick and mortar data center strategies.

Gardner: Jason, going to you now, pretty much the same question. We have this comprehensive ability. We have a much more rapid physical plant capability. This now allows for people to come in at different points in their maturity, but still have a roadmap or vision of how to get to a converged infrastructure, a transformed data center. What’s the process that you encounter at that AppSystem level, where people can get involved quickly? What would you recommend that they do first?

Newton: That depends on the customer. The whole point of the Converged System portfolio is that if you like the concept of a converged infrastructure and you want to get there, we have a very simple, flexible, optimized answer for you, for workload, virtual cloud, and dedicated application environment.

As to where a customer can start, go back and look at what your business priorities are, and your level of maturity. We've got quite a few experts that will sit down to talk to you and assess where you are in that continuum. The best place to start is what is your business asking for and what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are the outcomes? What can you deliver? That's the place to go.

The best place to start is what is your business asking for and what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are the outcomes? What can you deliver?

A reason someone would be looking at apps is because someone in the business is saying, "I need to make much better decisions much faster." Maybe it's supply chain decisions or it could be something in retail. Or, "I need to do some better financial analysis or make better offers to my banking customers. And, I need something much more powerful than just the data that I have, and we need to do it very quickly."

I would say to look at a Vertica real-time analytic system or a data warehouse solution that we've co-developed in Microsoft. That would be a perfect place to start. The good news is that if your next priority, after getting that software in the business, is you get that virtual environment more cleaned up and running more efficiently, more optimized and simplified in terms of management, VirtualSystem would be your next step.

If you're already doing a lot of virtualization today with HP on BladeSystem, on 3PAR, or on our LeftHand technology, I would say to build on that same architecture, keep all that in place, and upgrade that to a complete CloudSystem environment.

There are a lot of entry points. It really depends on the business priority at what you are trying to do. The good news of this approach is that you can come in at any point and you can scale and and extend and know that when you solve those different application needs, you're going to be doing it in a common way, not sacrificing best of class.

Gardner: We should also point out, Jason, that at Discover here we're seeing a lot of professional services and support announcements as well that dovetail and supplement these other announcements. Maybe you could give us a very quick recap of where the professional services kick in, and perhaps that's also a starting point.

Start services

Newton: You're right. There is a multitude of those at this show. We have some new professional services. I call them start services. We have an AppStart, a CloudStart, and a VirtualStart service. These are the services, where we can engage with the customer, sit down, and assess their level of maturity -- what they have in place, what their goals are.

These services are designed to get each of these systems into the environment, integrated into what you have, optimized for your goals and your priorities, and get this up and running in days or weeks, versus months and years that that process would have taken in the past for building and integrating it. We do that very quickly and simply for the customer.

We have got a lot of expertise in these areas that we've been building on the last 20 years. Just like we're doing on the hardware-software application side simplifications, these start services do the same thing. That extends to HP Solutions support, which then kicks in and helps you support that solution across that lifecycle.

There is a whole lot more, but those are two really key ones that customers are excited about this week.

Gardner: Brad Parks, you've been hearing from Jason and Jon. They supplement and support what you are doing in storage. But, when it comes to getting started, do you have any recommendations, whether it's professional services or some sort of a path or model for working the storage transformation and modernization process into these other larger activities around, AppSystems and facilities?

The combination of our portfolio and our expertise is really going to help our customers drive that success and embrace convergence.

Parks: The approach is very consistent across the board. Converged Storage is a foundational building block that is materialized inside the VirtualSystem, CloudSystem, and AppSystem, those internal part of that larger converged data center that Jon talked about. Along that way, you can have different entry points ,and we certainly have a full set of services to help people get started.

One of the things that we announced this week is the Technology Services Organization. HP recently did a complete reinvention of their consulting portfolio.

As we've seen customers trying to modernize their storage infrastructure and take advantage of some of these converged storage trends, they have responded with a set of workshops, start services, to get people down that path, as well as enterprise services for those customers who are looking to start to bridge between internal IT and cloud environments that might be hosted externally. Our HP 3PAR Utility Storage platform is now a standard offering as an outsourced storage service within enterprise services.

