A Computer Weekly buyer’s guide

to datacentre management
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Hybrid strategy offers

best of both worlds
More and more
businesses are
adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy

Moore’s Law is
running out – but
don’t panic
Can system
performance still
improve to cope with
datacentre needs?

New model
datacentres require
hybrid approach
CIOs must marry
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public
and private clouds The demands on
datacentres are ever
growing. In this 12-page
buyer’s guide, Computer
Weekly looks at the
advantages of a hybrid
cloud strategy, whether
system performance can

LEMBERGVECTOR/FOTOLIA
keep on improving, and
the value of marrying
legacy infrastructure with
a cloud environment
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 BUYER’S GUIDE TO DATACENTRE MANAGEMENT

Hybrid strategy offers

best of both worlds
More and more businesses are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy
for their datacentre needs. Cliff Saran looks at what’s on offer
A ccording to an IDC report commissioned by Cisco,
published in September 2016, cloud adoption contin-
ues to grow, but few companies have mature cloud
strategies in place.
Hybrid cloud is a significant part of the mix, with 73% of organi-
sations surveyed saying they are pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy,
subscribing to multiple external cloud providers and using a mix
of cloud and dedicated (on-premise) IT resources.
The study also showed that 78% of organisations are using or
planning to implement some form of cloud – a 61% increase from
the previous year. Yet only 31% of IT decision makers said they
had repeatable, optimised or managed strategies. Although this is
an increase from 2015, there is still room for improvement.

Automated management
Automated datacentre management, along with machine learn-
ing to understand the events that lead to degradations in sys-
tem performance, are set to drive datacentre strategies in the
coming years.
Analyst Gartner expects that, by 2020, the operating costs
of enterprise datacentres will have been reduced by 30%. As a
result, the analyst firm suggests that to attract buyers, technol-
ogy product management leaders at datacentre infrastructure
providers should differentiate themselves by providing targeted
automation and interoperability software to reduce the cost of
ALEXDNDZ/FOTOLIA

operating their products.

According to Gartner’s IT Key Metrics Data 2016 report, system
costs make up between 18% and 24% (in the case of Linux and

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Windows servers, respectively), whereas the cost Dell EMC offers Virtustream and Pivotal Cloud
More and more of software and administration ranges between ❯What is possible with hybrid Foundry to support both traditional and cloud-
businesses are 68% (Windows) and 72% (Linux). cloud, what types of data and native workloads.
adopting a hybrid what hybrid cloud architectures
cloud strategy Reducing operating costs applies equally to can combine on-premise and
In October 2016, VMware said it was work-
in-house datacentre operations, and the latest cloud storage capacity? ing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bridge
Moore’s Law is thinking from the large server, virtualisation and private and public cloud infrastructures. At the
running out – but cloud providers is to offer businesses a way to bridge time, Mark Lohmeyer, vice-president for products
don’t panic
Can system
their own datacentres with public infrastructure as at its cloud platform business unit, said in a com-
performance still a service (IaaS) using a hybrid cloud that can move workloads pany blog: “VMware Cloud on AWS will be powered by VMware
improve to cope with automatically across public and private cloud infrastructures. Cloud Foundation, a unified SDDC [software-defined datacentre]
datacentre needs?
platform that integrates VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN
New model
Federated cloud management and NSX virtualisation technologies, and will provide access to
datacentres require An organisation is unlikely to choose just one public and one the broad range of AWS services, together with the functionality,
hybrid approach private cloud. Often, several public and private cloud services elasticity, and security customers expect from the AWS cloud.”
CIOs must marry need to work together to provide the IT environment the busi-
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public ness needs. In many instances, the IT department does not have Technology tie-up
and private clouds overall responsibility for the cloud services that business users At the VMworld Europe conference in Barcelona last October,
procure and deploy. the company showed how the technology tie-up could be used.
And, as is often the case in IT, getting the constituent parts to Lohmeyer demonstrated how VMware could be used with AWS
work together is a complex and costly matter. to move workloads dynamically between the private and pub-
Buying off-the-shelf products can go some way to simplifying lic cloud. “We leverage AWS Direct Connect to use vMotion to
this integration. A report from Principal Technologies commis- migrate private cloud VMware workloads onto AWS,” he says.
sioned by EMC said organisations could gain the savings and Also at the event, CEO Pat Gelsinger announced VMware Cross
advantages of a cloud environment sooner. “By taking 1.3 years Cloud, which he said solves the challenge of using any cloud for
longer to build your own solution, your organisation runs the risk any application. One VMware customer facing this challenge is
of not realising the benefits and savings offered by a hybrid cloud betting company Ladbrokes, which has built automated provi-
consumption model during that period. These include $1.76m sioning on its VMware system and created an abstraction layer to
savings based on our hypothetical organisation,” the report says. enable it to run on-premise or in the cloud.

