This EMC perspective explains the importance and benefits of a transformational approach to today's data center challenges to CIOs and IT executives. Leveraging best practices from EMC Consulting experience with large-scale change programs, this white paper describes the characteristics of a transformed, next-generation data center

1. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT DATA CENTER
TRANSFORMATION
When business as usual is not enough:
The CIO’s dilemma
emC perspeCtive

2. Key Drivers of Change in Today’s Data Center
When business as usual is not enough:
• Cost the CIO’s dilemma
Information technology (IT) organizations are caught in a vicious circle. They are expected to
• Business agility
handle, on average, 60 percent more information every year while improving the quality of
• Virtualization
service they deliver to the business, all on a virtually flat budget. In reality, as more and
• Protection more of the IT budget is needed just to maintain the status quo, service levels actually
• Service Delivery decline, risk management suffers, and IT becomes increasingly less supportive of the
• Green IT business. In the worst scenarios, the vicious circle actually becomes a downward spiral.
• Obsolescence So, what’s a CIO to do? How do you balance the mandate to become strategic against
• People expectations to keep operations running smoothly? How do you deal with the more
sophisticated IT issues like speeding application delivery and managing risk when an
increasing percentage of your budget and your resources are consumed with managing
business as usual? What do you do when a program of continuous service improvement
actually results in service degradation?
Some leading enterprises are deciding that a dramatic change in IT strategy is needed to
achieve the speed and agility a successful IT organization needs today. This paper describes
a different approach to IT strategy called data center transformation, including its inherent
challenges and associated best practices that result in a plan to pull IT out of its downward
spiral into a transformed, strategic state.
A transformational leader must be able to:
• Develop and communicate a vision and a
strategy Data center transformation defined
Many organizations coin the phrase “data center transformation” to define their version of a
• Help the enterprise understand and believe
the vision challenging, “step-change” program. However, professionals who run transformational
programs define them more precisely as formal, large-scale programs of change that involve
• Motivate and inspire to achieve the vision
multiple concurrent, complementary workstreams touching on people, process, and
• Produce change, often to a dramatic degree
technology, and that require ongoing measurements and adjustments. Also, data center
transformation calls for a new, “transformational” management style—leadership that is
willing to challenge the organization’s traditional goals and ways of working, is aware of the
scale of change required, and can define and drive rapid delivery and adoption of new
strategy, infrastructure, and practices. Not every data center manager is prepared to lead a
transformational program.
Data center transformation characteristics
The objective of data center transformation is to change the organization from a siloed,
technology-focused cost center to a strategic enterprise asset. Transformed, next-generation
data centers have the following characteristics:
• Service-oriented: Providing value to business customers by delivering the right technology
services at “fair-market-value” prices.
• Agile: Quickly supporting a rapid change in business direction with required IT services
such as provisioning.
• Automated: Managing operational processes without deviation from best practices, with
regular reports on performance against SLOs.
• Protected: High availability and information security for data at rest and in flight, without
data loss.
• Green Sustainable: Efficient operating environment managed in an environmentally
conscious way.
Key components/challenges
For the CIO convinced that these are worthwhile goals to strive for, beginning with several of
these “cornerstone” initiatives is the recommended next step:
Service catalog: Achieving service orientation, which should be a primary goal/driver of any
data center transformation initiative, starts by defining a service catalog. A service catalog
enables the data center to capture business requirements, translate them into technical
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3. service-level objectives, then define a high-level reference architecture to deliver the
required services.
By aligning business with IT, a service catalog enables the data center, application
developers, and business stakeholders to have discussions not about which technologies
and vendors to purchase (the old “IT-as-a-parts-supplier” role), but rather on service
delivery—what level of IT service is needed. Deploying and managing a service catalog calls
for IT to build and maintain a business relationship with their client. Whether the client is
the application development organization or the line of business itself, the data center must
be able to gather requirements in business language and explain their service commitment
in similar terms.
Chargeback: Without financial consequences for their choice of IT services, delivering IT as a
service will fail since the lines of business will insist on getting the highest level of service,
whether justified or not. When creating a service catalog, therefore, you will need to know
the costs of the services you will be delivering. Most forms of chargeback are based on
allocation or equal distribution of the total cost of IT to different lines of business. A pure
Considerations for Successful Virtualization utilization-based model, while ideal for a service-catalog-based infrastructure, is expensive
and challenging to implement. Of the three popular methods of charging for IT services—
Virtualization is powerful—but because of its
profound impact on operations and core
pure allocation, pure utility, and paper-based adjustment based on utilization—the last
processes, it is essential to achieve the right option is most realistic and achievable.
balance between aggressiveness and care when
Consolidation and virtualization: Data center transformation typically leverages
deploying this new technology. For this reason, it
consolidation and virtualization for cost, efficiency, and agility. Virtualization challenges the
is critical to embrace virtualization holistically
and on a large scale—consolidate servers (and lines of business to share hardware assets and provides an opportunity to build SAN-based
networks), optimize operations, and then central repositories of data. Organizations looking to leverage consolidation and
virtualize—and to leverage professionals who virtualization for cost-cutting purposes must set proper expectations based on a complete
have the appropriate knowledge, experience, understanding of the operational and tool related cost and challenges. Although server
tools, and skills to understand the broad range of consolidation is sufficient for some companies, consolidation alone does not deliver the
associated issues, create a strategy, and set same amount of flexibility as taking the next step, which is to virtualize. For optimum
proper expectations.
results, storage consolidation with deduplication is a prerequisite for virtualization.
