Standardisation Of Datacentres Prevents Downtime

Standardisation of datacentres is the way to prevent downtime and thus loss of productivity. Data volumes are growing 50% and more year on year and information and applications have to be protected and made available at all times. The increasing volume of data is driving complexity and storage devices, virtual machines, multiple server platforms, applications and databases, all with their own proprietary tools, are making it further complex.

Sriram Iyer, director, Data Centre Management Group, Symantec speaks to Biztech2.0 on the importance of standardisation for datacentres and highlights the CIO’s role towards achieving that.

How do enterprises benefit from standardisation of datacentres?

Standardisation reduces complexity by replacing dozens of point tools used to manage datacentre infrastructure with Veritas datacentre software. It reduces hardware and software costs. With fewer tools, the time to get administrators trained and skilled should decrease. It maximises asset utilisation with the development of better datacentre control and effective planning for capacity to maximise server and storage utilisation. It reduces downtime associated with complexity and improves recovery time and recovery point objectives while reducing costs and improving productivity. It also enables heterogeneous platform and storage support by use of a common set of tools on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, Windows, and VMware operating system platforms, as well as multiple storage vendors.

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What should be the top priorities of a CIO while working towards the standardisation of datacentres?

Standardising a datacentre has to be a very strategic initiative as CIOs want IT to turn from a cost centre into a driver of competitive advantage. Given this scenario, CIOs have to take a business-centric view of how resources are managed and get clarity on the objective to standardise. Once there is a clear understanding of the result and objective, three key priorities need to be addressed.

The first being vendor evaluation; before handing over the reins of your system to an external agency it is important to do a thorough check on the vendor. Second being cost, as 70% of IT budgets are spent simply to keep the existing environment up and running. Hence, every new investment has to be made considering its cost effectiveness in the short and medium term. Third is the standardisation technology adopted should be proactive and solve problems automatically and intelligently with minimal human intervention. This clearly indicates that decision-making capabilities should be built in the technology. These seamless tools should also be tightly integrated with an overall system and network management solution.

How is Symantec planning to evangelise standardisation in the industry?

Enterprise datacentres are challenged with shrinking budgets, increasing demand for storage and more stringent availability requirements for mission critical applications. We at Symantec enable IT administrators to bridge the gap between being a cost centre to becoming the drivers of competitive advantage. Hence, we engage with some of our largest customers and partners with to successfully embrace the datacentre roadmap through standardisation. As customers begin to see the benefits of standardising on Symantec, both from a technology standpoint and a financial standpoint we believe that our customers will become our best reference and evangelists.

How can Symantec help reduce complexity?

Symantec helps design and implement a heterogeneous infrastructure management system that enables standardisation across the enterprise. This improves the quality of IT services and improves availability and responsiveness. It also improves governance, and reduced operating and capital expenditures. Standardising the software environment utilising Symantec products, technologies and services we focus on accelerating datacentre consolidation, server virtualisation and utilisation, storage utilisation and recovery, resulting in reduced management complexity in the datacentre environment.

Mention few offerings from Symantec to support standardisation.

Symantec provides deep expertise and a broad spectrum of products and services to efficiently manage enterprise storage resources.

The Command Central storage can help find orphaned TB of storage. This helps in improving operational efficiencies in the datacentre and also helps defer expensive storage investments. Storage Foundation provides a complete solution for heterogeneous online storage management. It increases operational efficiency with comprehensive visibility and centralised management of applications, servers and storage across multiple hosts and increases storage utilisation across heterogeneous operating systems and storage arrays. This allow companies to free their data from technology changes by allowing dynamic migration of data to different tiers of storage and perform seamless data migrations across different server architectures.