Showing posts with label Data Center Transformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Data Center Transformation. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Discover Case Study: Health Care Giant McKesson Harnesses HP ALM for Data Center Transformation and Dev-Ops Performance Improvement

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how McKesson has migrated data centers into fewer locations, while improving overall metrics of applications performance.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.

We're now going to focus on McKesson Corp., and how they're improving their operations and reducing their mean time to resolution. We'll also explore applications quality assurance, test, and development, and how they're progressing toward a modernization front on those efforts as well.

We might even get into a bit of how these come together for an application lifecycle management and dev-ops benefit. Here to help us understand these issues better -- and their experience and success -- is Andy Smith, Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson. Welcome, Andy.

Andy Smith: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. Welcome, Doug.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics.



Doug Smith: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: First, we might want to get people familiar, if they are not already, with McKesson. Andy Smith, tell us a little bit about McKesson, the type of organization you are, and the extent. It’s quite a large organization you have for IT activities there as well.

Andy Smith: McKesson is a Fortune 15 healthcare company primarily in three areas: nurse call centers, medical pharmaceutical distribution, and a healthcare software development company.

Gardner: And, you have a very large and distributed IT organization. I've heard about it before, but let’s go through that a little bit again if you don’t mind.

Andy Smith: It’s a very federated model. Each business unit has its own IT department responsible for the applications, and in some cases, their own individual data centers. Through Doug’s data center transformation program, we've been migrating those data centers into fewer corporate locations, and I'm responsible for running the infrastructure in those corporate locations.

Gardner: Andy, tell us about what you've been doing in order to get to faster time to market for your services, meeting your service level agreement (SLA) obligations internally, and how you reduce your meantime to resolution. What’s been the story there?

Improving processes

Andy Smith: What we've been doing over a little more than two years is improving our processes into ITIL v3. We focused heavily on change management, event management, and configuration management. At the same time, in parallel, we introduced the HP Tool Suite, for monitoring and configuration management, asset management, and automation.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics. We've seen a drop in our Tier 1 outages of 54 percent during the last couple of years, as we implemented this tool. We've got three years worth of metrics now, and every year, the metrics have declined compared to the prior year. We've also seen an 86 percent drop in the breaches of those Tier 1 SLAs.

Gardner: That’s very impressive. Doug Smith, tell us what you've been doing with data center transformation and how you're working toward a higher level of quality with the test development and the upfront stages of applications?

Doug Smith: Well, Dana, we've been on this road of transformation now for about three and a half years. In the beginning, we focused on our production environments, which generally consist of fairly predictable workloads across multiple business units, and as Andy mentioned, quite a variety actually of models. In the past, the business units have obtained a great deal of autonomy in how they manage their infrastructure.

The first thing was to pull together the infrastructure and go through a consolidation exercise, as well as an optimization of that infrastructure. There we focused heavily on virtualization, as well as optimization of our storage environment, and to Andy’s point around process, heavily invested in process improvement.

We look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.



A couple of years into this, we began to look at our development environment. McKesson has several thousand developers globally, and these developers spread across multiple product sets in multiple countries.

If you think about our objectives around security, quality, and agility, we look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.

Gardner: So, it sounds as if both of you have relied increasingly on automation and integration and federation for many of the products that support these activities. Is there anything in particular, at a philosophical level, about why managing and governing across multiple products, but with governance or management capabilities is so important? Let’s start with you, Andy.

Andy Smith: When we first started looking at new tools, we recognized that we had a lot of point solutions that may have been best-in-breed, but they were a standalone solution. So, we weren’t getting the full benefits of the integration. As we looked at the next generation of tools, we wanted a tool suite that was fully integrated, so that the whole was better than the sum of the parts is probably the best way to put it.

We felt HP had progressed the farthest of all the competition in generating that full suite of tools to manage a data center environment. And, we believe we're seeing the benefits of that, because all these tools are working together to help improve our SLAs and shorten those mean time to restore.

Gardner: Doug Smith, any thoughts on that same level of the whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Governance in place

Doug Smith: Absolutely. It's not unique, but to a large business like McKesson, as a federation, we have businesses that retain their autonomy and their decision-making. The key is to have that governance in place to highlight the opportunity at an enterprise level to say that if we make the investments, if we coordinate our activities, and if we pull together, we actually can achieve outcomes greater than we could individually.

Gardner: Doug Smith, you've been using the application development function as a first step towards a larger data center transformation effort, and you've been an early adopter for that set of application.