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Payment processing company Worldpay, another VMware cus-
More and more tomer, is looking to use software-defined IT to enable it to jump-
businesses are start its strategy for software-defined automation. Gelsinger
adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy added: “Users want freedom to choose any cloud, and you are
responsible for control. This is the world of a hybrid environment
Moore’s Law is for decades to come – this is the software-defined datacentre.”
running out – but The traditional server companies appear very much on the
don’t panic
Can system
on-premise side of hybrid clouds. Nevertheless, automation has
performance still an important role to play in making on-premise hardware as easy
improve to cope with to manage as cloud-based infrastructure.
datacentre needs?

New model
HPE’s The Machine
datacentres require Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for instance, has a long-term
hybrid approach research project dubbed The Machine, which is a server archi-
CIOs must marry tecture where storage and memory combine to form a so-called
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public memory fabric. Kirk Bresniker, chief architect at HPE, says:
and private clouds “We want to change the basic economics, going from relatively
scarce amounts of memory.”
In the past, says Bresniker, hardware architects worked out
elaborate schemes to speed up access to relatively slow storage
devices using cache memory. “The only time caches work is when
we hit the cache,” he says. In HPE’s vision for The Machine, appli-
cations would have direct access to vast amounts of memory.
Some technology from this project is finding its way into next-

ALEXDNDZ/FOTOLIA
generation Hewlett Packard Enterprise products. For instance,
the latest HPE SAN networking components support embedded
intelligence called HPE Smart SAN. This technology is embed-
ded into HPE StoreFabric switches and directors and enables fully

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automated SAN orchestration directly from within HPE 3PAR Businesses are demanding more from IT, and among the
More and more StoreServ Storage arrays. areas CIOs need to consider is what happens when back-office
businesses are According to HPE, Smart SAN cuts provisioning and change IT becomes customer-facing. This is one of the challenges that
adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy management time by 90% and reduces the risk of human error, global ticket distribution company Amadeus is facing. Previously,
assuring resilience and even enabling proactive risk mitigation its systems were geared towards supporting travel agents’ busi-
Moore’s Law is when network changes are made. HPE also provides Helion, a ness-to-business operations. Now that people book flights and
running out – but secure hybrid cloud with OneView management, which, it claims, hotels directly, the company’s IT operations need to meet higher
don’t panic
Can system
can help organisations speed up networking provisioning times by user expectations. If the service is slow or unresponsive, a con-
performance still 10 times while reducing configuration sumer will find an alternative site
improve to cope with errors and operational costs by 50%. through which to book their travel
datacentre needs?
On Microsoft operations man- “W e are automating to take arrangements.
agement suite Azure, the Microsoft During a roundtable discussion
New model
datacentres require Operations Manager is used for people out of the system .I n the at VMworld in October, Wolfgang
hybrid approach
CIOs must marry
hybrid cloud management. This was
recently extended with Service Map,
future , my people will become
Krips, executive vice-president for
global operations at Amadeus, said:
”
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public a tool to provide real-time depend- automation engineers “We are automating to take peo-
and private clouds ency discovery and mapping. ple out of the system. In the future,
Nick Burling, principal programme W olfgang K rips , A madeus my people will become automation
manager on Microsoft’s Enterprise engineers.”
Cloud management team, wrote in a blog post that the tool helps This is a big transformation. IT has to think about how it delivers
IT administrators to eliminate the guesswork of problem isolation, services, and applications must adhere to newer paradigms. “You
to identify surprise connections and broken links in the corporate have to find ways to operate in a hybrid world,” says Krips. “Today,
IT environment, and to perform Azure migrations knowing that if we have a problem, the supplier fixes it. In a cloud-based world,
critical systems and endpoints will not be left behind. As part of your applications have to deal with the problem.”
the cloud management capabilities in Operations Management One of the areas Amadeus is exploring is using artificial intelli-
Suite, wrote Burling, Service Map helps IT administrators track gence and best practices derived from fraud detection techniques
dependencies in their hybrid cloud environment, making it easier in financial services to flag up potential problem areas based on
to manage the complexity of multiple clouds. deep analysis of telemetry data from running IT systems. n

