1. Fast-Changing Demands on Data Centers Drives the Need
for Automated Data Center Infrastructure Management
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how organization need to deal with the impact that IT
and big data is having on data centers and how DCIM can help.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on improving the management and automation
of data centers. As data centers have matured and advanced to support unpredictable workloads
like hybrid cloud, big data, and mobile applications, the ability to manage and
operate that infrastructure efficiently has grown increasingly difficult.
Gardner
At the same time, as enterprises seek to rationalize their applications and data,
centralization and consolidation of data centers has made their management even
more critical at ever larger scale and density.
So how do enterprise IT operators and planners keep their data centers from spinning out of
control despite these new modern requirements? How can they leverage the best of converged
systems and gain increased automation, as well as rapid analysis for improving efficiency?
We’re here to pose such questions to two experts from HP Technology Services, and thereby
explore how new integrated management capabilities are providing the means for better and
automated data center infrastructure management or DCIM.
Here now to explain how disparate data center resources can be integrated into
broader enterprise management capabilities and processes, we’re here with Aaron
Carman. He is HP Worldwide Critical Facilities Strategy Leader. Welcome to
BriefingsDirect, Aaron.
Aaron Carman: It's pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Gardner: We’re also here with Steve Wibrew. He is HP Worldwide IT Management Consulting
Strategy and Portfolio Lead. Welcome, Steve.
Steve Wibrew: Hello, and glad to be here. Thank you.
Gardner: Aaron, let me start with you. From a high level, what’s forcing these changes in data
center management and planning and operations? What are these big new requirements? Why is
it becoming so difficult?

2. Carman: It's a very interesting question that people are actually trying to deal with. What it
comes down to is that in the past, folks were dealing with traditional types of services that were
on a traditional type of IT infrastructure.
Standard, monolithic-type data centers were designed one off. In the past few years, with the
emergence of cloud and hybrid service delivery, as well as some of the different solutions around
convergence like converged infrastructures, the environment has become much more dynamic
and complex.
Hybrid services
So, many organizations are trying to grapple with, and deal with, not only the traditional silos
that are in place between facilities, IT, and the business, but also deal with how they are going to
host and manage hybrid service delivery and what impact that’s going to have on
their environment.
Carman
It’s not only about what the impact is going to be on rolling out new
infrastructure solutions like converged infrastructures from multiple vendors,
but how to increasingly provide more flexibility and services to their end users
as digital services.
It's become much more complex and it's a little bit harder to manage, because there are many,
separate types of tools that they use to manage these environments, and it has continued to
increase.
Gardner: Steve, do you have anything more to offer in terms of how the function of IT is
changing. I suppose that with ITIL v3 and more focus on a service-delivery model, even the goal
of IT has changed.
Wibrew: That's very true. We’re seeing a trend in the change and role of IT to the business.
Previously IT was a cost center, an overhead to the business, to deliver the required services.
Nowadays, IT is very much the business of an organization, and without IT, most organizations
simply cease to function. So IT, its availability and performance, is a critical aspect of the
success of the business.
Gardner: What about this additional factor of big data and analysis as applied to IT and IT
infrastructure. We’re getting reams and reams of data that needs to be used and managed. Is that
part of what you’re dealing with as well, the idea that you can be analyzing in real-time what all
of your systems are doing and then leverage that?
Wibrew: That’s certainly a very important part of the converged-management solution. There’s
been a tremendous explosion in the amount of data, the amount of management information,
that's available. If you narrow that down to the management information associated with
operating management and supporting data centers from the facility to the applications, to the