At the same time, Andy Smith has been involved with trying to make operations run more smoothly. Do these come together? Is there a better ability to create an end-to-end process for development and operations and perhaps provide a feedback loop among and between them.

This is sort of dev-ops question. Andy Smith, how does that strike you? Is there something even greater, maybe perhaps a greater whole among the sum of even more parts?

Andy Smith: I believe so, because for the products that McKesson develops and sells to the healthcare industry, in many cases, we're also hosting them within our data centers as an application service provider.

I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.



And the bigger sum of the whole to me is the fact that I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.

Gardner: Doug Smith, thoughts on the same dev-ops benefit? How does that strike you?

Doug Smith: As you look across product groups and our ability to scale this, and with Andy’s capability that he is developing and delivering on, you really see an opportunity for a company like McKesson to continue to deliver on its mission to improve the health of the businesses that we serve in healthcare. And, we can all relate to the benefits of driving out cost and increasing efficiency in healthcare.

So, at the highest level, anything that we can do to facilitate a faster and more agile development process for the folks who are delivering software and services in our organization, as well as help them provide a foundation and a layer where then they can talk to each other and build additional services and value-added services for our customers on top of that layer, then we have something that really can have an impact for all of us.

Gardner: Well, very good. Thank you for sharing that. I want to thank our guests. We've been here talking about the benefits of better tools for operations, as well as application development and hosting, and sharing their experience has been Andy Smith. He is the Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson. Thanks so much, Andy.

Andy Smith: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. Thank you, Doug.

Doug Smith: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience discussions. Thanks again for listening, 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 BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how McKesson has migrated data centers into fewer locations, while improving overall metrics of applications performance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, June 07, 2011

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

A
t 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

B
eing 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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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Tag-Team of HP Workshops Provides Essential Path to IT Maturity Assessment and a Data Center Transformation Journey

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. 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 some fast-moving trends by addressing the need for data center transformation (DCT). We'll also identify some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

The pace of change, degrees of complexity, and explosion around the uses of new devices and increased data sources are placing new requirements and new strain on older data centers. Research shows that a majority of enterprises are either planning for or are in the midst of data center improvements and expansions.

Deciding how to best improve your data center however is not an easy equation. Those building new data centers need to contend with architectural shifts to cloud and hybrid infrastructure models, as well as the need to cut total cost and reduce energy consumption for the long-term.

An added requirement for new data centers is to satisfy the needs of both short-and long-term goals, by effectively jibing the need for agility now with facility decisions that may well impact the company for 20 years or more.

We are going to examine two ongoing HP workshops as a means for better understanding DCT and for accurately assessing a company’s maturity in order to know how to begin a DCT journey and where it should end up.

We're here with rather three HP experts on the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop and the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model Workshop. Please join me now in welcoming Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solution for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Helen.

Helen Tang: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager at HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Network Business Unit. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Edelmann: Thank you, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: And also Mark Grindle, Business Consultant for Data Center Infrastructure Services and Technology Services in HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Grindle: Hi, Dana. Thanks a lot.

Gardner: Helen, as I mentioned, this is a very difficult situation for organizations. Lots of conflicting data is coming in, and many changes, many different trends are impacting this. Why don’t we try to set the stage a little bit for why DCT is so important, but also why it's no easy task.

Exciting times

Tang: Absolutely, Dana. As you said, there are a lot of difficulties for technology, but also if you look at the big picture, we live in extremely exciting times. We have rapidly changing and evolving business models, new technology advances like cloud, and a rapidly changing workforce.

What the world is demanding is essentially instant gratification. You can call it sort of an instant-on world, a world where everything is mobile, everybody is connected, interactive, and things just move very immediately and fluidly. All your customers and constituents want their need satisfied today, in an instant, as opposed to days or weeks. So, it takes a special kind of enterprise to do just that and compete in this world.

You need to be able to serve all of these customers, employees, partners, and citizens -- 0r if you happen to be a government organization -- with whatever they want or need instantly, any point, any time, through any channel. This is what HP is calling the Instant-On Enterprise, and we think it's the new imperative.

Gardner: When you say instant-on, it means that companies have to respond to their customers at almost lightning speed, but we are talking about infrastructures that can take years to build out. How do you jibe the two, the need to be instant, in terms of how you respond, but recognizing that this is a very difficult, complex, and timely process?

Tang: Therein lies the challenge. Your organization is demanding ever more from IT -- more innovation, faster time to market, more services -- but at the same time, you're being constrained by older architectures, inflexible siloed infrastructure that you may have inherited over the years. How do you deliver this new level of agility and be able to meet those needs?

