Overcoming data centre challenges saves money

Data centre consolidation, and occasionally migration, consumes significant time and resources and is fraught with risk. Despite these challenges, the potential benefits of these projects such as cost savings and security have lead many organisations to initiate these projects. There are four gaps that could leave your consolidation project at risk and the following article shows you how to avoid them.

The consensus among industry analysts suggests that the growth in IT equipment - servers estimated to be growing at 11% per year on average, and storage at a median rate of 22% - is straining data centres’ capacities in environmental control, power and space as organisations struggle to find a balance between sprawling low-density racks and super-hot and power-hungry high-density racks.

However, making significant changes to your data centre - such as a consolidation or migration - creates a risk for interrupting service. The more errors there are in the planning and implementation processes, the higher the risk that something will 'break' and disrupt the business.

Errors in the planning process due to incorrect or incomplete information can cause unknown dependencies to be broken, which can create outages. Errors in the implementation process can affect or even disrupt availability and performance.

Both of these can be extremely difficult to troubleshoot after the consolidation or move and the longer it takes to identify and resolve the problem, the longer the business suffers. The risk of these errors is extremely high because there are four components to data centre consolidation and migration that many organisations do not currently have:

• They don’t understand actual dependencies - even if dependencies were documented, they have likely changed over time as applications are upgraded and enhanced and new services deployed.
• They don’t understand actual usage - as organisations evolve, application and service usage evolves and this information can be extremely difficult to obtain.
• They don’t understand the impact of change - without knowledge of dependencies and usage, there is no way to know what will happen when a change is made.
• They don’t proactively identify post-change problems - when there is a disruption, the only way to find out about it is to wait for calls to the help desk.

Right tools, reduced risks

The planning process for consolidation projects is long, reliant on manual processes and therefore error prone. It is unfortunately too common that services are restored with performance and availability problems that cause business disruptions, and current tools do not go far enough to address the risks associated with data centre moves.

There are tools available that can help automate parts of the process, but they can leave gaps and can introduce other problems such as network performance degradation and high deployment costs. For example, scanning tools can help build inventories but they don’t show dependencies and they can slow down network performance. Agents can also help automate the process but only for the areas of the network where the agents are installed. The high cost of deploying agents effectively limits their scope.

Network behaviour analysis (NBA) systems are different. They can help organisations significantly reduce the risk associated with data centre consolidation and migration by directly addressing the four gaps that result in the highest risk.

NBA systems analyse network traffic to provide valuable information about the interactions of and dependencies between users, applications and systems. IT personnel and management use this critical information to alert them to meaningful change and inform infrastructure optimisation initiatives, enabling them to evolve the IT infrastructure to keep pace with the business.

By collecting network flow data and enhancing it with application and user identification and behavioural analytics, NBA systems present a complex infrastructure in a business context. Predefined and customisable analyses allow users to identify performance, availability and security issues before they disrupt business services. In addition, role-based presentations enable users across IT to access this data in a format tailored to their specific needs, supporting informed optimisation and change management decisions.

Improving the planning process

While there are other tools that can also provide asset discovery, NBA systems do this passively and pervasively. This means that the discovery process will not adversely affect performance and will happen across the entire network (or specified segments if enterprise-wide is not required) without requiring widespread deployment of agents or probes.

But having an inventory is not enough. You need to understand all of the user and business service dependencies on the network. This is critical for identifying the infrastructure components that need to move together to prevent disruption, which can be done by:

User-to-service dependencies - knowing which users or groups of users use which services. This information enables you to accurately plan changes based on who needs access to which services. It also helps you develop appropriate usage policies for the new environment.

Server-to-server dependencies - knowing which servers provide or consume which services. This information enables you to accurately move servers and applications without breaking them. It also helps you develop appropriate firewall policies that won’t disrupt service delivery.

An NBA system can help you to accurately chart - and understand - these dependencies, so you can avoid disruptions caused by a break in dependencies.

Minimising implementation disruption

Even with the best of planning, there is still risk of disruption during the implementation phase of a data centre consolidation or migration.

You need to be able to verify that the implementation was successful, or quickly identify any problems that could cause performance or availability problems. Too many organisations rely on the wait-and-see-if-anyone-complains approach.

NBA systems can help you verify that all systems and services are running as expected. Problems can be detected before users complain and the NBA system can provide you the information you need to quickly identify the cause and troubleshoot the problem. NBA systems can also provide valuable capabilities to the data centre on an ongoing basis after the completion of the consolidation or migration. They monitor activity on an ongoing basis and alert the help desk when performance and availability thresholds are crossed, when services or hosts appear or disappear, or when other customisable conditions are met.

Beyond consolidation

Data centres are fluid environments, and even major projects such as consolidations and moves are only a small part of an IT manager’s ongoing responsibilities. Investing in a robust NBA system can have far-reaching benefits for the life of the data centre, well beyond the specific consolidation benefits outlined above. For example, NBA systems can be used for:

• Application performance management - behavioural analytics combined with user-defined policies deliver the information and policies to proactively assure service delivery. Contextual alerts provide the information needed to quickly resolve issues.
• Improved security - extensive analytics identify hard-to-detect security threats such as zero-day attacks, ‘boutique’ malware and credentialed attacks.
• Visibility into WAN and virtualised environments - get full visibility into traditionally ‘blind’ environments such as optimised WANs and virtualised systems.
• Automated regulatory compliance - visibility and reporting capabilities support automated planning and policy enforcement and reduce the effort and cost required to support audits.
• CMDB discovery - discovery and dependency mapping that is pervasive, continuous and passive for coverage that is accurate, cost effective and enterprise wide.

Conclusion

Data centre consolidation and migration projects are fraught with risk. There are four components that organisations lack today, which significantly increase the risk of these projects: dependency information, usage information, change impact information and post-change problem identification. NBA systems provide these four key capabilities, enabling you to significantly reduce your risk by automating and improving the planning process and minimising disruption during implementation.

*Steve Dixon is head of Riverbed Technology’s operations in Australia and New Zealand.