The Rising Tide of Cloud Computing Lifts All Boats

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Paul Lidsky.

Today’s IT data center is at an interesting crossroads. Faced with typically flat annual budgets and increasing demands from the business, IT organizations have started looking for creative ways to not just meet the needs of the business, but to exceed them – while simultaneously reducing costs and simplifying IT’s overall management required.

A tall order? You bet. Impossible to achieve? It’s certainly a challenge if you plan to use the same legacy infrastructure many data centers have in place today. However, such goals become infinitely achievable as IT organizations begin their migration to private cloud computing. One of the most transformational movements to hit IT in a long time, most organizations will seek guidance for how to best unify servers, storage, and networking infrastructures. Most will also need help with addressing the cultural shifts that are inherent when virtualizing and unifying data center infrastructures and teams that were once disparate. The end result of this migration to private clouds benefits both the enterprises that embark on the transformation as well as the vendors and solution providers best positioned to assist them…

New Cloud-Centric Technologies and Methodologies
What are the underpinning technologies and methodologies that make up a private cloud-oriented data center? Virtual data centers (VDCs) often present an intermediate step and later serve as the foundation for building private clouds. VDCs extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to networks and storage. VDCs move organizations closer to related cloud-centric technologies and architectures like converged networks or unified computing.

A number of industry leaders have created unified computing reference architectures. Examples of these in the marketplace go by trade names like Vblock, FlexPod, VSPEX, and SRA. Such solutions successfully combine offerings from multiple vendors into one "unified" stack of compute, network and storage resources. These solutions have been pre-tested, integrated and pre-validated (in effect, "unified") for use in private cloud environments. Cisco is just one example of a company that has embraced the concept of unified computing and has been working closely with key vendors in storage and virtualization to bring these to market.

How Vendors and Solution Providers Benefit from the Move to Private Clouds
How is private cloud computing driving growth or increasing revenues in the marketplace? There are two sides to this equation: how these trends are impacting the IT vendor/solution provider community and how they are impacting enterprise customers themselves.

We’ll tackle the vendor/solution provider community first. In an overall flat growth market for IT components, those IT vendors, service providers and advisors who aligned themselves to this movement are now starting to reap the benefits in both customers and revenue. That tells us it’s no longer enough to be a vendor or reseller of disparate components or solutions. What many customers want, instead, is guidance on how best to move their data centers to a private cloud environment. Many will seek advice from professional services organizations regarding such things as unified governance, security, service definitions, policies, orchestration, life-cycle management, and migration strategies. This demand will drive an onslaught of new consulting service offerings. Beyond consulting services, specialized deployment, monitoring, and unified architecture support services will also be needed.

Overall, service and solution portfolios must be adapted. Expertise around unifying networks, storage, and servers must be elevated. Holistic vs. "silo’d’ views of the data center need to be in place in order to capitalize on this market opportunity.

At Datalink, we saw the trend toward VDCs, data center convergence and unification occurring four years ago. We decided to adapt our consulting, deployment, and support models to better help enterprise customers vet these technologies, help them plan for the change to VDCs, unified computing and private clouds, and help them subsequently migrate their systems as refresh cycles occurred or new business needs came up. This also led us to invest in gaining early expertise in unified computing and advanced network infrastructures.

Closer alignment to this movement has begun to bear fruit. We have since designed and deployed over 100 virtual data centers infrastructures for enterprise customers. Other vendors who’ve successfully embraced this trend have also noticed healthy revenue growth.

Case Studies: How Enterprise Companies Benefit from the Move to Private Clouds
Such growth in the vendor/provider community is spurred, of course, by first meeting the IT needs of mid and large enterprise customers. This leads us to the other side of our earlier equation: how trends toward private cloud computing are driving growth or revenues for enterprise customers themselves.

As companies embrace virtual data centers as they migrate to private cloud architectures, they reap greater agility, scalability, and efficiencies. They become, in effect, an excellent service provider that can now offer top-flight IT services, on demand, to both internal and external customers.

Done successfully, this metamorphosis often leads to the following benefits to the enterprise:

• Faster response to customers, changing priorities and changing market conditions
• Quicker turnaround for new prototypes and emerging ideas
• Rapid scaling and adjustment of systems to handle such things as exponential data growth, new mergers or business acquisitions
• The ability to offer better IT services at a lower overall cost to the business
• Greater ability to compete in the marketplace

Let’s take a look at a few real-world examples of these benefits in operation.

One example is the Cook County Health and Hospital System (CCHHS). This is a large county hospital system in the Midwest that needed to be both budget-conscious in their IT expenditures while also innovating and improving the way in which it delivered information and services to its patients, doctors and clinics. Datalink helped them plan and implement a unified virtual data center that not only boosted their IT efficiency but now allows physicians much faster access to patient data. CCHIS’s savings from the project is expected to reach seven figures.

In a contrasting example, Velocitor Solutions is a Datalink customer that provides mobile/wireless software as a service (SaaS) offerings to its transportation/logistics, direct-store-delivery, field service and field sales customers. After struggling with 200% annual growth in its data center and how best to address emerging needs of its business and new customers, Velocitor Solutions worked with Datalink to move to a more streamlined, unified virtual data center environment. The end result now enables Velocitor to more dynamically grow and adjust its environment to meet new customer demand, offer a better product to customers with a higher level of service delivery – all at a lower, bottom-line cost to Velocitor’s business.

Another customer, Hughes Network Systems’ North American division, wanted to speed up deployment of new applications and servers, as well as eliminate inefficient silos and general server sprawl. After working with Datalink to implement a unified FlexPod architecture and a virtual data center, Hughes was able to achieve greater efficiency in system deployment, growth, and on-going management. Hughes was also able to reduce new server provisioning time down to 15 minutes (from the prior three weeks) and obtain an ROI in the first six months of the project (as opposed to the originally projected 12-month ROI estimate).

How the Rising Tide of Private Clouds Lifts All Boats
While it’s often hard for IT organizations to tie specific company revenue gains to their own IT projects, I hope these customer examples give readers a glimpse into the obvious benefits and savings enterprises are starting to see as IT starts to embark on the journey to a more cloud-centric architecture.

In the end, those vendors and providers who successfully aid them in their journey also reap the benefits of this rising tide as well.