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BUYER’S GUIDE TO DATACENTRE MANAGEMENT

Moore’s Law is running

out – but don’t panic
Can system performance continue to improve to cope with the
burgeoning needs of datacentres? Daniel Robinson investigates
I ntel kicked off CES 2017 in Las Vegas with the declaration
that Moore’s Law is still relevant as it slated its first 10nm
processor chips for release later this year. Despite this, engi-
neers are facing real issues in how to continue to push sys-
tem performance to cope with the growing demands of new and
emerging datacentre workloads.
This isn’t the first time the end of Moore’s Law has been pro-
claimed, but Intel and other chip makers have so far found new
tricks for shrinking transistors to meet the goal of doubling density
every two years, with a knock-on boost for compute performance.
Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said at CES: “I’ve been in
this industry for 34 years and I’ve heard the death of Moore’s Law
more times than anything else in my career. And I’m here today
to really show you and tell you that Moore’s Law is alive and well
and flourishing. I believe Moore’s Law will be alive well beyond my
career, alive and well and kicking.”

Approaching physical limits

Yet the pace is slowing as Intel works at developing 7nm (nano-
metre) and 5nm technologies to follow on from 10nm. The
introduction of 10nm itself has already been delayed by a year
because of difficulties with the manufacturing process, and
these difficulties are likely to increase as the size approaches
physical limits on how small the on-chip circuitry can be made.
“I can’t see them getting much beyond 5nm, and Moore’s Law
will then run out because we will have reached the end of the sili-
con era,” says Ovum principal analyst Roy Illsley. Some industry
observers think this will happen in the next 10 years or so.
PUCKUNG/FOTOLIA
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As to what will ultimately replace silicon, such as the massively parallel architecture of a GPU which
More and more optical processing or quantum computing, there ❯Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s makes it excellent for performing complex calcula-
businesses are appears no consensus so far. However, this does Law planted the seeds for the tions on large datasets.
adopting a hybrid internet of things decades
cloud strategy not mean that compute power will cease to expand, ago, illustrating and helping to
In 2016, Nvidia launched its DGX-1 server, which
as both hardware and software in the datacentre predict potential for IoT. sports eight of its latest Tesla GPUs with 16GB
Moore’s Law is have evolved since the days of single-chip servers memory apiece and is aimed at applications
running out – but and monolithic applications. involving deep learning and artificial intelligence
don’t panic
Can system
“The way apps are written has changed,” says (AI) accelerated analytics. “Nvidia’s system can do
performance still Illsley. “They are now distributed and scalable, so Moore’s Law what would have taken a whole datacentre of servers a few years
improve to cope with is a rather pointless metric for what a computer can do, anyway.” ago, at a pretty competitive price,” says Illsley.
datacentre needs?
In fact, the industry hit a similar crisis some time ago, when Intel Another example is the field programmable gate array (FPGA),
discovered that its single-core chips simply overheated when which is essentially a chip full of logic blocks that can be config-
New model
datacentres require ever-increasing clock speeds started to approach 4GHz. The ured to perform specific functions. It provides a hardware circuit
hybrid approach solution then was to change tack and deliver greater processing that can perform those functions much faster than can be done
CIOs must marry power by using the extra transistors to put multiple processor in software, but which can be reconfigured under software con-
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public cores onto the same chip, and comparable architectural shifts will trol, if necessary.
and private clouds enable the industry to continue to boost processing power. One notable adopter of FPGAs is Microsoft, which uses the
Such an approach can be seen in the growing interest in comple- technology in its Azure datacentre servers to speed up Bing
menting conventional central pro- searches and accelerate software-
cessing units (CPUs) with special- defined networking (SDN).
ised accelerators that may be better
suited to handling specific tasks or
“A pps are now distributed and Intel is also working on integrating
FPGA circuitry into some of its Xeon
workloads. A good example of this is , M
scalable so oore s aw is ’ L server chips, which could lead to
the graphics processing unit (GPU), broader adoption. In 2016, the firm
which has long been used to acceler- a rather pointless metric for showed off a Xeon coupled with a
ate 3D graphics, but which has also
found its way into high-performance
 