Process rationalization and optimization: Organizations looking to improve service delivery
via standards such as ITIL and COBIT cannot overlook the need to modify their organization
and align it with the new operational processes. Consider that any data center process worth
improving is usually fairly complex and has components that different IT roles support. In
the ideal situation, your IT organization will be organized around platform specialization/
focus (network, compute, and storage) and will require planners to architect your
information infrastructure, senior-level engineers to build it, and more junior-level staff to
monitor and administer it.
Rationalized processes will be aligned with the right platform skills and roles to ensure that
tasks are performed smoothly and clearly meet promised service levels. EMC® Consulting
has seen up to a 400 percent improvement in the number of management processes
executed per data center employee when process improvement is accompanied with an
organizational realignment. Also, with ITIL V3 putting a new emphasis on service lifecycle,
an optimized operations function will be constantly seeking to refresh service delivery levels.
Automation: Only after you are satisfied that your processes are well streamlined should you
introduce technology to automate them. Remember that the introduction of new technology
is not only intended to discipline the organization to follow their best practices, but also to
monitor, measure, and report benefits realization on a regular basis to management.
Automation is also the key to preventing organizations from reverting back to the older, more
familiar but less efficient processes.
People change: A transformational program aligns the data center organization with newly
optimized processes and procedures, giving people greater clarity regarding their present
roles and responsibilities as well as career path and growth opportunities—and ironically,
injecting the organization with a sense of energy rather than a fear of change which is
sometimes exhibited at the start of large change programs.
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4. Starting your transformation journey
Since it is extremely difficult to address all of your transformational objectives at the same
time, you need to identify and prioritize your key business and associated IT challenges to
determine where you want to focus your transformation efforts first. You also need to
establish your current data center capabilities and set goals for your transformational
program.
The combination of a transformational framework and maturity model such as the ones
illustrated here can help you evaluate your current capabilities—where you are today. The
data center transformational framework organizes your change program into key workstream
categories (Customer/Service, Organization/Process, Infrastructure/Toolset, People, and
Benefits Realization) and is a powerful tool to identify the critical success factors that should
be in place to drive a comprehensive transformational program. It helps you focus not only
on the technologies you should adopt, but also on the expected capabilities or
characteristics of the data center at each progressive stage of maturity. An assessment of
your data center against this framework can enable you to have strategic discussions on the
business value of deploying new technologies to improve the current state of your IT
infrastructure and address cost issues, security risk, and operational agility.
Basic Standardized Rationalized Dynamic
Customer and Service Support technology Service catalog established Service catalog SLA reports to Utilization-based chargeback
always in “react” mode clients
Automated services
Allocation-based chargeback management
Organization and Process No formal processes, Process efficiency baseline IT best practices documented, Continuous process
procedures established measured improvement
Some best practice processes Managed automation Automated management
documented reports
Operations for virtualization
RACI alignment in place
Infrastructure and Toolsets Technology “silos” Tiering, application alignment Broader virtualization Complete production
supporting single deployed virtualization
applications Availability alternatives
assessed Policy-based data Multi-site load balanced DR
Many non-integrated tools classification
Targeted, policy-based Policy-based data mobility
archiving Backup to disk, optimization
Infrastructure consolidation
Limited virtualization deployed
Backup architecture
rationalized
People Employees support Career paths defined Strong retention through Business requirements
technologies without training career growth, mobility gathering skills in IT
experience Skill set assessed, training
plan in place
Benefits Realization IT viewed as cost center Lower-cost, efficient data Energy related savings from Agile infrastructure
IT value difficult to articulate centers virtualization
IT service performance
Consistent IT services across IT service performance reports
enterprise reports
Business intelligence enabled
Information pooled, available Decision support enabled
for re-use
Data Center Transformational Framework: In this example of a transformational framework used by EMC
Consulting, each workstream category comprises a series of related elements that constitute possible
initiatives in your program, accompanied by a list of related best-practices/critical success factors at
each level of maturity that need to be addressed to achieve a fully transformed, next-generation data
center. Depending on which business drivers you are responding to, you will focus on one or more
workstream category, sometimes concurrently.
