Podcast Transcription
Assessments: Ammunition for Facts-Based Decision Making
Richard L. Sawyer, Senior Principal, HP Critical Facilities Services
Hello. Welcome to our podcast on Assessments – Ammunition for Facts-Based Decision Making. I’m Rick Sawyer, working for Critical Facilities Assurance Division of HP. We’d like to invite you to download the white paper on which this podcast is based. The white paper has significantly more information and detail than we can present today, but we look forward to your participation in downloading that.
Data centres are large, important investments that when properly designed, built and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise, yet the central focus of organisations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems, with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced and maintained. This invariably leads to facility infrastructure problems, such as thermal hot spots, lack of UPS, rack power, lack of redundancy, system overloading and other issues that threaten or prevent the realization of the return on the investment in the IT systems.
The solution is to fully understand the capacity of the data centre to support the mission critical loads – which we define as the IT architecture; the availability, which is the uptime potential of the data centre; and the condition of the key facility components and systems. Management then can make informed decisions based on facts, which leads to better direction of resources to close the known gaps between what is and what should be in systems reliability. Good management decisions rest on knowing what you have, what it can do, where investment gives the greatest returns.
A well designed facility infrastructure assessment provides the facts needed for informed decision making, which minimises waste in the form of misdirected investment, unrealised investment returns, and over or under sizing facility infrastructure systems needed to support the IT infrastructure.
Let’s discuss the basic problem. Many data centre managers and operators do not know the capacity, utilisation or availability of their data centres. This leads to the inability to support change in a business strategy, optimise the IT architecture with equipment refreshes or through consolidation and virtualisation. It also leads to the inability to meet corporate mandates for efficiency or to realise the return on investment that was used in justifying project upgrades. Missing any one of these business drivers can range from what we call a career changing event or lost opportunity to significantly contribute to the success in achieving a business strategy.
The solution to the problem is to base decisions on facts. A well designed and executed assessment supports the ability to respond to a change in the business environment. IT processing, systems and software are now an integral part of company offerings, either in distinct products – for example, software driving your digital camera – or services – for example, online, real time quotes from your car insurance company. The speed of business today is approaching real time, and change is the constant, not the exception. The ability to react to changes in the business environment quickly and effectively is not only a competitive advantage, but it is required in this day and age. Understanding your capacity and utilisation levels helps you to understand your margin, which is the resources a data centre needs to redirect and redeploy to effectively manage change.
The solution seeks to optimise the IT architecture. Let’s face it: the cost of computing has gone down markedly. More bytes of processing can be obtained per dollar invested than ever before. With this drop in actual processing cost has come a concurrent increase in the thirst of companies for more processing, as the software applications become key to business products and business efficiency. Instead of seeing a reduction in the size of the IT platforms due to increased processing capacity and ever smaller footprints, the number of platforms and systems has increased to meet business demands. This has led to large amounts of equipment with very low utilisation levels – 10-20 percent is not uncommon – which means a lot of equipment is being used ineffectively and inefficiently. The solution has been to consolidate the applications on servers to drive up the utilisation through virtualisation, and to refresh the equipment deployments, which drive up processing capacity even more efficiently.
Knowing the ability of a given data centre or data centres base to support these consolidation and optimisation efforts is key to realizing the value of the investment in attaining the project goals. A well designed and executed assessment will define both the strengths of a data centre infrastructure that can support the optimisation project and the gaps that must be closed as part of the project to ensure success. The solution also consists of meeting the mandates for efficiency. Going “green” is not just good business in the 21st Century. It is becoming a corporate, and eventually a government, mandate.
Efficiency of a data centre is ultimately the ratio of the electrical power being delivered to the data centre at the utility service to the electricity needed to run the IT infrastructure systems and platforms. This is where the real work of a data centre is being performed. Knowing what the utility capacity is through a power survey, and how much of it is being used for just the IT equipment, facilitates the ability to identify the systems which should be targets for efficiency improvement. If, for example, an assessment finds that the UPS system is significantly over sized for the size of the data centre equipment load, and there are multiples of UPS modules in the system supplying redundancy, the analysis of the data gathered in the survey might suggest shutting down one redundant module to achieve higher efficiency. This simple step may be counterintuitive, but the management decision to do so would be supported by the facts discovered and analyzed in the assessment.
The solution assists in realizing return on investment and projects. Sound business practices drive up investment decisions. IT systems and software represent significant allocations of company resources. Investments in products to improve, upgrade or consolidate almost always have a return on investment that justifies the management decision to approve the project. Frequently the projects focus on one aspect, such as the IT server investment or a software upgrade, without considering the data centre as an end to end information processing tool. Investments are justified and made on partial information, which can result in an unrealised return on investment when the new equipment or systems cannot be supported adequately by the facility infrastructure. The result is that equipment operates in a degraded mode because it is too hot – not enough cooling capacity – or insignificant redundancy – for example, no dual power source for dual cord loads – or insufficient space, no rack space that fits the manufacturer’s requirements. Due to the unforeseen constraints, the result is a loss in anticipated processing capacity or additional equipment to upgrade the facility infrastructure to meet the needs of the equipment, both of which act to drive down the ROI.
A well-designed and executed assessment provides the information for an accurate ROI because it will identify all the factors that need to be addressed in the investment to fully realise the anticipated benefit or the return.
So what are the elements of a good assessment? Assessments are targeted to multiple concerns: IT architecture, software, electrical power, cooling, security, maintenance practices. They all have common elements, which should be clear when their scopes of work are presented for consideration and purchasing or conducting an assessment service. These elements, all of which should be in the assessment report, are survey, analysis and recommendations. Let’s discuss each in turn.
