Continuing my post-week coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Wednesday morning started with another keynote session, followed by some break-out sessions.

Realities of IT Investment

Tighter budgets mean more business decisions. Future investments will come from cost savings. The analysts report that 77 percent of IT decisions are made by CFOs. Most organizations are spending less now than back in 2008 before the recession.

How we innovate through IT is changing. In bad times, risk trumps return, but only 21 percent of the audience have a formal "risk calculation" as part of their purchase plans.

Divestment matters as much as investment. Reductions in complexity have the greatest long-term cost savings. Try to retire at least 20 percent of your applications next year. With the advent of Cloud Computing, companies might just retire it and go entirely with public cloud offerings. Note that this graph the years are different than the ones above, in groups of half-decade increments.

It is important to identify functional dependencies and link your IT risks to business outcomes. Focus on making costs visible, and re-think how you communicate IT performance measurements and their impact to business. Try to change the culture and mind-set so that projects are not referred to as "IT projects" focused on technology, but rather they are "business projects" focused on business results.

Moving to the Cloud

Richard Whitehead from Novell presented challenges in moving to Cloud Computing. There are risks and challenges managing multiple OS environments. Users should have full access to all IT resources they need to do their jobs. Computing should be secure, compliant, and portable. Here is the shift he sees from physical servers to virtual and cloud deployments, years 2010 to 2015:

Richard considers a "workload" as being the combination of the operating system, middleware, and application. He then defines "Business Service" as an appropriate combination of these workloads. For example, a business service that provides a particular report might involve a front-end application, talking through business logic workload server, talking to a back-end database workload server.

To address this challenge, Novell introduces "Intelligent Workload Management", called WorkloadIQ. This manages the lifecycle to build, secure, deploy, manage and measure each workload. Their motto was to take the mix of physical, virtual and cloud workloads all "make it work as one". IBM is a business partner with Novell, and I am a big fan of Novell's open-source solutions including SUSE Linux.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cloud....

Bud Albers, CTO of Disney, shared their success in deploying their hybrid cloud infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the Disney brand for movies and theme parks, but may not aware that they also own ABC News and ESPN television, Travel cruises, virtual worlds, mobile sites, and deploy applications like Fantasy Football and Fantasy Fishing.

Two years ago, each Line of Business (LOB) owned their own servers, they were continually out of space, power and HVAC issues forced tactical build-outs of their datacenters. But in 2008, the answer to all questions was Cloud Computing, it slices and dices like something invented by [Ron Popeill], with no investment or IT staff required. However, continuing to ask the CFO for CAPEX to purchase assets that were only 1/7th used was not working out either. That's right, over 75 percent of their servers were running less than 15 percent CPU utilization.

The compromise was named "D*Cloud". Internal IT infrastructure would be positioned for Cloud Computing, by adopting server virtualization, implementing REST/SOAP interfaces, and replicating the success across their various Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Disney is no stranger to Open Source software, using Linux and PHP. Their [Open Source] web page shows tools available from Disney Animation studios.

At the half-way point, they had half their applications running virtualized on just 4 percent of their servers. Today, they run over 20 VMs per host and have 65 percent of their apps virtualized. Their target is 80 percent of their apps virtualized by 2014.

Bud used the analogy that public clouds will be the "gas stations" of the IT industry. People will choose the cheapest gas among nearby gas stations. By focusing on "Application management" rather than "VM instance management", Disney is able to seamlessly move applications as needed from private to public cloud platforms.

Their results? Disney is now averaging 40 percent CPU utilization across all servers. Bud feels they have achieved better scalability, better quality of service, and increased speed, all while saving money. Disney is spending less on IT now than in 2008,

UPMC Maximizes Storage Efficiency with IBM

Kevin Muha, UPMC Enterprise Architect & Technology Manager for Storage and Data Protection Services, was unable to present this in person, so Norm Protsman (IBM) presented Kevin's charts on the success at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC]. UPMC is Western Pennsylvania's largest employer, with roughly 50,000 employees across 20 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites. They have frequently been rated one of the best hospitals in the US.

Their challenge was storage growth. Their storage environment had grown 328 percent over the past three years, to 1.6PB of disk and nearly 7 PB of physical tape. To address this, UPMC deployed four IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER gateways (2 clusters) and three XIV storage systems for their existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environment. Since they were already using TSM over a Fibre Channel SAN, the implementation took only three days.

UPMC was backing up nearly 60TB per day, in a 15-hour back window. Their primary data is roughly 60 percent Oracle, with the rest being a mix of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and unstructured data such as files and images.

Their results? TSM reclamation is 30 percent faster. Hardware footprint reduced from 9 tiles to 5. Over 50 percent reduction in recovery time for Oracle DB, and 20 percent reduction in recovery of SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Epic Cache. They average 24:1 deduplication overall, which can be broken down by data category as follows:

• 29:1 Cerner Oracle
• 18:1 EPIC Cache
• 10:1 Microsoft SQL Server
• 8:1 Unstructured files
• 6:1 Microsoft Exchange

UPMC still has lots of LTO-4 tapes onsite and offsite from before the change-over, so the next phase planned is to implement "IP-based remote replication" between ProtecTIER gateways to a third data center at extended distance. The plan is to only replicate the backups of production data, and not replicate the backups of test/dev data.

The presentation and supporting case study details on this is available on the [IBM Literature Fullfilment] website.

The show floor closed after Wednesday's lunch, so many people made their last attempts to meet the folks at the booth.

technorati tags: IBM, CFO, Novell, WorkloadIQ, Disney, UPMC, ProtecTIER, TS7650G, deduplication, XIV, Kevin Muha, Norm Protsman, Bud Albers

Tags:  cfo xiv protectier workloadiq upmc kevin+muha novell deduplication bud+albers ibm norm+protsman ts7650g disney