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5. Data Center Transformation Case Study
Achieving and sustaining momentum
Like many of its customers, EMC’s own IT The duration and complexity of a data center transformation—and the need to maintain
organization faces diverse challenges in its progress on all concurrent workstreams without dropping the ball on day-to-day operations—
day-to-day operations as it supports a can make it difficult for an organization to sustain momentum for continuous improvement
rapidly growing business that has over time. A phased approach with multiple measurement checkpoints not only at the end
undertaken 25 acquisitions in three years
of, but also at multiple points within each phase, can help to sustain the sense of success
and has over 44,000 employees around the
and progress and allow the organization to refresh its commitment at each milestone. As the
world. With more than 500 applica-
tions—21 of which are classified as mission successes mount, so too will the momentum and commitment to continue driving the
critical—distributed over three enterprise transformational journey.
data centers and two regional data centers,
The following best practices are also key to achieving and sustaining a successful data
EMC IT must simultaneously manage its
current application portfolio while
center transformation initiative:
improving service levels and business • Obtain executive sponsorship to champion the initiative and resolve conflicts when
agility as well as reducing costs and risk.
necessary.
The changing environment and the need to
improve service levels provided the impetus • Establish a program office or center of excellence to help set expectations, remove
for EMC IT to undertake a data center obstacles, communicate objectives and progress, measure benefits, and renew
transformation initiative. commitment.
EMC Consulting helped achieve this • Focus on information and its service requirements—not on technology.
transformation with a phased approach that • Change interim goals or measurement points as needed to energize the organization as it
focused on classifying data as well as transitions through the transformation phases.
consolidating, tiering, archiving, and • Use savings realized from short-term efficiency gains (e.g., from consolidation and
virtualizing the infrastructure. Several years
virtualization) to fund longer-term program goal initiatives.
into the project, EMC IT is now undertaking
• Focus on system management and operations to ensure successful virtualization
further change initiatives, leveraging best
practices from the first phases. deployment and sustained benefits.
• Leverage chargeback to ensure that business customers choose the right services at the
EMC IT accomplished its objectives in this
transformation by reducing costs while right cost points.
improving alignment with the business • Develop IT business services, and formalize governance.
through a service-oriented approach. The • Establish key performance indicators that measure the effectiveness of your operations
program generated hard benefits of greater and service levels.
than $80 million over three years, as well as • Augment process improvement initiatives with organizational alignment.
improved compliance and operational
efficiency—even while EMC was experienc-
ing 70 percent growth during that period. Reaping the rewards
Examples of these savings include: Successfully making the transition from a tactical utility to a strategic, next-generation data
• Consolidating, classifying, and tiering center requires significant time, commitment, and dedication. The stakes are high and there
data eliminated redundant data and are no magic bullets—not even virtualization. Senior IT leaders need to ask if a
yielded cost avoidance of $42 million. transformational approach is required, and how they will manage such a long-term change
• Archiving data and applying policy-driven initiative. Not everyone is a candidate for a data center transformation.
data tiering yielded cost avoidance of
Nonetheless, there is significant measurable ROI to be achieved; companies that have
more than $29 million.
successfully completed a data center transformation have documented multiple millions of
• Streamlining backups saved approxi-
dollars in savings representing a significant return on their investment. Perhaps the greater
mately 1.2 PB of storage.
value of data center transformation is in the “intangibles”—speed, agility, and control. A
• Virtualizing servers produced a cost programmatic approach to data center transformation—especially when leveraging industry
avoidance of at least $9 million.
best practices, expertise, and tools such as a transformational framework—will deliver
steady improvements/benefits at every step in the journey with the greatest benefits
realized after the first year. Ultimately, transformation programs inject meaning and
direction into organizations and yield remarkable results that reach beyond the group/
organization being transformed.
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6. EMC Consulting draws on a unique mix of
Are you a candidate for data center
industry, business, and technology transformation?
expertise to help organizations solve Successful transformation is brought about by deep organizational willingness to change at
today’s toughest challenges and transform
its core—its approach, its organization and processes, its infrastructure and toolsets, and its
information into business results, using
skillsets—and by the ability to address and stay focused on the many multiple threads of a
field-tested tools, proven methodologies,
best practices, and industry standards to transformation initiative until the desired end state is achieved. Some organizations that
minimize risk and optimize time-to-value. have achieved a certain level of efficiency and maturity may not require a transformation,
Visit www.EMC.com/consulting for more and some may even choose to wash their hands of technology altogether and outsource to a
information. third party. You and your management should consider the following questions to help you
determine if your organization is a candidate for this journey:
• Do you understand the profound opportunity inherent in a data center transformation?
• Do you understand the challenges ahead and are you ready to assume the risk?
• Do you have the discipline to stick with a transformation initiative even when progress and
benefits realized at any point are not up to expectations?
• Do you have the strong sponsorship you need to support you throughout your journey?
• Do you have the “can-do” culture to enable and sustain momentum and achieve your
transformation goals?
• Do you have the transformational leadership in place?
• Do you have the right staff to carry out this journey?
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services can help solve your business and IT
challenges contact your local EMC Consult-
ing representative or visit us at www.EMC.
com/consulting.
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respective owners. © Copyright 2008, 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 09/11 EMC Perspective
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