How to maximise Cloud efficiencies in the data centre using people, process and technology

As IT departments undergo one of the largest transformations since the introduction of the personal computer, today’s data centres are having to evolve to keep pace. This is especially critical as IT is becoming more essential to almost every business function. Enterprises of all sizes are turning to every technology and best practice at their disposal to streamline process and reduce inefficiencies, and for many this means two things primarily: virtualisation and cloud computing.

Saving time, increasing productivity and streamlining processes are goals every IT department aspire to achieve, and cloud and virtualisation provide the means for them to extend these efficiencies across the wider business. A main attribute of cloud technology that helps achieve these aims is its scalability and the speed at which it enables new workloads to be deployed or re-sized based on demand. This means that for growing businesses, cloud provides a great way to quickly scale up or down, while providing established businesses with the opportunity to improve tired and outdated infrastructure.

An efficient IT environment embraces a number of new concepts and technologies. Firstly, hybrid-cloud -with environments that span on-premise systems and the public cloud, usually starting with backup and archive, disaster recovery, test environments and static file hosting with CDN access for web properties.

Secondly, the data centre, should embrace processes and technologies such as virtualisation and service catalogs to enable offering technology as a service, automation wherever possible, and self-service. This means resources such as virtual machines can be easily managed through the use of a self-service portal to provision them automatically online, with a variety of operating systems, service levels and sizes to choose from with little or no interaction from the IT department.

In order to accommodate the transformation of technology, day-to-day responsibilities within the IT department need to change. The duties commonly associated with today’s IT pros are beginning to evolve, as the combination of virtual infrastructure, automation and self-service cements itself as the preferred vehicle for delivering computing services to end users. As such, it is important that IT pros adapt accordingly to two significant trends in order to maximise the efficiency gains the technology achieves.

By embracing these technologies and processes, the role of IT in the data centre starts to shift. From manual tasks such as provisioning, resource management and troubleshooting to managing automation, monitoring performance and optimising costs. Silos disappear when the focus shifts to applications and overall system performance instead of technology components with a view on a particular part of the stack.

The role of the Database Administrator (DBA) in particular also shifts as more applications move into the public cloud. Historically, the DBAs have less involvement in infrastructure than other IT teams working silos. But understanding the capabilities of the platform may help them to be more efficient and automated. In today’s environment, the DBA also needs to be knowledgeable about the infrastructure that their data is going to be run on - be it the functionality, and the capacity and the management of the cloud platform or how to move data in or out. DBAs also need an active participant in the management and optimisation of overall system uptime, performance and efficiency.

A management platform should be in place to allow IT pros to eliminate the mundane, repetitive administrative tasks being performed manually today. Less critical issues will be handled by configuration management tools, cloud management platforms or applications that are cloud-aware, control their own hardware, and can heal themselves autonomously.

With cloud applications scaling to accommodate maximum performance and efficiency in a service-oriented mindset, monitoring software should also be able to look at aggregate performance metrics that are meaningful and require the IT pro’s attention to situations that expressly require the involvement of a human being, instead of alerting for resource contentions and individual component issues.

This mind shift for IT hinges on full-stack monitoring that gives all members of a team a shared view into system performance and the role of each of the services or technology components in delivering performance, presenting fully integrated end-to-end viewpoints, so IT pros can start at the top of the stack (applications), the bottom of the stack (data storage) or somewhere in the middle and traverse in any direction. Finally, this will all help leverage visual presentation of the entire infrastructure correlated in real-time, allowing the diagnosis of an end user reported issue in minutes rather than the hours or days sometimes required in today’s environments.

Moving to a more efficient data centre model will not and should not happen overnight. Performance should be continuously evaluated from a number of perspectives, including the technological tools in use, the skills and straining provided to staff, through to the governance of the data centre itself. Application development, business charge-backs and overall how the organisation looks at IT needs to be re-drawn, with new processes, metrics and objectives. This will produce greater levels of flexibility, staffing efficiencies, and enable IT pros to spend a greater amount of time on strategic IT investments in line with the organisation’s ambitions.