IT leaders within SMEs are supporting enterprises that have increasingly become distributed. Business globalization and a proliferation of mobile and remote workers are changing enterprise needs, as well as the demand for access to data center services. As a result, the future data center will be less about traditional centralization of data center assets and more about the management of decentralized service delivery.
Today's enterprises have learned that physical hardware matters less than TCO and risk management. Info-Tech sees that IT leaders focused on improving their organizational resilience, smoothing costs, and supporting global business objectives are creating a decentralized fabric of enterprise IT service delivery that:
- Insulates the enterprise from service disruptions if one location (through disaster or corporate transaction, etc.) is unavailable without placing delivery of mission-critical services at risk.
- Handles time-zone staffing issues for service delivery through normal working hours aligned with existing regional staff, instead of trying to build a "chase the sun" staffing model within a central core.
- Establishes mechanisms for service delivery as close to operational business units as TCO permits.
- Absorbs regional and line-of-business services requirements without pitting business units against each other.
- Centrally controls mission-critical IT elements that are defined as core to the business and where management mandates that no regional or line of business deviation is permissible.
The Value of Decentralization
A mid-sized manufacturing enterprise with global assembly operations demonstrated a 10% reduction in global IT spending over three years through service de-centralization. In addition to the preservation of cash, creating a decentralized fabric for successful delivery of IT services also provided the enterprise with the following benefits:
- Due to the relatively small size of the central IT staff, the organization was capable of delivering only a small set of required delivery competencies. Further, the company's global reach (along with an increasing dependency on secure, reliable IT functionality) meant that some business initiatives were put on hold or went completely unrealized. However, decentralizing consolidated aspects of the service delivery allowed IT to execute the business initiatives through distributed IT "competency centers" without additional headcount globally.
- Key elements of the organization's IT infrastructure had reached end-of-life status. By decentralizing its consolidated infrastructure, the enterprise was able to optimally realign service delivery by capitalizing on underutilized hardware capabilities already existing outside the primary data center.
- Adopting decentralized competency centers and automated infrastructure management tools provides the required framework for IT to monitor and manage enterprise infrastructure 24x7 without increasing staff.
This particular example illustrates how infrastructure consolidation and the required automation toolsets lay the ground work for the decentralization.
Consolidation Enables Decentralization
Successful IT leaders have learned that the technologies, tools and processes available for the consolidation of infrastructure also support the decentralization of service delivery.
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Elements that Enable Consolidation |
Elements that Enable Decentralization of Service Delivery |
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Server / Storage Hardware |
- Industry standard 64-bit server performance.
- Physical and logical partitioning.
- Mature virtualization techniques.
- Hot swap techniques.
- Low-cost blade servers.
- Storage consolidation.
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- Virtualization management software.
- Blade and rack-mounted management capabilities with integrated communications facilities.
- Storage resource management (SRM) tools.
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Data Communications |
- Decreased communication costs.
- Thin-client architectures.
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- Increased availability of WAN backbones.
- Management and operation tools.
- Future 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) availability from carriers.
- Machineless PCs
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Infrastructure Management Software |
- The ability to patch, configure, monitor and deploy server images through a single centralized console.
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- Agentless monitoring of applications, servers, and storage network devices.
- Monitoring of application transaction availability and response times.
- Web-portal displays of tracked performance metrics against Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Automated hardware and software discovery.
- Asset discovery and tracking.
- Software distribution and remote control of desktops or servers.
- Centralized change management console with inventory tracking of items affected by changes.
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Process Frameworks |
- Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) comprehensive operations guidance to achieve reliability, availability, and manageability on consolidated Microsoft platforms.
- COBIT provides the basic structure for IT controls to reduce risk, improve efficiencies and align IT with the business.
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- IT service management platforms such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) serve as an adaptable template to deliver distributed services.
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) process maturity focuses IT and the business on service delivery rather than technical infrastructure.
- COBIT 4.0 provides guidance for the roles, responsibilities, accountabilities and metrics required to deliver distributed services.
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Recommendations
- Wrap-up server and storage consolidation projects quickly. Renew the priority for any remaining server and storage consolidation initiatives. Simple server consolidation results in reducing server TCO by up to 40%. For more information, refer to the McLean report research note, "High ROI for Server Consolidation." Furthermore, the technologies, tools and processes required for the consolidation of infrastructure lay the groundwork for the de-centralization of service delivery.
- Rethink infrastructure boundaries. Optimal consolidation of infrastructure includes the unused hardware capabilities located outside the centralized data center as part of the available pool. Take a broad view to identify all the disk and server capacity available to the enterprise.
- Redesign operations practices and procedures. The ultimate endgame is for the management of service delivery as close to operational business units as TCO permits. Adopting distributed IT competency centers with the aid of an established service management framework is crucial for success. However, this is a long-term strategy that may take three to five years to realize its full potential. Focus on finding the organizational points of pain and fighting one battle at a time will be a more successful strategy than attempting massive, wholesale changes.
Bottom Line
The technologies, tools, and processes available to data centers today work as much for the decentralization of service delivery as they do for consolidation of infrastructure. Successfully addressing the future needs and demands for access to data center services requires IT leaders to begin planning for the creation of a distributed fabric of enterprise IT service delivery.