3. platforms right up to the services to the business, clearly that's a huge amount of information
that’s collected or maintained on a 24×7 basis.
Wibrew
Making good, intelligent decisions on that is quite a challenge for many
organizations. Quite often, we would be saying that people still remain in
isolated silo teams without good interaction between the different teams. It's a
challenge trying to draw that information together so businesses can make
intelligent choices based on analytics of that end-to-end information.
Gardner: Aaron, I’ve heard that word "silo" now a few times, siloed teams,
siloed infrastructure, and also siloed management of infrastructure. Are we now talking about
perhaps a management of management capabilities? Is that part of your story here now?
Added burden
Carman: It is. For the most part, most organizations, when faced with trying to manage these
different areas, facilities IT and service delivery, have come up with their own set of run books,
processes, tools, and methodologies for operating their data center.
When you put that onto an organization, it's just an added burden for them to try to get vendors
to work with one another and integrate software tools and solutions. What the folks that provide
these solutions have started to realize is that there needs to be an interoperability between these
tools. There has never really been a single tool that could do that, except for what has just
emerged in the past few years, which is DCIM.
HP really believes that DCIM is a foundational, operational tool that will, when properly
integrated into an environment, become the backbone for operational data to traverse from many
of the different tools that are used to operate the data center, from IT service management
(ITSM), to IT infrastructure management, and the critical facilities management tools.
Gardner: I suppose yet another trend that we’re all grappling with these days is the notion of
things moving to as-a-service, on-demand, or even as a cloud technology. Is that the case too
with DCIM, that people are looking to do this as a service? Are we starting to do this across the
hybrid model as well?
Carman: Yes. These solution providers are looking towards how they can penetrate the market
and provide services to all different sizes of organizations. Many of them are looking to a
software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to provide DCIM. There has to be a very careful analysis of
what type of a licensing model you're going to actually use within your environment to ensure
that the type of functionality you're trying to achieve is interoperable with existing management
tools.
Gardner: Steve, do you have anything more to offer in terms of where this is going, perhaps
over time on that services delivery question?

4. Wibrew: Today, clients have a huge amount of choice in terms of how they provision and obtain
their IT. Obviously, there are the traditional legacy environments and the converged systems and
clients operate in their own cloud solutions.
Or maybe they’re even going out to external cloud providers and some interesting dynamics that
really do increase the complexity of where they get services from. This needs to be baked into
that converged solution around the interoperability and interfacing between multiple systems. So
IT is truly a business supporting the organization and providing end-to-end services.
Gardner: Well I can certainly see why IDC recently named 2014 is the year of DCIM. It seems
that the timing now is critical. If you let your systems languish in legacy status for too long, you
won’t be able to keep up with the new demand. If you don’t create management-of-management
capabilities, you won’t be able to cross these boundaries of service delivery and hybrid models
and you certainly won’t be able to exploit the analysis change from all the data.
So it seems to me that this is really the time to get on this before you lose ground and/or can’t
keep up with the modern requirements. What’s happening right now in terms of HP and how it’s
trying to help organizations obtain do some sooner rather than later? Let me start with you,
Aaron.
Organizations struggling
Carman: Most organizations are really struggling to introduce DCIM into their environment,
since at this point, it’s really viewed as more as a facilities-type tool. The approach from different
DCIM providers varies greatly on the functions and features they provide in their tool. Many
organizations are struggling just to understand which DCIM product is best for them and how to
incorporate into a long term strategy for operations management.
So the services that we brought to market address that specifically, not only from which DCIM
tool will be best for their environment, but how it fits strategically into the direction they want to
take from hosting their digital services in the future.
Gardner: Steve, I think we should also be careful not to limit the purview of DCIM. This is not
just IT. This does include facilities, hybrid and service delivery model, management capabilities.
Maybe you could help us put the proper box around DCIM. How far and why does it go or
should we narrow it so that it doesn’t become deluded or confused?
Wibrew: Yeah, that’s a very good question, an important one to address. What we’ve seen is
what the analysts have predicted. Now is the time, and we’re going to see huge growth in DCIM
solutions over the next few years.
DCIM has really been the domain of the facilities team, and there’s traditionally been quite a
lack of understanding of what DCIM is all about within the IT infrastructure management team.

5. If you talk to lot of IT specialists, the awareness of DCIM is still quite limited at the moment. So
they certainly need to find out more about it and understand the value that DCIM can bring to IT
infrastructure management.
I understand that features and functions do vary, and the extent of what DCIM delivers will vary
from one product to another. It’s very good certainly around the facilities space in terms of
power, cooling, and knowing what’s out on the data center floor. It’s very good at knowing
what’s in the rack and how much power and space has been used within the rack.
It’s very good at cable management, the networks, and for storage and the power cabling. The
trend is that DCIM will evolve and grow more into the IT management space as well. So it’s
becoming very aware of things like server infrastructure and even down to the virtual
infrastructure, as well, getting into those domains.
DCIM will typically have work protectabilities for change in activity management. But DCIM
alone is not the end-to-end solution, and we realized the importance of the need to integrate it
with the full ITSM solutions and platform management solutions. A major focus, over the past
few months, is to make sure that the DCIM solutions do integrate very well with the wider IT
service-management solutions to provide that integrated end-to-end holistic management
solution across the entire data-center ecosystem.
Gardner: Aaron, when I hear Steve talking about this more general inclusionary description of
DCIM, it occurs to me that this isn’t something you buy in a box. This is not just a technology or
a product that we’re talking about. We’re talking about methodology. We’re talking about
consulting, expertise, and tribal knowledge that’s shared. Maybe you could help us better
understand not only HP’s approach to this, but how one attains DCIM. What is the process by
which one becomes an expert in this?
Great variation
Carman: With DCIM being a newer type solution within the industry, I want to be very
careful about calling folks DCIM specialists. We feel that we have a very great knowledge of the
solutions out there. They vary so greatly.
It takes a collaborative team of folks within HP, as well as with the client, to truly understand
what they’re trying to achieve. You could even pull it down to what types of use cases they’re
trying to achieve for the organization, which tool works best and in interoperability and
coordination with the other tools and processes they have.
We have a methodology framework called the Converged Management Framework that focuses
on four distinct areas for a optimized solution and strategy for starting with business goals and
understanding what the true key performance indicators are and what dashboards are required.

