Shifting to Utility Computing

Even though technology's contributions have increased productivity and enabled ways of doing business that were unimaginable just a few years ago, the "computer department" was seen as a cost centre, charged with speeding and automating the tasks of other departments, but disconnected from the goals of its internal customers.

The achievements of many IT departments have been measured largely by technology advances deployed, hardware, software and networking, in an effort to keep pace with increasing demands from users and infrastructure alike.

While employees demand faster access, management requires real-time reporting capabilities, and new rich-media applications require more bandwidth, storage and processing power. The combination of these three forces has caused an unyielding growth in infrastructure, which IT must now manage.

This focus on providing the raw technology has often impeded the IT staff's ability to focus on business value. And thus, IT continues to be viewed as an expense, rather than a value, to many organisations.

Emergence of the IT Utility
Today, having the ability to fine-tune IT resources to meet the changing demands of business can be a critical tool in reducing expenses and saving time. To that end, turning IT into an internal utility service, much like water, power, or phone, can enhance flexibility as well as the user experience.

Just like traditional utilities are metered, delivered, and expected to be available without interruption, IT can now deliver applications, storage and security as utility services. By doing so, IT can help to achieve logical functional benefits including supporting user demands, new business processes, and continual growth.

The challenge for many is how to abstract the technology so users need not care which platform, storage device, or client workstation they use. Instead, users would focus on the business function they need to perform, and those functions would be enhanced by the delivery of supporting IT services.

Viewing IT as a utility also creates an environment that enhances the IT department's ability to charge back for these services on a usage basis, just as departments and organisations pay for conventional utility services. Users can demand different levels of service availability, and IT can offer "pay as you go" charge-back capabilities for those differing service-level agreements (SLAs).

A charge-back system could also be set up based on depth of solution. For example, storage that is synchronously replicated could be a "platinum" service; locally mirrored storage could be a "gold" service; and JBOD storage could be a "silver" service. Ultimately, delivering IT in a utility-like fashion gives IT departments the level of accountability needed to demonstrate to management value for services rendered.

Utility computing also offers internal benefits to the IT department itself. As IT becomes more closely aligned with the goals of individual business units, the ability to control costs and assets by allocating them to specific business departments or projects enables IT management to get a better handle on how dollars spent relate to the success of business tasks and projects.

Lastly, taking a utility view of the IT infrastructure can enable more flexibility in architecture, hardware and software deployed to achieve business goals. In other words, IT can move and expand differing pieces of its infrastructure as business needs change and grow.

Turning Data to Action
Now that the information economy has surpassed the manufacturing sector in gross revenues, the importance of having actionable information, not just raw data, has increased immeasurably. Collecting data from various departments and tasks is one thing, but being able to use that data to steer your business and help forecast where action need be taken is critical to any enterprise's success.

Often, business units have turned to outsourcing solutions of various types to assist in this process. But today, more companies want to leverage their internal resources better by becoming their own internal service providers, focused on delivering solutions to business problems.

Storage: The First IT Utility
For years, VERITAS Software Corporation has led the industry with a variety of storage management tools—from backup and recovery solutions to networked storage management tools that ease the management burden of complex, heterogeneous storage infrastructure for enterprises of all sizes. And although VERITAS solutions have raised the bar in the areas of business continuity and storage management, customers have asked for more. Indeed, today's enterprises want a comprehensive view of application delivery from end to end to help turn IT into an information utility to help their organisations meet business goals.

VERITAS has responded to this challenge by developing tools that allow IT to deliver a key resource—storage—as a utility, with many parallels to more traditional utilities that can benefit both IT and users. With storage resource management (SRM) tools at the centre, this "storage as utility" approach views the data residing on your storage devices much like water: more important than the pipes that carry it, traversing the delivery medium of networks, and necessarily always available. For without data flow, life in the IT infrastructure comes to an immediate halt.

The utility view allows management of the physical storage and networks from which data is delivered and carried, which enables measurable service level agreements, usage metering and billing providing a comprehensive solution for delivering storage as the first true IT utility.

Tools to support an SLA "scorecard" for all IT services and to enhance workflow management from end-to-end, as well as automation tools to enforce business policies and practices, helps to ensure that storage systems aren't contaminated with unwanted data. For today's corporations, this includes not just spurious MP3 files, but increasingly, numerous duplicates of the same file that cause backup jobs to grow until they exceed the available backup window.

Additional tools to support asset tracking and management throughout a heterogeneous enterprise allow a consolidation of information into a single "bill," no matter where user data is stored. Ultimately, users will see IT from an application point of view—so VERITAS solutions provide the tools needed to report on IT from that same viewpoint.

VERITAS SRM Solutions
With the incredible growth in demand for storage, VERITAS continues to enhance its offerings to meet the changing needs of IT departments of all sizes. The company's portfolio of enhanced SRM solutions includes VERITAS SANPoint™ Control, VERITAS™ Storage Reporter and VERITAS™ CommandCentral Service.

VERITAS SANPoint Control
You can't control what you don't know. VERITAS SANPoint Control software provides comprehensive resource management and end-to-end data path management from host to storage. Seamlessly integrating policy and performance management, storage provisioning, and zoning capabilities, VERITAS SANPoint Control offers customisable tools to automate notification and recovery, as well as fully automated tracking capabilities through automatic discovery of devices, their attributes, and connectivity paths for all mounted storage volumes, whether SAN or DAS.