You have to take a transformational approach and look at things like converged infrastructure as a foundation for moving your current data center to a future state that’s able to support all of this growth, with virtualized resource pools, integrated automated processes across the data center, with an energy-efficient future-proofed physical data center design, that’s able to flex and meet these needs.

Gardner: Of course, one of the larger trends too is that technology is just more important to more companies in more ways. This is not something you do just to support your employees. It really is core to most companies in how they actually conduct business, and is probably one of the chief determinants of their success.

So doing DCT is really part and parcel with how well you actually run your business -- or am I overstating it?

Tang: That’s absolutely true. We talked earlier about how being an Instant-On Enterprise is an imperative. Why do we call it that? Well, because these vast changes are coming, and you don’t have a choice.

If you look at just a few examples of some of these changes in the world of IT, number one is devices. I think you mentioned this earlier. There’s an explosion of devices being used: smartphones, laptops, TouchPads, PDAs. According to the Gartner Group, by 2014, that’s less than three years, 90 percent of organizations will need to support their corporate applications on personal devices. Is IT ready for that? Not by a long shot today.

Architecture shifts

Another trend that we see is some of these architecture shifts. Cloud obviously is very hot today, but two or three years ago a lot of CIOs pooh-poohed the idea and said, "Oh, that’s not real. That’s just hype." Well, the trend is really upon us.

Another Gartner stat: in the next four years, 43 percent of CIOs will have the majority of their IT infrastructure and organizations and apps running in the cloud or in some sort of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. Most organizations aren’t equipped to deal with that.

Last but not least, look at your workforce. In less than 10 years about half of the workforce will be millennials, which is defined as people born between the year of 1981 and 2000 -- the first generation to come of age in the new millennium. This is a Forrester statistic.

This younger generation grew up with the Internet. They work and communicate very differently from the workforce of today and they will be a main constituency for IT in less than 10 years. That’s going to force all of us to adjust to different types of support expectations, different user experiences, and governance.

Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner.



Gardner: So, as we recognize that the workloads, the requirements placed on IT are shifting, the data center needs to respond to that as well. I guess it’s important to know where you are, how well you have done in adjusting to what you have been serving up in the last several years in order to know what you need to do in order to be able to provide for these new requirements that we are describing.

Let’s start talking about one of these first workshops. It’s about the Maturity Model, a better understanding of where you are. I guess there is an order to these workshops. This one seems to be in the right order. You have to know where you are before you can decide where to go.

So let’s move to Mark Edelmann. Tell me a little bit about the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and why it’s important, as I said, to know where you are before you start charting the course in any detail to the future.

Edelmann: Before we dive into the maturity model though, I recently bumped into a definition on Wikipedia about maturity and I thought it might be useful to consider your IT environment as you listen to this definition that I picked up.
"Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner. The response is generally learned rather than instinctive and is not determined by one’s age. Maturity also encompasses being aware of the correct time and place to behave and knowing when to act appropriately according to the situation."
Now, that probably sounds a little bit like what you might want your infrastructure to behave like and to actually achieve a level of maturity, and that’s exactly what the Maturity Model Workshop is all about.

Overall assessment

The Maturity Model consists of an overall assessment, and it’s a very objective assessment. It’s based on roughly 60 questions that we go through to specifically address the various dimensions, or as we call them domains, of the maturity of an IT infrastructure.

We apply these questions in a consultative, interactive way with our customers, because some of the discussions can get very, very detailed. Asking these questions of many of our customers that have participated in these workshops has been a new experience. We're going to ask our customers things that they probably never thought about before or have only thought of in a very brief sort of a way, but it’s important to get to the bottom of some of these issues.

As a result of examining the infrastructure’s maturity along these lines, we're able to establish a baseline of the maturity of the infrastructure today. And, in the course of interviewing and discussing this with our customers, we also identify where they would like to be in terms of their maturity in the future. From that, we can put together a plan of how to get from here to there.

Gardner: When you say a workshop, are these set up so that people physically go there and you have them in different places, or is there a virtual version where people can participate regardless of where they are? How does that work?

Edelmann: We've found it’s much more valuable to sit down face to face with the customer and go through this, and it actually requires an investment of time. There’s a lot of background information that has to be gathered and so forth, and it seems best if we're face to face as we go through this and have the discussion that’s necessary to really tease out all the details.

The impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors.



Gardner: I'd like to understand a little bit more, Mark, why you break out maturity versus installed base. Help me understand what it takes in order to succeed and what you typically find with these companies? Do they find that they are further ahead than they thought or further behind when we look at this through that distinct lens of maturity?