Last, we know that internal IT folks have to upscale and continually learn these new technologies, so that they can feed those back into their business. HP ExpertONE has recently come out with a full set of training and certification courseware to help our channel partners, as well as internal IT folks that are customers, to learn about these new storage elements and to learn how they can take these architectures and help transform their information management processes.

Gardner: Let's go to Helen Tang for the last word today. Helen, based on the research that you’ve conducted and the fact that we have these large trends, some organizations are working towards cloud-computing models, for example, more rapidly than others. Some organizations focus just on converting apps and modernizing them, or perhaps adopting appliance models.

These services are designed to get each of these systems into the environment, integrated into what you have, optimized for your goals and your priorities, and get this up and running in days or weeks.

What is it about the research and the fact that there are so many different ways the organizations need to react rather to these trends that makes sort of the über view of what's been announced this week such a good fit?

Tang: Clearly, ever since HP launched our Converged Infrastructure strategy and portfolio in 2009, we’ve seen great traction among the analyst community, and more importantly, our customers. We’ve helped over 1,000 customers on different stages of this journey, taking their existing data center environments and transforming them, so they can embrace convergence and be able to maximize the enterprise agility that we talked about earlier.

This set of announcements that we’re talking about in the show this week, and hopefully, for the remainder of this year, are significant additions in each of their own markets, having the potential to transform, for example, storage, shaking up an industry that’s been pretty static for the last 20 years by offering completely new architecture design for the world we live in today.

That’s the kind of innovation we’ll drive across the board with our customers and everybody that talked before me has talked about the service offering that we also bring along with these new product announcements. I think that’s key. The combination of our portfolio and our expertise is really going to help our customers drive that success and embrace convergence.

Gardner: Very good. You’ve been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with the HP Discover 2011 Conference on some major news around Converged Infrastructure and data center transformation. There is lots more information available through the various landing pages, and press reports on these events this week.

I’d like to thank our guests for adding some more context, depth, and analysis. We’ve been joined by Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions. We’ve also been joined by Jon Mormile, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Performance-Optimized Data Centers And, Jason Newton, Manager of Announcements and Events for HP ESSN, and as well as Brad Parks, Converged Infrastructure Strategist for HP Storage. Thanks to you all.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks also to our listeners, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction HP Discover 2011 on how HP's converged infrastructure strategy supports data center transformation and applications modernization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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• HP rolls out EcoPOD modular data center, provides high-density converged infrastructure with extreme energy efficiency
• HP at Discover releases converged infrastructure products and services aimed at helping IT migrate rapidly to the future
  
• HP's IT Performance Suite empowers IT leaders with unified view into total operations, costs
• HP Delivers NMC 9.1 as New Demands on Network Management Require Secure, Integrated, and Automated Response

Converged Infrastructure Approach Paves Way for Improved Data Center Productivity

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on achieving cost control and increased utilization through coordinated design, open standards and application-specific infrastructure.

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on improved data center productivity for a natural progression toward converged infrastructure. Many enterprise data centers have embraced a shared service management model to some degree, but converged infrastructure applies the shared service model more broadly to leverage modular system design and open standards, as well as to advance proven architectural frameworks.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

We're here to explore the benefits of a converged infrastructure approach and to better understand the challenges of attaining a transformed data center environment. We'll see how converged infrastructure provides a stepping stone to private cloud initiatives. But, as with any convergence, there are a lot of moving parts, including people, skills, processes, services, outsourcing options, and partner ecosystems.

We're here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please join me in welcoming our guests today. We're here with Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Doug Oathout: Thank you, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, John.

John Bennett: Thank you very much, Dana. Glad to be with you again.

Gardner: Let me start with you, John. We're talking about some pretty big subjects. There's a lot to chew on here. Data-center transformation (DCT), I suppose, is the most general topic to approach and then to delve down more deeply. What do we mean nowadays by DCT? How does HP define it, and how does that relate to some of the business issues that IT folks are grappling with?

Not one-size-fits-all

Bennett: DCT helps customers implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that's aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it's customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we've seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP's Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Whichever combination of these fits a particular customer, there is the practical challenge of how to change from where you are today to having that implemented? That's what DCT is really about, because it helps implement these strategies through an integrated roadmap of data center projects by consolidation, energy efficiency initiatives, and technology initiatives, like virtualization and automation.