what a computer can do ” discrete FPGA inside a chip pack-
age, but its goal is to get both onto
compute (HPC) clusters thanks to Roy Illsley, Ovum a single piece of silicon.

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Meanwhile, Intel prefers to push its Xeon Phi platform rather during which time the processor may execute millions of instruc-
More and more than GPU acceleration for demanding workloads. These “many tions. So anything that can speed memory and storage access will
businesses are integrated core” chips combine a large number of CPU cores (up deliver a welcome boost to system performance, and a number
adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy to 72 in the latest Knights Landing silicon) which are essentially of technologies are being developed, such as Intel and Micron’s
x86 cores with 512-bit vector processing extensions, so they can 3D XPoint or IBM’s Phase-Change Memory, which promise to be
Moore’s Law is run much of the same code as a standard Intel processor. faster than flash memory, although their cost is likely to see them
running out – but However, one issue with having so many cores on one chip is used at first as a cache for a larger pool of slower storage.
don’t panic
Can system
getting access to data in system memory for all those cores. Intel These are being developed alongside new I/O interfaces that
performance still has addressed this by integrating 16GB of high-speed memory aim to make it quicker and easier to move data between mem-
improve to cope with inside each Xeon Phi chip package, close to the CPU cores. ory and the processor or accelerator. Examples include Nvidia’s
datacentre needs?
NVLink 2.0 for accelerators and the Gen-Z standard that aims to
New model
The Machine deliver a high-speed fabric for connecting both memory and new
datacentres require HPE has shown a different approach with The Machine, its “storage-class” memory technologies.
hybrid approach experimental prototype for a next-generation architecture. This
CIOs must marry
legacy infrastructure
has been described as memory-driven computing, and is based Specific workloads
with agility of public around the notion of a massive, global memory pool that is One thing Illsley thinks we may see in the future is systems that
and private clouds shared between all the processors in a system, enabling large are optimised for specific workloads. Currently, virtually all com-
datasets to be processed in memory. puters are general-purpose designs that perform different tasks
A working version, demonstrated at HPE Discover in December by running the appropriate software. But some tasks may call for
2016, saw each processor directly controlling eight dual inline a more specialised application-specific architecture to deliver the
memory modules (DIMMs) as a local memory pool, with a much required performance, especially if AI approaches such as deep
larger global pool of memory comprising clusters of eight DIMMs learning become more prevalent.
connected via a memory fabric interface that also links to the pro- Moore’s Law, which started out as an observation and predic-
cessors. In the demo, all the memory was standard DRAM, but HPE tion on the exponential growth of transistors in integrated circuits
intended The Machine to have a non-volatile global memory pool. by Intel founder Gordon Moore, has lasted five decades. We may
In fact, focusing on processors overlooks the fact that memory be reaching the point where it no longer holds true for silicon
and storage are a bigger brake on performance, as even flash- chips, but whatever happens, engineers will ensure that compute
based storage takes several microseconds to read a block of data, power continues to expand to meet the demands thrown at it. n

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 BUYER’S GUIDE TO DATACENTRE MANAGEMENT

