SunIT Data Center Consolidation
Thursday Jan 10, 2008
SunIT's Data Center Consolidation Efforts
Sun IT is driving towards a consolidated and unified data center approach by 2015, while reducing overall operating costs, overall energy consumptions, and to eliminate all SunIT data center's. Did I just say 0 data centers? Yes! Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015.
Immediate question is... What definition of Data Center are you using? Well the definition I have been using is from Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), specifically TIA-942.
SunIT's 2013 Data Center targets will be to consolidate:
50% of SunIT's Data Center square footage
50% or more of total SunIT Data Center BTU's consumed
50% or more of total SunIT Data Center Power consumed
SunIT's 2015 Data Center goals will be:
0 SunIT Data Center's
Vision:
SunIT will move in an evolutionary manor from several generations of infrastructure, both technology and processes, to a model that is far more efficient with enabling factors like technology and IT Governance like processes. As SunIT reduces data centers due to higher utilization functionality, there will be a point proven by metrics, that SunIT can only become so efficient. At that point SunIT must progress from a service oriented architecture to more of a software as a service.
I will attempt to show in later blogs the benefits of becoming more efficient but with hard numbers. Also I will show in other blogs how SunIT can reach a level of efficiencies that will get us to our 2013 goal, but that 2015 goal will require some greater efforts. Specifically around the potential of a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
Why do this?
Reduced IT costs thanks to a major reduction in data center space, power, and cooling requirements.
Reduced IT costs and decreased time to implement projects thanks to a reduction in operations complexity for the data center staff.
Compliance with Data Center audit finding.
A foundation for sourcing components.
A transition to an “evolutionary change” infrastructure management style.
Alignment with application, security, business systems, and agent architectures.
How do we plan on getting to the 2013 goal?
There is an ample amount of technologies available to SunIT that will allow us to consolidate systems, storage, applications, etc.
Server Virtualization – Xen/xVM, Solaris Zones/LDOMS
Storage Consolidation – Tiered storage, NAS, etc
Application Consolidation – For SunIT its called IBIS
WAN acceleration – Another interesting technology in which its roots have been around for a while.
SaaS - Another blog but SaaS plays a huge role. SaaS and mashups are an interesting discussion
Currently SunIT uses Zones and LDOMS, I am implying that these solutions are enabling technologies to allow SunIT to achieve our goal of 0 data centers by 2015. The above bullet items are a simplified and I mean simplified view of IT efficiencies from a technology standpoint. There is then the evolutionary change in process and procedures that becomes a challenge. This introduction blog is to show folks that SunIT is actively doing data center consolidations and we do have strategies going out to 2015.
I will follow up with some more detailed blogs about our efforts, supporting technologies, SaaS industry, EDI vs Mashups, and many more.....
As always you can contact me direct at brian dot cinque at sun dot com