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The CIO of a leading and rapidly expanding biotech company called his IT staff and said, “We need to consolidate things into one physical location. We must try to put them into a much smaller footprint.”

That is where the challenge began! In the past, the organization typically dedicated one physical server to each application or user group. Today, the organization has 3,000 research analysts who run multiple applications in their areas of expertise on multiple physical systems. So now, the IT team is looking for a solution that will allow them to operate more efficiently and at the same time provide them with the flexibility to adapt and grow.

Since the researchers use the highly complex data modeling software, the amount of data generated runs into over 70 terabytes. This data is critical as it holds all the research findings. The future of organization depends on this data. To add to their woes, the storage environment is highly heterogeneous in nature with storage boxes from 2-3 different vendors. Managing it is a complex task.

The IT team faces a dilemma while exploring various solutions to make their 100 servers and their storage environment more manageable. Should they simply consolidate or is virtualization a better option?

“During the past 10 years we have experienced a lot of temporary growth. To achieve better growth in future we are now restructuring our server and storage environment,” says the IT Head. “We now think more than ever about integration and simplification.” What approach should they adopt?

Dataquest spoke to two leading experts on what approach should the company adopt in this current scenario. Their opinion reflects a system integrator's and vendor's perspective to this problem case.

This question deals with complexity, one of the biggest and most common problems IT managers are faced with. Managing a data center, today, can be a nightmare, as the networks often include thousands of disparate appliances, each requiring its own management console. As a result there has been a demand for consolidated appliances, which offer multiple services, all from one device.

Many devices available in the market, today consolidate functions such as firewalls, VPNs, intrusion prevention or detection services (IPS/IDS), and other services into one appliance. This reduces the cost of purchasing multiple appliances (CAPEX) as well as the cost of configuring and managing them (OPEX).

Besides, consolidated devices also offer the benefit of scalability. But this scalability is possible only to a limited extent.  If you are looking out for a new firewall and know that six months down the road you are also going to need VPNs, then purchasing a consolidated device that includes both would be beneficial. This would enable the user to start the VPN service, whenever he is ready to upgrade. The limitations, however, are that one can only use a limited amount of services before needing to purchase additional consolidated appliances.

There are inherent risks involved with the consolidated devices, alongwith the benefits. One such risk to consider is the introduction of a single point of failure in your network. Say you are using a consolidated device for firewalls, VPNs, and intrusion prevention and the device fails. You would immediately lose all connectivity. Depending on how separate appliances were deployed, you might have been able to escape with just a partial failure if the services were separate. However, traffic would still have to flow through the failed appliance. In order to avoid this, it is often best to deploy appliances, whether consolidated or not, in pairs to provide a backup in case of device failure.

Another issue to consider is the level of management consolidation that complements the feature consolidation. If several functions are consolidated onto a single device but each function still requires its own management interface, then you will still face the same problem of managing multiple consoles. The problem is same as managing multiple appliances.

It is also important to consider the difference between consolidated devices and virtualized devices. One needs virtualized solution along with a consolidated one if he goes for more capacity and functionality in the future. With consolidation, one would still need to deploy more integrated appliances throughout the network.

Whether consolidated or virtualized, one would ensure that the product has high availability features to maximize uptime, as well as appropriate management consolidation features to accompany the consolidation of functions.

If one decides to go virtual, he must keep in mind that virtualization technology is still evolving. One should deploy this technology internally or via on-demand services incrementally so he can monitor initial deployments, closely. This will enable him to validate that virtualization approach can clearly improve the performance of existing systems without becoming a single point of failure or disrupting any operations. Virtualization simplifies management while increasing scalability, but it is wise to take an incremental approach in order to ensure the success of your deployment. 

The problem presented here is a classic case of conflicting objectives that every company wishes to achieve: reduce footprint and at the same time provide flexibility to grow rapidly. Consolidation and virtualization are two important technologies that help to simplify IT infrastructure. An interleaved architecture enables the corporation to achieve greater levels of manageability, business continuance and also helps in managing the information throughout its lifecycle (ILM).

An important point to note is that virtualization and consolidation are not mutually exclusive options. Both of them can bring rich dividends in terms of lower TCO, reduced costs, better management capabilities and increased utilization when strategically deployed after careful planning.

The answer here is that they should do both. The CIO's concern for footprint reduction clearly calls for consolidation.  That is based on a business need.  However, there are other facts to be considered as well. First, there is an existing heterogeneous storage that contains critical data. Second, there is a need to protect investment from hardware perspective. Third, the company already has 70 TB of useable data and expects substantial growth in years to come. And, last but not the least, the issue of management complexity looms large. All these factors point towards the necessity to virtualize storage.

Hence, I would recommend that at the first available opportunity the company should plan and implement virtualization. This will bring all the existing storage devices under the virtualization fold, thereby pooling the storage capacities from across all of the storage devices. This will reduce the management overheads as well.

As a second step, they can start consolidating storage by moving all the critical data into fewer storage devices. Virtualization will enable this movement without causing any application downtimes. This will also help constructing a hierarchical storage structure by re-purposing the old storage (protection of investment). At the end of the exercise, they will achieve the consolidation and virtualization.

Why Should They Virtualize?
Effective virtualization of IT resources can help mask the complexity of the storage networks. This in turn increases resource utilization, improves personnel productivity and enables a tiered storage environment in which one can match the cost of storage to the value of data. For a biotech company, the propensity to accumulate lot of data is high.

Why Should They Consolidate?
Consolidating the storage environment should be a logical step in this company's efforts toward simplifying the infrastructure. Consolidated environments can be more resilient and more cost-effective to manage, reducing planned downtime and TCO.

As Told to Shipra Arora
shipraa@cybermedia.co.in

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