Modius Data Center Blog

Modius OpenData has recently reached an intriguing milestone. Over half of our customers are currently running the OpenData® Enterprise Edition server software on virtual machines (VM). Most new installations are starting out virtualized, and a number of existing customers have successfully migrated from a hard server to a virtual one.

In many cases, some or all of the Collector modules are also virtualized “in the cloud,” at least when gathering data from networked equipment and network-connected power and building management systems. It’s of course challenging to implement a serial connection or tie into a relay from a virtual machine. It will be some time before all possible sensor inputs are network-enabled, so 100% virtual data collection is a ways off. Nonetheless, we consider greater than 50% head-end virtualization to be an important achievement.

This does not mean that all those virtual installations are running in the capital-C Cloud, on the capital-I Intranet. Modius has hosted trial proof-of-concept systems for prospective customers on public virtual machines, and a small number of customers have chosen to host their servers “in the wild.” The vast majority of our installations, both hardware and virtual, are running inside the corporate firewall.

Many enterprise IT departments are moving to a virtualized environment internally. In many cases, it has been made very difficult for a department to purchase new actual hardware. The internal “cloud” infrastructure allows for more efficient usage of resources such as memory, CPU cycles, and storage. Ultimately, this translates to more efficient use of electrical power and better capacity management. These same goals are a big part of OpenData’s fundamental purpose, so it only makes sense that the software would play well with a virtualized IT infrastructure.

There are two additional benefits of virtualization. One is availability. Whether hardware or virtual, OpenData Collectors can be configured to fail-over to a secondary server. The database can be installed separately as part of the enterprise SAN. If desired, the servers can be clustered through the usual high-availability (HA) configurations. All of these capabilities are only enhanced in a highly distributed virtual environment, where the VM infrastructure may be able to dynamically re-deploy software or activate cluster nodes in a number of possible physical locations, depending on the nature of the outage.

Even without an HA configuration, routine backups can be made of the entire virtual machine, not simply the data and configurations. In the event of an outage or corruption, the backed-up VM can be restored to production operation almost instantly.

The second advantage is scalability. Virtual machines can be incrementally upgraded in CPU, memory, and storage capabilities. With a hardware installation, incremental expansion is a time-consuming, risky, and therefore costly, process.  It is usually more cost-effective to simply purchase hardware that is already scaled to support the largest planned installation. In the meantime, you have inefficient unused capacity taking up space and power, possibly for years. On a virtual machine, the environment can be “right sized” for the system in its initial scope.

Overall, the advantages of virtualization apply to OpenData as with any other enterprise software. Lower up-front costs, lower long-term TCO, increased reliability, and reduced environmental impact.  All terms that we at Modius, and our customers, love to hear.

Speaking to a standing-room-only audience at the 2011 Uptime Symposium, Modius CEO Craig Compiano talked about the evolution of data center maturity: keeping pace with business needs. He introduced Modius’ Data Center Optimization Roadmap, which illustrates how optimization capabilities can be logically divided and accomplished in incremental steps. These steps deliver tangible benefits that continue to be leveraged as data center capabilities mature and become more relevant to the enterprise it supports.

The value of this roadmap immediately resonates with anyone who has worked on a long-term IT project—like managing a data center, for instance. All too often failures occur because the project team did not have the foresight to discern how their technology implementation might evolve over time. Consequently, early investments become outmoded in about 18 months, and the stakeholders are confronted with rapidly diminishing returns on their investment, if they are ever fully realized at all.

Instead of thinking about adding functionality and capacity in terms of incremental hardware (e.g., adding more servers), consider maximizing the capacity of your current investment, such that resources are more economically utilized within the existing infrastructure (e.g., identifying stranded capacity). Let’s take a closer look at the Data Center Optimization Roadmap to see how this can be accomplished.

Click Image to Zoom

Modius sees the operational maturity of the data center in three stages. At each stage, the operational maturity of the data center increases with the level of strategic relevance it provides to the enterprise.

Stage 1 is device-centric: Continuous optimization requires gaining visibility of data center assets—from racks to CRACs—including those assets at different sites. Whether assets are being monitored from across the hall or across the continent, granular visibility into each device is necessary to understand how resources are being utilized by themselves and within the larger system that is the network.

The only way to accomplish this is by measuring where, when, and at what rate power is being consumed. Device-level visibility enables us to eke every kW of power, to maintain safe yet miserly cooling levels, and to ensure every square foot of the data center floor is effectively being used. (Walking around the data center floor and spot checking metered readings is no longer effective.)

With this device-level insight, you can identify tactical ways of maximizing utilization or reducing energy consumption. And, as a result of more efficient use of resources, businesses can defer capital expenses.

Stage 2 is business user-centric: The second stage in advancing data center optimization requires the alignment of data center performance information with the business user’s requirements. (By business users, we mean either internal users, such as a department or a cost center at an enterprise, or external users, such as the customers at a co-lo facility.) This level of optimization can only be achieved once the mechanisms are in place to ensure visibility of data center assets by their end users, per Stage 1. For example, monitoring and decision support tools must have the ability to logically sort and filter equipment by business groups, rather than the physical location of equipment in a data center (e.g., racks, rows or zones). Likewise, these tools must be flexible to accommodate business-driven time periods, rather than time periods convenient only to data center operations.

By enabling this business user-centric view—that is, by making data center operational intelligence meaningful to the end-users of the data center—IT and Facility personnel can now engage business users in a productive dialog about how their business requirements impact data center resources. Now, data center managers can begin to optimize throughput and productivity in a way that is meaningful to the business, which significantly advances the strategic relevance of the data center to the enterprise.

Stage 3 is enterprise-centric:  The third stage in advancing data center optimization requires making available data center operational intelligence with enterprise business intelligence (BI).  We are not suggesting anything complicated or unwieldy, only that by including data center performance and resource data, enterprises can provide a more complete picture of the true cost of doing business. By aligning “back end” data center operations with “front end” enterprise business processes, we can understand how market pressures impact the infrastructure, which in turn helps improve business continuity and mitigate risk.

For example, product and marketing managers can now have visibility into the data center resources supporting their web services. They can drill down to their back-office systems and  account for the commissioning and decommissioning servers, plus the energy and human capital required to run and manage those services. Another example: supply chain managers or sourcing managers can now see where and at what rate energy is being consumed across data center operations, enterprise-wide. This enables them to make better decisions about where to source energy, in addition to forecasting how much is needed.

These improvements are evidenced by enterprise agility—enterprises that can rapidly respond to a dynamic market and economic pressures. It is at this stage of maturity in data center operations that a data center can have a profound impact on whether a business can compete and win in the marketplace. 

Different isn't always better, but better is always different.
Marina Thiry, Director of Product Marketing