Technology Problems

Today's data centers are very complex and difficult to manage. It is hard to reconcile the value they deliver with what they cost and equally hard to deliver strategic business agility. Typically, when a large set of data center owners or managers are asked what their data center's problems are, they list the same small set of problems:

• Total cost of ownership (TCO) is too high.

  This usually refers to acquisition cost or an aggregate roll-up TCO, including technology costs, operational costs, and business costs. At the time of this writing, cost reduction is by far the highest priority.

• Utilization is low.

  Utilization of IT resources is often well below 25 percent to 30 percent.

• It is too complex.

  There are simply too many things to manage and too many relationships and interdependencies between those things.

• It is fragile.

  If someone touches something, it breaks.

• It is not dynamic enough.

  Services cannot be brought to the market fast enough, or IT cannot respond fast enough to changes in use or load.

These problems are interrelated. Poor utilization means a poor return on investment and increased cost. This is not only reflected in having to acquire more servers, storage, and networking equipment, but is also reflected in the ongoing costs of managing them, cooling them, and powering them. Complexity not only drives up the cost of management, but also results in fragility, which in turn drives controlling strategies involving static environments. These static environments hinder business agility and reduce utilization by preventing effective resource sharing.

These complex interrelationships make it unlikely that any of these problems can be effectively solved in isolation. Nonetheless, to deliver business success, these problems must be solved, and their root causes must be addressed while maintaining acceptable and predictable service levels.