Edelmann: Most of our customers find out that they are a lot further behind than they thought they were. It's not necessarily due to any fault on their part, but possibly a result of aging infrastructure, because of the economic situation we have been in, disparate siloed infrastructure as a result of building out application focused stacks, which was kind of the way we approached IT historically.

Also, the impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors and so forth. Rationalizing all that can leave them in kind of a disparate sort of a state. So, they usually find that they are a lot further behind than they thought.

Gardner: And, because you've been doing this for quite some time and you've been doing it around the world, you have a pretty good set of data. You have some good historical trend lines to examine, so you have certain domains and certain stages of maturity that you have been able to identify.

Maybe you could help us understand what those are and then relate how folks can then place themselves on those lines, not only to know where they are, but have a sense of how far it is they need to go to get to that higher level of maturity they're seeking.

Edelmann: Sure. We can talk through that level of detail and you can familiarize yourself, at least verbally, with how this model is set up and so forth.

4x5 matrix

Picture, if you will, a 4x5 matrix. We examine the customer’s infrastructure in four, what we call, domains. These domains consist of technology and architecture, management tools and processes, the culture and IT staff, and the demand, supply, and IT governance aspects of the infrastructure and the data center operations. Those are the four domains in which we ask these questions and make our assessment.

From that, as we go through this, through some very detailed analysis that we have done over the years, we're able to position the customer’s infrastructure in one of five stages:
  • The first stage, which is where most people start, is in Stage 1; we call that Compartmentalized and Legacy, which is rather essentially the least-mature stage.
  • From there we move to Stage 2, which we call Standardized.
  • Stage 3 then is Optimized.
  • Stage 4 gets us into Automated and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and,
  • Stage 5 is more or less IT utopia necessary to become the Instant-On Enterprise that Helen just talked about. We called that Adaptively Sourced Infrastructure.
We evaluate each domain under several conditions against those five stages and we essentially wind up with a baseline of where the customer stands.

We've been doing this for a while and we've done a lot of examinations across the world and across various industries. We have a database of roughly 1,400 customers that we then compare the customer’s maturity to. So, the customer can determine where they stand with regards to the overall norms of IT infrastructures.

It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.



We can also illustrate to the customer what the best-in-class behavior is, because right now, there aren’t a whole lot of infrastructures that are up at Stage 5. It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.

Gardner: I want to make sure I've got this straight in terms of the order of these workshops and why how they play off of one another. Maybe, Helen, you could come back in and help understand which one you see people doing first and which one you think is the one that makes the more sense?

Tang: Both workshops are great. It's not really an either/or. I would start with the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, because that sets the scene in the background of how I start to approach this problem. What do I think about? What are the key areas of consideration? And, it maps out a strategy on a grander scale.

The CI Maturity Model Assessment specifically gets into when you think about implementation. Let's dive in and really drill deep into your current state versus future state when it comes to these five domains that Mark just described.

Gardner: Let's go now to the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop with Mark Grindle. First, do you share Helen’s perspective on the order, and what would people gain by entering into the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first? Then, you can then fill us in a little bit on what it's about?

Interesting workshop

Grindle: Thanks, Dana. I agree with what Helen said. It really is more structured if you do the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first and then follow that up with the Maturity Model. It's very interesting workshop, because it's very different from any other workshop, at least that I have ever participated in. It's not theoretical and it's also extremely interactive.

It was originally designed and set up based on HP IT’s internal transformation. So, it's based on exactly what we went through to accomplish all the great things that we did, and we've continued to refine and improve it based on our customer experiences too. So, it's a great representation of our internal experiences as well as what customers and other businesses and other industries are going through.

During the process, we walk the customer through everything that we've learned, a lot of best practices, a lot of our experiences, and it's extremely interactive.

Then, as we go through each one of our dimensions, or each one of the panels, we probe with the customer to discuss what resonates well with them, where they think they are in certain areas, and it's a very interactive dialog of what we've learned and know and what they've learned and know and what they want to achieve.

The outcome is typically a very robust document and conversation around how the customer should proceed with their own transformation, how they should sequence it, what their priorities are, and true deliverables -- here are the tasks you need to take on and accomplish -- either with our help or on their own.

It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.



It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.

Gardner: And the same question to you, Mark Grindle, about location. Is this something you prefer to do face to face as Mark Edelmann mentioned, or is this something that people can gather virtually or through road shows? How does it actually come to the market?

