Mobile Application: Just Fix It

Over the last few years, we have seen the number of data centers

growing at an exceptional rate to keep pace with the growth in data. And this is

a huge concern for IT managers. Until recently, continuous improvements in price

and performance made it easy and affordable to solve storage concerns simply by

adding more disks to existing storage systems.

Now, each and every enterprise has its own data center. But the

complexity of managing these efficiently has also become a challenge for CIOs.

An email survey done on CIOs of some SMEs by VOICE&DATA found that there are

limits to that easy growth-floor space, weight loads, rack space, network

drops, power connections, cooling infrastructure, and even power itself are

finite resources. Failing on any one of these limits significantly jeopardizes

the ability of the IT department to meet the demands of business.

The Data Center Scenario



The Indian scenario is a bit different from the global for managed data
services. In India large enterprises rely on their own in-house data centers,

whereas SMEs prefer to outsource. What are the benefits? "That depends on

the storage needs. For direct attached storage where data access is needed by

servers, in-house storage is a better option," says Rajesh Uppal, chief GM,

IT, Maruti Udyog.

High availability, capacity planning, and optimal utilization of

resources are some of the biggest concerns for CIOs. Cost cutting is not one of

the top priorities. To ensure high availability, power backup has to be there

24x7x365. Data centers should also adopt network load balancing along with

disaster recovery (DR) so that stress on them can be minimized. For the critical

applications running in the data centers one should have an automatic fail-over

set-up. Redundancy building into all the elements can also affect high

availability.

If the organization does not have enough trained staff to

provide high availability, then outsourcing of critical applications is a better

idea. "Enterprises prefer to outsource to data center service providers

because of lack of expertise," says Deepak Makhija, business head, Storage

Services, HCL Comnet.

To combat the issue of capacity planning, one of the options

suggested by some of our respondents was server consolidation. A requirement for

which is monitoring the IT resources before formulating the strategy. Broadly

speaking, server consolidation translates into IT resource management. You

should only revamp your data center if you think it can't take the load of

your upcoming projects or if you don't have enough time and budget then-outsourcing,

then, becomes a better option.

Virtualization is another solution for capacity planning. With

virtualization enterprises can add more apps in the same environment in order to

utilize the unused server power, for efficient resource management. This will

also help in addressing other concerns like ensuring optimal utilization of

resources and keeping costs under control.

Key Management Concerns



Power concerns top the list, followed by crash and recovery. There are also
connectivity related cooling and data backup issues. Let's take these issues

one by one.

	"In the next 18 months, increase in average storage rack density is expected to raise average power consumption"
	——Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, India, NetApp
	"Enterprises prefer to outsource the data center needs to the data center service providers because of lack of expertise"
	——Deepak V Makhija, business head, Storage services, HCL Comnet
	"For direct attached storage where data access is needed by servers, in-house storage is a better option"
	——Rajesh Uppal, chief GM, IT, Maruti Udyog

Power, undoubtedly, is the basic need for a huge data center. As

it grows it requires more electricity in order to power the infrastructure.

"In the next 18 months, increase in average storage rack density is

expected to drive the average power consumption from 2kw per rack to 30kw,"

says Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, India, Network Appliance. Here too,

capacity planning plays a major role. One has to evaluate the present and future

power requirements for a data center.

Servers can alone consume 50% of the power coming into the data

center. The first step in reducing power consumption is to attack the power

problem where data centers can reap the most gains-consolidating and

virtualizing application servers.

In environments with lots of direct-attached storage, as much as

27% of the power going into the data center is being consumed by storage. These

days, many organizations have their own power generation units for powering

their data center grid.

Next is the crash recovery issue. For instance, if any of the

mission critical applications fail due to hardware failure, what would be the

recovery strategy to bring back the application with minimum down time? You can

keep spares in stock 'so that you can just replace the hardware and host the

application on a new piece of hardware', suggests Makhija.

Connectivity issues are another concern that CIOs face. In fact,

one interesting aspect that came up from our survey was availability of network

equipment. What if one switch fails somewhere in your large data center? For

this, you need real time monitoring of the networking equipment, and failover

support for the most critical ones.

Data centers have a lot of servers and other equipment that

generate huge amounts of heat. As temperature rises, it adversely affects the

performance of the data center, plus chances of wear and tear of equipment also

increase. Therefore, cooling plays a very important part. Before building a data

center you need to analyze your cooling requirements and design accordingly. For

your existing data center, you should put in temperature monitoring and control

equipment. One of the respondents said that for additional cooling on demand,

you could also deploy emergency chillers.

Monitoring and management is another element. This helps CIOs

evaluate the health of a data center on a real time basis. According to our

survey, this was evenly split between either having a 24x7 monitoring set-up

manned by in-house staff or a completely outsourced management model. Very few

respondents said that they didn't have a dedicated monitoring set-up. So, one

thing is pretty clear-a 24x7 monitoring should be in place for any data

center, whether in-house or outsourced.

Disaster Protection



Disasters happen all the time and businesses that can best survive, win. To
ensure survivability, businesses must have a disaster recovery (DR) program and

infrastructure in place. Says the CIO of a large enterprise, "In this day

and age of RoI, IT managers must think of the basic and critical business

objectives of a DR program and infrastructure. IP-SAN serves near line data

protection needs."

Businesses know that controller-based replication is a

time-tested solution for disaster recovery. But what few people understand is

the different types of replication, and how it meets their needs.

Many IT organizations today are challenged with moving their

online and near-line data to offline tape backups and archives. The requirement

for 24x7 application uptime dramatically shrinks the backup window. Yet the data

volume on the multitude of servers, desktops, and laptops continues to grow at a

rapid rate. While tape arrays and incremental backup solutions help achieve

shorter backup windows, they are often complex and costly both for backup and

restore. Hence, not many enterprises back up regularly, if at all.

For the data that is backed up, the latency of restoring data

from tape is usually long. If the backup log, ie, the catalog is maintained

online and the data maintained in a tape library, restoring it might take time.

It could take hours, perhaps days, to retrieve the tape from an offsite vault

before data can be restored.

To address these challenges, IT departments are now deploying

low cost, cost-effective ATA disk arrays as a staging area, either as a

front-end to a tape library or as a stand-alone appliance on the network.

This approach minimizes the impact on the application hosts and

effectively eliminates the backup window issue. It also enables backup servers

and the associated tape drives to be consolidated, to achieve further cost

savings. Most Indian companies are looking at building DR capabilities by

utilizing their existing Ethernet infrastructure and already available IP

skill-sets of their IT technicians.

Gyana Ranjan Swain





gyanas@cybermedia.co.in