New model datacentres

require hybrid approach
CIOs must marry legacy datacentre infrastructure with the agility
of public and private cloud environments, writes Bernt Ostergaard
T he datacentre vision of just a decade ago was focused
on a consolidated infrastructure located in a single
datacentre – with a hot backup site – consisting of a
small number of highly scalable servers servicing a
large application pool.
Today, IT organisations are faced with the task of optimising
that legacy infrastructure and aligning it closer to fast-changing
business strategies. IT must provide solid change control and all
the predictability of traditional IT, while also providing cloud-like
speed for the new world of mobile, big data, and cloud-native
apps. To maximise agility and minimise complexity, CIOs must
bring together disparate public and private cloud environments to
create a centrally managed and optimised hybrid cloud.
Resources must be allocated efficiently with simplified and inte-
grated management. With DevOps, many new apps are being
created on the go, so the corporate IT infrastructure must also
reduce error-prone manual processes and automate IT opera-
tions. Success is measured by the ability to deliver the benefits
of software-defined infrastructure leveraging both internal and
third-party cloud services. Datacentre remodelling has both soft-
ware and hardware components.

Why upgrade legacy at all?

IVAN MOGILEVCHIK/FOTOLIA

Legacy platforms in industry verticals such as finance and insur-

ance survive because of the risk and cost of replacing them.
Replacement projects can fail, with follow-on business losses,
lost confidence in the IT department and threats to people’s
careers. The time and cost involved in system testing and the

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prospect of a big user retraining programme must All businesses are data-driven now. And for
More and more be factored in. Against this, a stable platform with ❯Hybrid cloud is one of the many organisations, customer-generated data
businesses are tried-and-tested processes remains appealing. buzzwords in IT, but what is being created more quickly than it can be ana-
adopting a hybrid exactly is it, and how should you
cloud strategy However, recent research from Temenos in the implement it? Learn more with
lysed. Any company thinking about internet-of-
banking sector found that 14% of costs in bank- this hybrid cloud primer. things data gathering to facilitate better decisions
Moore’s Law is ing are IT-related compared with a cross-industry and business growth will certainly need to spend a
running out – but average of 7%. This is caused by multiple factors lot of effort to improve real-time analysis and avail-
don’t panic
Can system
including redundant, outdated, and/or siloed appli- ability. The challenge is to clean, manage and store
performance still cations. Something has to give. it, visualise it so it is easy to understand, and automate data pro-
improve to cope with Some may choose to mix old and new using tools such as IBM’s cesses so they run efficiently and without error.
datacentre needs?
WebSphereMQ message broker. This can handle multiple oper-
New model
ating systems, providing a convenient way of passing messages Customer insights
datacentres require between applications running under incompatible operating sys- Data visualisation tools and dashboards, such as the ones pro-
hybrid approach tems. Similarly, virtualisation can disaggregate legacy systems vided by Oracle BI Cloud Service, IBM Watson Analytics, SAP
CIOs must marry software from the hardware on which it was originally designed Lumira and Microsoft SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) in
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public to run, allowing users to replace their hardware and consolidate Azure can identify patterns and underpin reliable data-driven
and private clouds legacy systems on a single server. decisions. This way, companies can find the insights that unlock
The cost of such mix-and-match products comes with contin- performance. The right insights can improve business perfor-
ued siloed information, more bandwidth consumption, problems mance and strengthen customer relationships.
with application security due to lack of software patching, and More and more of the corporate datacentre is being virtual-
simply maintaining legacy skill- ised across all servers to ensure
sets. Not many young IT people seamless merging between
want to get into Cobol program- A
t some point the cost and , on-site private computing and
ming or Windows NT4 these days. off-site public cloud. IT now
At some point, the cost and incon-
inconvenience of maintaining a faces the challenge of managing
venience of maintaining a legacy legacy system will force even and monitoring swift infrastruc-
system will force even banks to ture changes driven by virtu-
remodel their datacentres. banks to remodel their datacentres alisation. Typically, this involves