Each of these has its own short-term benefits and returns, but collectively the results get compounded over time, delivering the kind of benefits that we traditionally talk to with DCT. This is all in response to what's going on in customer environments.

I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs -- legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology's needs or environments.

Facilities and data centers that were designed and built even five years ago might not have the energy and capacity to support current infrastructure environments. Then, of course, there's energy cost.

So, the CIO is at the heart of this vise. I like to think of DCT and converged infrastructure as kind of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City, where converged infrastructure is Emerald City. It's where you want to get to. DCT is the yellow brick road. It's how you get there, and they complement each other quite nicely.

Gardner: Doug, help me understand why this is important now. The way John is describing it, it seems that the same old approach just won’t hold up, that the trajectory of data centers is unsustainable, whether it's through cost, energy, or capacity issues.

It's not clear to me yet why this converged infrastructure is the right thing to do in totality. Are we talking about a rip-and-replace or are we talking about a gradual direction? Help me understand why, if you are going to move in that direction, you should start now.

Cutting innovation

Oathout: There is a major economic situation going on right now, Dana. As you said earlier, about two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the operations budget is spent on maintaining the IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Converged infrastructure is important now because we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they're looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

Let me give you an example. A server consolidation using virtualization and new server equipment will generally double or triple your capacity within your data center for the same footprint, just by getting the utilization of the servers up, better performance within the servers, and better capabilities within virtual environments. You can basically double or even triple the size of your capacity within your data center.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment.

The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two or three year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes -- virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

Gardner: So, clearly it's efficiency and better balance between supply and demand of resources, and then being able to apply those resources dynamically with a shared service model. All sounds very well and good. What are the hurdles? What's preventing people from getting to this vision?

Resilient and optimized

Oathout: The big hurdles to get over are the application managers themselves. Line of business comes to the applications team and say they need a SAP deployment or an Oracle deployment, and they tell them what hardware to put it on. In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it's resilient, it's optimized, and it's modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application's demand.

What you really have is a process change that's required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That's where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John's team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they're working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Gardner: John, it sounds as if we're asking people, in a sense, to rethink things a little bit. Typically, as Doug pointed out, you start with the application set and you deploy it, and then you figure out the best way to operate that over time. We are trying to flip that on its head, thinking about what the operational outcome should be, and then go about applying those applications in the right fashion. Is that fair?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

Bennett: Well, I would suggest that good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization's strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

We also have the question of how it can be exploited for benefit. This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

Doug characterized it very well, when he said the SAP team wants a new deployment and they tell you what to put it on. The moment you do that, you're losing any of the advantages of a converged infrastructure.

Gardner: As you point out, rethinking IT has been happening for quite some time. We really don't have the luxury of standing still for very long in this industry. On the other side of the equation, you need to have a business or financial rationale to create that change in addition to having the vision of where you would like to go.

So, is there a business case, a rationale, a economic formula of some sort that HP is reflecting about -- how to go to those people who control the purse strings in order to move in this direction of a converged infrastructure?

Business plan in play

Bennett: There clearly is a business plan in play here. A lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of cost savings -- the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to -- the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

Other benefits have financial benefits too. There's economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There's an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn't disappear. There's a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

The business case for transformation and the business case for a converged infrastructure should be constructed, and it's the best way to get the buy in from senior executives.

Technologists playing with toys is not a compelling argument for investment by a business. Technologists making significant investments to make sure that IT is aligned to the needs of the business and having the business case for it is a great way to get approval to go ahead.

Gardner: Doug, when we think about a shared services model and a natural progression toward more of a converged infrastructure that borrows from that shared services mentality, how do we move into this as a manageable progression? How do we avoid that thinking about a rip and replace or a massive disruption or throwing of a switch? How is this applied in terms of a managed process or a progression or evolution?

It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used.

Oathout: The way you go back and look at your infrastructure is very important, Dana. Let's just take the storage environment for a moment. You have a number of storage environments. They could either be direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area networks (SANs).

All these environments have performance application service-level agreements (SLAs), associated with them. If you look at the different types of storage environments, there are different technologies that virtualize those today. These allow you to take large blocks of the storage and put them behind a virtual SAN or behind a virtualized environment, which allows you to share those resources amongst multiple server environments.