6. It looks at what the metrics are going to be for measuring success and couples that with
understanding organizationally who is responsible for what types of services we provide as an
ultimate service to our end user. Most of the time, we’re focusing on the facilities in IT
organization.
Also, those need to be aligned to the process and workflows for provisioning services to the end
users, supported directly by a system’s reference architecture, which is primarily made up of
operational management tools and software. All those need to be supported by one another and
purposefully designed, so that you can meet and achieve the goals of the business.
When you don’t do that, the time it takes for you to deliver services to your end user lengthens
and costs money. When you have separate tools that are not referencing single points of data,
then you’re spending a lot of time rationalizing and understanding if you have the accurate data
in front of you. All this boils down to not only cost but having a resilient operations, knowing
that when you’re looking at a particular device or setup devices, you truly understand what it’s
providing end to end to your users.
Gardner: Steve, it seems to me that this is a little bit of a chameleon. People who have a certain
type of requirement can look at DCIM, some of the methodologies and framework, and get
something unique or tailored.
If someone has real serious energy issues, they’re worried about not being able to supply
sufficient energy. So they could approach DCIM from that energy vantage point. If someone is
building a new data center, they could bring facilities planning together with other requirements
and have that larger holistic view.
Am I reading this right? Is this sort of a chameleon or an adaptive type of affair, and how does
that sort of manifest itself in terms of how you deliver the service?
Wibrew: If you think about the possibilities in the management of facilities, the IT
infrastructure, right up to services of a business, end to end, it’s very large and very, very
complex. We have to break it down into small or more manageable chunks and focus on the key
priorities.
Most-important priorities
So we look at the trans-organization, work with them to identify to them what their most
important priorities are in terms of their converged-management solution and their journey.
It’s heavily structured around ITSM and ITIL processes, and we’ve identified some great
candidates within ITIL for integration between facilities in IT. It’s really a case of working out
the prioritized journey for that particular client. Probably one of the most important integrations
would be to have a single view of the truth of operational data. So it would be unified asset
information.

7. CMDBs within a configuration management system might be the very first and important
integration between the two, because that’s the foundation for other follow-on services until you
know what you’ve got, it’s very difficult to plan, what you need in the future in terms of
infrastructure.
Another important integration that is now possible with these converged solutions is the
integration of power management in terms of energy consumption between the facilities and the
IT infrastructure.
If you think about managing the power consumption of things like efficiency of the data center
with PoE, generally speaking, in the past, that would be the domain of the facilities team. The IT
infrastructure would simply be hosted in the facility.
The IT teams didn’t really care about how much power was used. But these integrated solutions
can be more granular, far more dynamic around energy consumption with much more
information being collected, not just at a facility level but within the racks and in the powerdistribution units (PDUs), and in the blade chassis, right down to individual service.
We can now know what the energy consumption is. We can now incentivize the IT teams to take
responsibility for energy management and energy consumption. This is a great way of actually
reducing a client’s carbon foot print and energy consumption within the data center through these
integrated solutions.
Gardner: Aaron, I suppose another important point to be clear on is that, like many services
within HP Technology Services, this is not just designed for HP products. This is an ecumenical
approach to whatever is installed in terms of product facility management capability. I wonder if
you could explain a bit more HP’s philosophy when it comes to supporting the entire portfolio.
Carman: HP’s professional services we’re offering in this space are really agnostic to the final
solution. We understand that a customer has been running their environment for years and has
made investments into a lot of different operational tools over the years.
That’s a part of our analysis and methodology, to come in and understand the environment and
what the client is trying to achieve. Then we put together a strategy, a roadmap of different
products, that will help them achieve their goals that are interoperable.
Next level
We continue to transform them to the next level of abilities or capabilities that they are
looking to achieve, especially around how they provision services and help them become, at the
end, most likely a cloud-service provider to their end users, where heavy levels of automation are
built in, so that they can get digital services to their end users in a much shorter period of time.