VERITAS SANPoint Control looks deep into the "DNA" of a storage network to discover not only storage hardware and networking components, but also business-critical applications such as Oracle databases and Microsoft Exchange applications. This discovery process allows administrators to manage delivery of these resources proactively, as a whole—applying quality-of-service policies to the entire data path. And VERITAS SANPoint Control software's integrated data path management features enable discovery of multiple data paths, helping to ensure that all existing resources—arrays, switches and host-bus adapters—are fully utilised.

VERITAS Storage Reporter
Storage is your network's most costly component —and VERITAS now offers even more insight into what's going on inside with VERITAS Storage Reporter. Whether SAN, NAS or DAS data in Windows, UNIX or Linux environments, VERITAS Storage Reporter gives you a comprehensive view of all the storage resources on your network from a centralised console.

VERITAS Storage Reporter helps IT departments achieve three critical business objectives. First, VERITAS Storage Reporter helps to maximise storage ROI by immediately identifying wasted storage space. Through improved capacity utilisation, you can plan storage hardware expenditures more effectively, which provides immediate bottom-line benefits.

Second, VERITAS Storage Reporter can help your company align IT resources with business priorities by quantifying storage resources in use by application, department, and business unit. This capability enables management to associate costs directly with value.

Lastly, this solution enables administrators to increase their levels of knowledge and efficiency by automating data collection and report generation for storage utilisation, which can lower IT operating expenses. VERITAS Storage Reporter also maintains historical data to support capacity planning.

VERITAS CommandCentral Service
VERITAS CommandCentral Service operates with an eye towards solving business problems with technology solutions by tracking IT effectiveness and providing business-level reporting of storage resource utilisation, costs and service-level delivery.

VERITAS CommandCentral Service also improves service delivery for internal customers by helping to ensure that best practices are implemented consistently across the enterprise, from service order to request fulfilment. Thus, greater efficiencies and lower response times are enabled.

Using VERITAS CommandCentral Service, you can provide a cost/value analysis of the different storage services in your enterprise, allowing business-unit customers to select the lowest-cost services that meet their performance and availability requirements for their applications. This ability to offer a "menu" of storage services, along with a price/performance analysis of each, can help users understand the tradeoffs associated with various types of installed storage solutions without having to understand the technology.

Users can even monitor the performance and availability they've contracted for. A centralised portal allows individual business users to request services, view service levels, and see the costs of their application. Using self-defined pricing models, you can present itemised "invoices" to business customers, export charge-back tables to external billing systems, or use the charge-back data to analyse and justify expenditures for new or enhanced storage solutions.

Enabling Storage as Utility
When IT departments consolidate resources to share among departments or users, the resulting complex infrastructure is often difficult to manage with existing tools. With VERITAS SRM solutions in place, however, IT professionals can facilitate the shift towards utility computing from a storage perspective.

That's because the VERITAS SRM tools outlined above enable storage management from all angles: VERITAS SANPoint Control covers physical storage management; VERITAS Storage Reporter takes care of logical storage management; and VERITAS CommandCentral Service performs business management functions.

These three tools work together to help support your goals of improving efficiencies and optimising existing hardware assets. They provide a single, consistent point of management across SAN, NAS and DAS. This helps to reduce operator error, which is the single largest cause of unplanned downtime.

Delivering on promised service-level agreements is one of IT's top imperatives. VERITAS tools enable prioritised management of storage resources corresponding to those application SLAs, so you can help ensure that your company's most important applications are always available.

Consolidation of storage, or taking a consolidated view of disparate physical storage devices, is a growing challenge. VERITAS' vendor-neutral support for the widest variety of storage hardware—including SAN, NAS, DAS and tape—as well as support for a broad array of platforms and operating systems allows you to support multi-vendor, best-of-breed installations with a common set of powerful tools.

With a continued focus on aligning IT resources with the priorities of the business, VERITAS solutions provide centralised visibility into resource allocation, helping IT to ensure that the organisation's most important applications receive the service levels that they need. Further, IT can assess the business and financial impact of IT service delivery to the organisation as a whole.

The Shift Is On
VERITAS Software's SRM solutions are designed to support a fundamental shift in enterprise IT, towards a service model which is more centralised, better managed, and most importantly, well-aligned with the needs, desires and budgets of departmental users.

Delivering storage as a utility can provide companies with several significant business-value benefits. It can help to:

1. Reduce hardware capital expenditures

2. Reduce operating costs

3. Allow IT to align its resources with business initiatives

4. Shorten time to deploy new or additional resources to users

Technology should enable solutions to business problems, not exist for technology's sake. Technologies need to become the menu items for users to choose from, and for IT to use to solve problems quickly.

Automation of provisioning, problem management and problem solving— through policy-based tools and "smart" systems that learn from previous problems solved—will play a large part in future advances in deploying storage as a utility. Predictions of future usage, as well as automated discovery of new applications, users, devices, and network elements, will further ease the burden of managing the IT utility as it evolves from storage to other areas.