For example, we have a SAN Virtual Services Platform from HP, in which you can take heterogeneous storage, put it behind this virtual SAN technology, and actually get 30 percent of the capacity back, because all the over-provisioned disks now become available for all those applications sitting on the other side of the virtual SAN. We have a very similar technology from our LeftHand team, with our P4000, it does the same thing for direct-attached storage.

Using technologies like those to grab the excess capacity you have today by doing storage virtualization is very easy to do. It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used. A lot of our customers don't have to buy disks for two to three months, and then when they do buy disk, they can actually put it behind the SAN environment and multiple applications can use it and share it.

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For more information on HP's Virtual Services, please go to: www.hp.com/go/virtualization and www.hp.com/go/services

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Server consolidation

On the server side of things, server consolidation is very prevalent today, because the new servers are faster than the old. They have more memory capacity. They have virtual I/O built into them. So, it's very simple for you to consolidate servers, and when you are consolidating you use virtual I/O environment or FlexFabric environment. You then have the capability to dial up and dial down the I/O capacity of the server to meet the demand of the virtual machines running on it.

There is the server consolidation with virtualization that everybody knows, but then there is also the big benefit of storage virtualization and the fabric virtualization that can go on. Those are the three pieces. Once you get them in place, you can then start doing the automation, management, and the provisioning of workloads that John talked about much faster.

It's basically virtualizing that whole environment with resiliency and everything built into our ProLiant boxes and high availability business critical system boxes. You get all the capabilities and all the resiliency you need in them, and then you put virtualization on top of the storage networking and servers, and you really get the pool of resources that you can dynamically allocate.

Those three projects are the ones that give you that base from which you can then springboard your projects or your new applications.

Gardner: We've heard so much in the last year or two about cloud computing and private clouds. I think there is some confusion about private cloud. What we are talking about in terms of these converged infrastructures, the virtualization of various major aspects of your infrastructure, and then getting them to work in some harmony as a fabric. Are we talking about the same thing? Is cloud computing and converged infrastructure essentially the same? What is the relationship?

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter.

Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it's modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it's all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn't matter. It's designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, "I'm now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront." You're getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Optimizing over time

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it's in support of a private cloud.

Gardner: John Bennett, when we think about that earlier imperative around flipping the balance of spending on operations into spending on innovation, when we think about moving toward a private cloud or cloud environment, and we charge people based on their usage, do they factor together? I'm trying to understand how we can both reconcile moving toward cloud and fabric and "blank as a service," and, at the same time, reduce those costs, so that we can get that business benefit and innovation engine roaring?

Bennett: That's a very interesting question. For an organization to make good business decisions, they need to have a very good understanding, not only of the benefits, which I talked about earlier, but of the costs. In this environment you get line of sight into the cost infrastructure, so you know what it costs you to provide services.

The businesses, in turn, know what it costs to take an offering to market, a cost based on reality and not based on just spread out mayonnaise models of financing. It lets them really understand the business and whether or not it's an investment they should make. There are clearly benefits on that side, if you can go that far. The benefit of moving to that services orientation is that it gives you clear insight into the cost structures.

It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Gardner: I'm always an advocate of showing rather than telling. I hope we have some examples to illustrate how some of your clients have undertaken a converged infrastructure initiative, and what some of the outcomes were. Does either of you have any examples today?

Oathout: There is a retailer we worked with called Stein Mart. They had an inflexible infrastructure to run nearly 300 stores in the Americas, and they were struggling to bring new applications on line quickly enough to support the demands of the store environment.

They bought into the converged infrastructure story. They bought into our BladeSystem Matrix product, which is the combination of storage, server, flexible network, software, and services.

We enabled them to run this BladeSystem Matrix environment. It allowed them to spin up applications in hours instead of days. It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Increased productivity

Stein Mart saw a significant cost reduction, because of the floor space they had in their data center. They saw a significant increase in productivity from their staff. They saw a 2x increase in response time for calls from the stores, and they saw a significant increase in the time to market for new applications. Instead of days, they were taking hours to set up new applications.

The second customer is the Dallas Cowboys. They built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It's a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. That's an evolution, versus a Stein Mart, which did a rip and replace to get better productivity to support their business.

Gardner: Any other examples and perhaps ways to demonstrate what HP can bring to this very complex equation?

