Developing an Action Plan is critical to defining your goals and objectives for the "Data Center is the Computer" project.
The Action Plan should include an overview of what you expect the end state or vision to be (What does done look like). While I'm not a big believer in being "finished", it is always wise to have a target that is measurable in it's completion.
Ensure you've captured baseline information (previous post) that will allow you to report and market your improvements.
Create a team - The data center and it's systems aren't generally owned by any one person, you're going to need the help of the following folks;
- Application managers
- CIO
- CFO
- Facilities
- Green or Sustainability team
There are unique ways of gaining each groups support, you can't use the same message with the CFO that you used to win over the application team.
Each of these groups has a stake in the current environment and will either put a drag on your project or facilitate it moving forward, but it will all depend on how you get them involved.Review your environment for opportunities - My first recommendation here is to run something like VMware's Capacity Planner against your environment to obtain up-to-date utilization of servers. This utilization can help drive your choices for consolidation and virtualization and the information can be an argument winner.
Review your network infrastructure - How will your future environment be supported by the current network. In the long run even a fairly minor improvement in server utilization rates will overcome any short term costs for network upgrades. You should consider the technologies that your team is most suited to support and or have the most flexibility for adapting to a "Virtualized" environment. At a high level you should be considering 4GB or better connectivity so that you can get the most value out of a network consolidation and improve the performance of consolidated infrastructure.
Review your storage infrastructure - If you don't have a SAN solution in place, now is the time to consider one. The benefits of having a SAN back end for your virtualized environment are overwhelming. You don't have to do Fiber Channel, but you really do need to have the SAN.
The strategy here is not a simple one, but if approached correctly it will create a great starting point on your road to Nirvana. To me Nirvana is when your data center is truly managed and run like one large computer with lots of mostly commoditized components.
- Your front end is expandable/retractable processor and memory capability that can be measure as a total, not by individual servers or applications
- Your middle is a single network that handles basic ethernet and FCoE or iSCSI
- Your back end is a virtualized multi-tier storage environment that allows you to move servers from one location to another dynamically and to allocate space based on the total available, not on some pre-determined value. Your storage environment should also allow for the remote replication of data and largely tapeless backups.
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