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consolidation, automation and orchestration, workload replat- revenue opportunities in line with corporate governance, risk and
More and more forming and migration. Companies see their leading-edge peers compliance policies.
businesses are driving increased efficiency and performance across their entire Any datacentre remodelling strategy must also ensure that the
adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy enterprise with these strategies. But how do they make it happen? IT group has the tools to monitor, analyse and automate IT opera-
The good news is that corporate management is often willing tions at a level that supports cross-application data analysis. The
Moore’s Law is to allocate significant resources to this transition, and a host of IT and network group audits and supports the business needs for
running out – but systems integrators are ready to provide support encompassing big data and analytics infrastructure by providing the right data
don’t panic
Can system
assessment, design, build, testing, implementation, support and mining, warehousing and business intelligence capabilities.
performance still managed cloud transitions. What are the key steps in this transi-
improve to cope with
datacentre needs?
tion, and how is it managed? Using reference models
The “customer journey” is often used to describe the ongoing
New model
Taking the right steps relationship between a business and its customers. The corpo-
datacentres require To address the key question “how can we use the cloud?”, cor- rate cloud and data strategy must support this customer dia-
hybrid approach porate management must formulate its cloud and data strategy logue any time, any place, on any device and across any channel,
CIOs must marry (key phrases could be product and tech innovation, customer and deliver value-added services in real time. When planning
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public insight and market expansion), datacentre remodelling, it is a good
and private clouds soliciting input from the IT and net- idea to use a reference model to
working groups, as well as lines- T
echnology is only the first ensure consistency and compre-
of-business product and market-
ing executives to unite operational
.T
step he key enabler to driving hensiveness. There are many verti-
cal industry reference models avail-
and business insights from IT data in business value from the cloud able from the leading cloud platform
real time. providers: VMware, Microsoft and
Directly involving lines of business is people and processes OpenStack providers such as Red
is important because more and more Hat, IBM and HP Enterprise.
application deployment projects are initiated directly by them But technology is only the first step. The key enabler to driving
and circumvent the IT department – so-called shadow IT. business value from the cloud is people and processes. Companies
The cloud and data strategy should aim to transform busi- may need cloud managed services to transform their operational
ness decisions, enhance customer relationships and create new service. Hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds, optimising

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existing datacentre space on-premise, with the ability to burst to treats infrastructure as code, disaggregating compute resources
More and more public cloud when business scenarios demand it. so they can be programmed and automatically managed more
businesses are Datacentre remodelling also entails a hardware side of the equa- efficiently. In this way, infrastructure resources become fluid
adopting a hybrid
cloud strategy tion. Processing and connectivity constraints determined by lim- pools that can be composed dynamically.
its in power, cooling and space as Hyper-convergence may ulti-
Moore’s Law is well as lower capital expenditure mately lead enterprises to adopt
running out – but
don’t panic
are forcing firms to converge their H -
yper convergence may ultimately a serverless computing model.
Can system
infrastructure and move away This does not mean getting rid of
performance still from siloed servers, storage, data lead enterprises to adopt a the hardware on which a service
improve to cope with and processes to use available or application runs, but rather the
datacentre needs? serverless computing model
power and space more efficiently. capacity to provide a function as
This converged infrastructure a service in a unified environment.
New model
datacentres require groups multiple IT components (servers, data storage devices, The first real instantiation of this serverless computing model
hybrid approach networking equipment and software) into a single, optimised is demonstrated by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Lambda
CIOs must marry on-site computing package for IT infrastructure management, product. Launched last year, Lambda lets users run code with-
legacy infrastructure
with agility of public automation and orchestration. With a pool of centrally managed out needing to provision servers on AWS’s EC2 platform. Once
and private clouds computers, storage and networking resources, they can be shared the code is loaded, Lambda takes care of all the rest – provision-
across a wider range of corporate applications. Policy-driven pro- ing the resources to run the workload, monitoring and managing
cesses can be used to manage these shared resources. the dynamics of maintaining these at the right levels. Competing
offerings are Microsoft Azure Functions and IBM’s Bluemix
Composable infrastructure OpenWhisk, plus Google’s Platform Cloud Functions.
HPE coined the term composable infrastructure to denote its Few companies today are willing to undergo a complete data-
hyper-convergence approach to datacentre architecture (now centre remodelling. The vast majority are on a phased journey
augmented with its recent Simplivity acquisition). This offers the from legacy mission-critical, siloed on-site applications to a dis-
ability to compose and recompose fluid pools of compute, stor- tributed and disaggregated datacentre supporting mobile users,
age and fabric for any application or workload. In a similar vein, ad hoc locations and customers 24/7. Future IT datacentre func-
Cisco extends the functionality of its unified computing system tion will entail less application management and more support of
management with a software-defined infrastructure (SDI) that lines-of-business apps development and deployment. n

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