The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Oathout: One other example we have is the airport in Dubai, which was a new business, one of the fastest growing airports in the world. They wanted to set up a shared-service environment for their retailers and other businesses around the airport. So, they actually set up a BladeSystem Matrix environment to run their video surveillance, their infrastructure, baggage handling, and all that.

They set up another environment, which allowed their retailers, passport personnel, and other businesses on site to use their shared service environment to really a full service to their client base inside the airport.

So, when a new business, a new government, or a new agency had to come into the airport, they didn’t have to worry about bringing infrastructure with them. The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Very productive

All three examples: Stein Mart, Cowboys, and Dubai airport, are very productive in how they bring applications online, very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That's what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It's that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

Gardner: I recall that HP announced converged infrastructure in November 2009, and this is something that I think pulls together a lot of aspects of what HP had been doing for some time. It's a complex process involving people, skills, and different product sets, different professional services, capabilities, and so forth. What makes HP different in terms of how they are accomplishing this notion of DCT, John?

Bennett: What makes us different is that, first of all, we don’t believe one size fits all. We believe that we need to do a good job working with our customers in understanding their strategies and goals and developing an infrastructure strategy that is aligned to that.

We also don’t believe that these infrastructure strategies for the future should have at their core monolithic computing solutions from the past. We also have a very flexible approach in our projects, in that we try to wrap the services we have available around the capabilities of the customer, rather than making them pay to have HP do everything.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools . . . will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools -- like the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and the assessment that goes with that -- will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

We try to offer a great deal of flexibility in how we work with customers, and also in how these are implemented. Customers can do these in a traditional customer-owned data-center environment, in an HP hosted environment, or even outsource it to HP. So, there's incredible flexibility based around the customers' needs and interests.

Gardner: You mentioned the maturity model. Is that a potential stepping stone of how to get started on some of these initiatives? Where could some of the folks who are contemplating their next moves architecturally, in terms of transforming their data centers, go to start? How do they get more information?

Oathout: There are two ways to get started. They can contact one of HP’s business partners. Our business partners are enabled to do our Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model. Or, you can come to HP.com/go/ci, and it will take you to the landing page for a converged infrastructure. A client or a customer could click on the Maturity Model, find out about what it can do for them, and then find a practitioner from HP that can come help them, through the Maturity Model, to show them the roadmap or the yellow brick road that John talked about to help them get to converged infrastructure.

Bennett: If the customer is interested in understanding all the things that HP might be able to do with them, they can engage with HP in a Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, Doug mentioned the CI landing page. They can also go to www.hp.com/go/dct to find out more about that. That will help them take a broader look at the IT infrastructure and facilities and environment, and look at it from a transformational perspective.

Gardner: Focusing on the future, as we look to close up, this strikes me as something that's not just a flash in the pan or a one- or two-year trend. This seems to me a long-term trajectory. This is pretty much an inevitable way in which data centers are going to develop, that is to say converged, fabric, service-oriented, with the efficiency of dynamic provisioning involved. Any thoughts about where this direction is going to take us, and do you agree that this is essentially inevitable?

Economies of scale

Oathout: It is inevitable, just because of the economies of scale, Dana. Truly, when you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they're going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it's internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

Gardner: Any last thoughts John in terms of the future direction and how long of a trend we are talking about here?

Bennett: How long a term is always difficult to say. One of the exciting things about IT in general is that we see this wonderful yin and yang, this give and take between technology advancements and customer expectations and uses. Customers challenge us to step forward to meet tomorrow's problems. Technology evolves, and we challenge customers to take advantage of it for a business benefit.

That's going to continue, as Doug highlighted, the economic value that comes from this convergence of infrastructure, and the economies of scale are very compelling, but I'm not going to predict how long it's going to last.

Gardner: Well, we'll certainly find out, won't we? It's been very good speaking with you. We've been talking about improved data center productivity through a progression to converged infrastructure.

We've been joined by two executives from HP. Doug Oathout is the Vice President of Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Thanks so much, Doug.

Oathout: Thank you Dana.

Gardner: Also John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Thanks again, John.

Bennett: And thank you, Dana, and thank you, Doug.

Gardner: And, thank you all for listening. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

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Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on achieving cost control and increased utilization through coordinated design, open standards and application-specific infrastructure. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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