The survey is the first element. A survey may take many forms, but it is essentially a review of information, systems, or site conditions to establish known, valid facts on which to base the analysis and recommendations necessary for management decision making. This may involve a high level review of existing site documentation, equipment specifications, software capabilities, facility or IT infrastructure systems. It is frequently conducted on site, although some surveys can be done remotely, given the power of the Internet and digital information processing. For example, a survey of facility control through the building control systems via remote access link. The results of the survey are the findings, which are the facts that are objective and generally agreed to on which the analysis will be performed.
An analysis is the second element. Once the survey establishes the facts, they can be held up to the scrutiny of interpretation and we begin the analysis portion. As with any human endeavor, this is where variances are encountered, since a useful analysis relies on the expertise and experience of the person or persons looking at the facts and drawing conclusions. The validity of the analysis is only assured if it is based on facts and an objective study by a qualified and experienced professional. The experience to do this is often found in house, the staff and management of the data centre, or it can be outsourced to a qualified consultant, but in either case, the implications of the facts, as discovered in the survey, must be understood and articulated in a useful manner. Through this process, gaps are discovered, qualified and quantified, as well as assets and attributes that may be leveraged to close the gaps.
The third element is the recommendations. An analysis leads to identifications of gaps, and the action plan to close those gaps constitutes the recommendation phase of a good assessment. How extensive the recommendations are is dictated by the scope of work of the assessment. This may range from high level recommendations that provide global guidance for strategy making by management to a detailed gap remediation on a rack by rack deployment for IT service personnel. It may include, if specified in the scope of work, a matrix of actions that range from easiest to most difficult to implement, and a cost of implementation with the attendant ROI calculations.
Let’s discuss the cost of assessments. Gathering facts, analyzing them and developing recommendations is an expensive process, whether it’s done internally or through consultants, because it involves high value human activity. While most managers focus on the hard dollar costs, since it directly influences budgets, there are soft costs that must be accounted for when using internal staff. The individuals most apt to bring validity and value to an internal assessment are most often the most experienced technical managers, who also tend to have heavy and important workloads. Diversion from daily duties bears three costs. The first is the direct cost of accounting for their time. The second is the time of the person who is charged with executing their responsibilities while they work on the assignments. And the third is the opportunity cost of their contributions while not being in their regular roles. These costs, while seemingly obtuse, are real, and a decision to conduct an assessment either internally or through a consultant should take them into account. Frequently, when these costs are weighed against the cost of obtaining an assessment through an external source, the decision is made to avoid the potential internal disruption and go with a consultant having the required expertise.
Consultants’ fees for conducting assessments reflect the hours of expertise needed to obtain and analyze the information, and to produce a report with recommendations. It frequently includes travel hours, administrative support cost and the facilitation cost of running any business – i.e., IT, management, finance and accounting, or what we would generally refer to as overhead. Costs typically range from $150-$300 per hour, depending on the expertise of the assigned professionals, which translates into a typical assessment cost which can range from $10,000 for basic reports to well over $100,000 for complex assignments with very detailed costing and implementation recommendations. That’s a lot of money.
So what are the benefits of doing an assessment? Weighed against the cost of performing an assessment, whether through internal or consulting resources, are the benefits, tangible and intangible. First, the as is state of the data centre is known. Utility capacities, existing load levels and margins for systems expansions are defined. Vulnerabilities, such as single points of failure, are understood, leading to the development of risk mitigation planning or the design of projects to reduce the threat of failure.
Second, the capabilities of the data centre are known. The capacity to support IT systems and operations is understood, along with any gaps that must be addressed to support existing or planned equipment. The chances of investing in unsupportable equipment or systems that will operate in a degraded mode are reduced or eliminated through addressing gaps in a methodical manner. The availability of the data centre is defined, and gaps between the availability as required by the business strategy and the availability inherent in the data centre design are quantified. Projects can be designed to address better availability and increase capacity based on real information.
Third, investments in improving the availability and capacity can be directed to those areas that will yield the greatest return. Operating from a factual base with clear analysis reduces guesswork and speculation and allows for a best practice solution for that particular data centre, supporting the assigned processing loads.
True ROI can be defined, because all of the gaps and variables have been identified through a careful analysis, which leads to cost effective recommendations. Given the cost of data centres, which range from $750-$3,000 per square foot today, and the value of the IT equipment that those data centres support, which is three to five times the data centre cost, the potential cost of misplaced investment is enormous, frequently in the tens of millions of dollars. Against the risk of investing in the wrong place, or at the wrong magnitude, an assessment is a good investment both in hard dollar value and in the intangible benefits as well. Reducing operational stress, moving from a reactive to a proactive management process, directing focus to problems that have high potential impact on business success are all intangible benefits that ultimately lead to tangible results.
A well designed and executed data centre assessment is a foundation for accruing these benefits.
In conclusion, consider this. Sound decision making in data centre management is a key to realizing the success of a business strategy. Decisions made objectively, based on valid facts and a thorough analysis, yield strong results by directing resources where they can achieve the greatest possible impact for the minimum expenditure of effort. Assessments are a powerful management tool in obtaining those facts, analyzing the gaps between what is and what should be and developing action plans to close those gaps by directing resources efficiently. In this manner, the goal of attaining the maximum level of availability is achieved with a thorough knowledge of the capabilities of the data centre to adapt to change when driven by a relentless business environment.
Assessments are good investments.
We invite you to contact your local HP Technical Sales Representative to discuss the problems you are facing in your data centre today, and how a facts based assessment can help you.
Thank you.
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