Grindle: It absolutely has to be face-to-face. We use a very large conference room and we set up these panels around the room. Each one of these panels is floor to ceiling and height. There are about 4 feet by 5, or 5.5 feet high, and we walk through a series of 10 panels that approaches each of the dimensions of transformation, as we look at it.

So having all the people in the room and being able to be interactive face to face, as well as reference panels that you might have gone through or that you are about to go through as different points in the conversation come up, is critical to having a successful workshop.

Designed around strategy

It's definitely designed around strategy. Most people, when they look at transformation, think about their data centers, their servers, and somewhat their storage, but really the goal of our workshop is to help them understand, in a much more holistic view, that it's not just about that typical infrastructure. It has to do with program management, governance, the dramatic organizational change that goes on if you go through transformation.

Applications, the data, the business outcomes, all of this has to be tied in to to ensure that, at end of the day, you've implemented a very cost-effective solution that meets the needs of the businesses. That really is a game-changing type of move by your organization.

Gardner: And, as part of some of the trends we mentioned, building these for the long-term means that you're building for operational efficiency. The total cost, of course, over time is going to be that ongoing operational penalty or, if you do it right, perhaps payback. How do you help people appreciate the economics of the data center, and how important is that to people in these workshops?

Grindle: The financials are absolutely critical. There are very few businesses today that aren’t extremely focused on their bottom line and how they can reduce the operational cost.

Certainly, from the HP IT experience, we can show, although it's not a trivial investment to make this all happen, the returns are not only normally a lot larger than your investment, but they are year-over-year savings. That’s money that typically can be redeployed to areas that really impact the business, whether it's through manufacturing, marketing, or sales. This is money that can be reinvested in the business, and allowed to help grow the areas that really will have future impact on the growth of the business, while reducing the cost of your data centers and your operation.

Even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology.



Interestingly enough, what we find is that, even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology. You actually have to implement new technologies and robust technologies to help bring your cost down. Things like automations, operational efficiency, ITIL processes all help you drive the saving while you are allowed to upgrade your systems and your environments to current technologies and new technologies.

And, while we're on the topic of cost savings, a lot of times when we are talking to customer about transformation, it's normally being driven by some critical IT imperative, like they're out of space in their data center and they're about to look at building out a new data center or perhaps a obtaining a collocation site. A lot of times we find that we sit down and talk with them about how they can modernize their application, tier their storage, go with higher density equipment, virtualize their servers, they actually can free up space and avoid that major investment of the new data center.

Gardner: That gets back to the definition of maturity, where it might not necessarily mean bringing in trucks and pouring cement. It could very well mean transforming in a way that ekes out more productivity from your existing facilities before you rush into something new. Is that typically the case? How often does that really happen where you can wring out enough efficiency to postpone the actual new facility?

Grindle: It happens time and time again. I am working with a company right now that was looking at going to eight data centers and by implementing a lot of these new technologies -- higher virtualization rates, improvements to their applications, and better management of their data on their storage. We're trying to get them down into two data centers. So right there is a substantial change. And, that’s just an example of things that I have seen time and time again, as we've done these workshops.

A big part of this is working through what the customer really needs and what their business drivers really are. In some cases, we're finding out that brick and mortar aren’t really the right solutions for their data centers. They should look at collocation or even at more creative solutions like the HP Data Center POD, where you can stand up one of these containers filled with high density, very modern equipment, and meet all their needs without doing anything to your existing data center.

It's all about walking through the problems and the issues that are at hand and figuring out what the right answers are to meet their needs, while trying to control the expense.

What's next?

Gardner: Okay, I am starting to get it now. I see why these two workshops play off of one another, because you are laying out all the things that have happened at HP, what to expect, and what some of the alternatives are. That way you've got in your mind a set of alternative directions. Then, by doing the Maturity Model, you get a sense of where you are and where you can go, and putting the two together can start you on that path.

Let’s look at that future path a little bit. Folks have taken these workshops and gotten a better sense of the holistic full total equation. What usually happens next? What's the process from research, understanding, and knowledge to actually starting to hammer out a definition of what you and your particular situation as an organization should do?

Let me fire that first off at you, Helen.

Tang: As often happens, it depends. It’s based on your organization’s business needs. Where are you trying to go in the next year, two years, or five years? It’s also based on the level of constraint that you face right now in the data center.

