VERITAS CommandCentral Service: Enabling utility computing (page 1 of 6)

On the other hand, the relationship between IT spending and business success is murky, and often mysterious.

The mystery of IT spending is due, in part, to the traditional view of IT as an operational expense - a variable cost on the corporate balance sheet. Treating IT as an operation usually results in costs being lumped together, making it very difficult to enforce accountability for individual expenditures. From a line-of-business perspective, this means it is hard to convey real-time fluctuating priorities back to the IT organisation.

And from the IT side, lacking a clear understanding of the business need for appropriate levels of service - be it performance, availability, or access to the latest technology - resource allocations become hit or miss. Utility computing aims to solve these problems.

Utility computing increases the transparency between IT spending and line-of-business priorities. Organising IT around a utility model, rather than an operations model, allows IT departments to package the technologies they offer according to the characteristics of individual resources and their real-world costs.

The utility model gives business users greater flexibility when making IT purchasing decisions, with choice being firmly based on a description of the service they will receive - for example, the recovery time characteristics of a particular storage platform - and the cost of that service. Connecting the dots between actual IT costs and end-user value leads to more effective decision making when deploying technology resources.

Transparency also helps corporate IT departments compete with managed service proposals from external providers. By clearly illustrating the services and service levels being offered, the utility model allows business users to accurately assess the price-performance value of internal IT products. This sets a benchmark that external providers must meet, and gives IT departments a distinct competitive advantage.

The enterprise storage infrastructure, responsible for up to 25 percent of many IT budgets, offers tremendous scope for realising the rewards of utility computing.

A Service Approach to Storage
Provisioning enterprise storage - including storage related services such as backup and recovery and replication - in a utility (or service) model delivers benefits to IT and storage end users.

A utility is able to maximise the advantages of a multi-vendor pool of storage resources, improving capacity utilisation and giving corporate storage buyers greater leverage when negotiating with individual vendors. This service-based approach also allows storage management to be centralised - improving administration efficiencies, allowing best practices to be applied uniformly across all resources, and increasing the scope for automation.

A storage utility strengthens the IT department's ability to satisfy end-user service level demands. By clearly stating the expected service levels of each packaged storage product, the IT department helps end users accurately map application needs to a storage-product offering.

This gives the IT department a clear understanding of the service-level expectations of a business application. And end users of the business application benefit by knowing that IT is able to live up to the service level it has defined.

To highlight how a storage utility operates, a rough analogy can be made to a commercial utility company offering water resources to businesses and households.

The Water Utility Analogy
Just as a storage array holds data for delivery to applications over a networked storage infrastructure, a water utility holds its product - water - in storage tanks and reservoirs for delivery through a network of pipes to customers.