We see one of two paths. In the more transformational approach, whereby you have the highest level of buy-in, all the way up to the CIO and sometimes CFO and CEO, you lay out an actual 12-18 month plan. HP can help with that, and you start executing towards that. You say, "Okay, what would be the first step?" A lot of times, it makes sense to standardize, consolidate. Then, what is the next step? Sometimes that’s modernizing applications, and so on. That’s one approach we have seen.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation. Then, we take a more project-based approach. It still helps them a lot going through these two workshops. They get to see the big picture and all the things that are possible, but they start picking low-hanging fruit that would yield the highest ROI and solve their current pain points.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation.



Often, in these past few years, it has been virtualization. What is my current virtualization level? How do I take it up to maximum efficiency? And then, look to adjacent projects. So, the next step might be consolidation, or automation, and so on.

Gardner: Mark Edelmann, same to you. Are there some typical scenarios that you've seen that folks when they have digested the implications from these workshops then have a vision or a direction, and what typically would that be?

Edelmann: Helen did a great job of outlining it, because different customers start at different places and they are headed for different places. Often, the journey is a little bit different from one customer to the other.

The Maturity Model Workshop you might think of as being at a little lower level than the Data Center Transformation Workshop. As a result of the Maturity Model Workshops, we produce a report for the customer to understand -- A is where I'm at, and B is where I'm headed. Those gaps that are identified during the course of the assessment help lead a customer to project definitions.

In some cases, there may be some obvious things that can be done in the short term and capture some of that low-hanging fruit -- perhaps just implement a blade system or something like that -- that will give them immediate results on the path to higher maturity in their transformation journey.

Multiple starting points

There are multiple starting points and consequently multiple exit points from the Maturity Model Workshop as well.

Gardner: Mark Grindle, same kind of question. How do people take what they've gathered here to use it? Any stories or anecdotes about what you have seen people do with this that has helped them?

Grindle: Mark and Helen were both right in their comments. The result of the workshop is really a sequence series of events that the customer should follow up on next. Those can be very specific items, like gather your physical server inventories so that that can be analyzed, to other items such as run a Maturity Model Workshop, so that you can understand where you are in each of the areas and what the gaps are, based on where you really want to be.

It’s always interesting when we do these workshops, because we pull together a group of senior executives covering all the domains that I've talked about -- program management, governance -- their infrastructure people, their technology people, their applications people, and their operational people, and it’s always funny, the different results we see.

I had one customer that said to me that the deliverable we gave them out in the workshop was almost anti-climatic versus what they learned in the workshop. What they had learned during this one was that many people had different views of where the organization was and where it wanted to go.

It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head.



Each was correct from their particular discipline, but from an overarching view of what are we trying to do for the business, they weren’t all together on all of that. It’s funny how we see those lights go on as people are talking and you get these interesting dialogs of people saying, "Well, this is how that is." And someone else going, "No, it’s not. It’s really like this."

It’s amazing the collaboration that goes on just among the customer representatives above and beyond the customer with HP. It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head. It ends up motivating people to start taking those next actions and figuring out how they can move their data centers and their IT environment in a much more logical, and in most cases, aggressive fashion than they were originally thinking.

Gardner: It sounds like a very powerful exercise for a lot of different reasons. For those folks interested, how could they learn more about these workshops? Are there some resources out there whereby they go to find them? Let me start with you, Helen.

Tang: The place to go would be hp.com/go/dct.

Gardner: That’s pretty straightforward. Any other thoughts Mark and Mark about where you could go to pursue information if you were starting to get interested in these workshops?

Edelmann: Well, it’s probably not a big surprise, but to learn more about the CI Maturity Model, you can go to hp.com/go/cimm.

Gardner: And Mark Grindle?

Grindle: I agree with both of those. Obviously your HP account rep can help you. We have an HP IT Forum coming up soon. For people who are attending, we do mini workshops during this event. We set up a day that individual customers can come in for an hour and we walk them through each one of the panels very quickly and give them a flavor for what the full workshop would look like. There are a lot of options here for people to get a better understanding of the workshop and how it can help them.

Gardner: So, you can get the appetizer before the entrée?

Grindle: Absolutely.

Gardner: Well, thank you. You have been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the need for DCT and some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

I would like to thank our guests. We have been joined by Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions for HP Enterprise Business. Thanks again, Helen,

Tang: Thanks, Dana. Always a pleasure.

Gardner: And Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager, HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Networking Business Unit. Thanks to you, Mark.

Edelmann: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Mark Grindle, Business Consultant, Data Center Infrastructure Services in the Technology Services within HP Enterprise Business. Thanks to you.

Grindle: Thank you, Dana. It was great being here.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. 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: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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