8. Gardner: One of the things I really like in talking about technology is not just talking about
technology, but the way it’s being used, to show rather than just tell. I’m hoping that either of
you, Aaron or Steve, have some use cases or examples where this has been put to good use -DCIM processes, methodologies, the über-holistic approach, and planning right down to the
chassis included.
I hope you can not only discuss a little bit about by who and how this is being done, but what
they get for it. Are there any data points we can look to that tell us that, when people do this right
-- and here are some folks that have done it right -- what they got back for their efforts. Why
don’t we start with you, Aaron?
Carman: HP has been offering operational services for years. So this is nothing new to HP, but
traditionally, we’ve been providing these services in silos. When we reorganized ourselves just
recently and really started to put together the IT-plus-facilities store, it quickly became very
apparent that from an operations management perspective, a lot of the services we provide really
needed to have a lifecycle approach and be brought together.
So we have a lot of different examples. We’ve rolled out different forms of convergedmanagement consulting to other clients, and there are a lot of different benefits you get from the
different tools that are a part of the overall solution.
You can point to DCIM and a lot of the benefits you get from understanding your assets and
being able to decommission those more quickly, understanding the power relationship, and then
understanding many different elements of tying the IT infrastructure chain to the facilities chain.
In the end, when you look at all these together, it’s going to be different for every client. You
have to come in and understand the different components that are going to make up a return on
investment (ROI) for the client based upon what they’re willing to do and what they’re trying to
achieve.
In the end, we’re providing folks with a means of optimizing how they provision services, which
is going to lower their cost structures. Everyone is looking to lower cost, but also increase
resiliency, as well as then possibly defer large capital expenditures like expanding data centers.
So many of these different outcomes could apply to a customer that engages with converged
management.
Gardner: I realize this is fairly new. It was just on January 23 that HP announced some new
services that are converged-management consulting, and that management framework was
updated with new technical requirements. You have four new services organized with the
management workshop, roadmap, design implementations, and so forth.
So this is fairly new, but Steve Wibrew, is there any instance where you’ve worked with some
organization and that some of the really powerful benefits of doing this properly have shown
through? Do you have any anecdotes you can recall of an organization that’s done this and
maybe some interesting ways that it’s benefited them, maybe unintended consequences?

9. Data-center transformation
Wibrew: I certainly can give some real examples. Where I've worked in the past with some
major projects for transformation within the data center, we would be deploying large amounts of
new infrastructure within the data center.
The starting point is to understand what’s there in the first place. I’ve been engaged with many
clients where if you ask them about inventory, what’s in the data center, you get totally different
answers from different groups of people within the organization. The IT team wants to put more
stuff into the data center. The facilities team says, “No more space. We’re full. We can’t do that.”
I found that when you pull this data together from multiple sources and get a consistent feel of
the truth, you can start to plan far more accurately and efficiently. Perhaps the lack of space in
the data center is because there may be infrastructure that’s sitting there, powered on, and not
being utilized by anybody.
It’s a fact that we’re redundant. I’ve had many situations where, in pulling together a consistent
inventory, we can get rid of a lot of redundant equipment, allowing space for major initiatives
and expansion projects. So there are some examples of the benefits of consolidated inventory and
information.
Gardner: We’re almost out of time, but I just wanted to look towards the future about the
requirements and the dynamic nature of workloads and the scale and density of consolidated data
centers. I have to imagine that these are only going to become more urgent and more pressing.
So what about that, Aaron, as we look a few years out at big-data requirements, hybrid cloud
requirements, infrastructure KPIs for service delivery, energy, and carbon pressures? What’s the
outlook in terms of doing this, and should we expect that there will be an ongoing demand, but
also ongoing and improving return on investments you make, vis-à-vis these consulting services
and DCIM?
Carman: Based upon a lot of the challenges that we outlined earlier in the program, we feel that
in order to operate efficiently, this type of a future state operational-tools architecture is going to
have to be in place, and DCIM is the only tool poised to become that backbone between the
facilities and IT infrastructures.
So more-and-more, with a lot of the challenges of my compute footprint shrinking and having a
different requirements that I had in the past, we’re now dealing with a storage or data explosion,
where my data center is all filled up with storage files.
As these new demands from the business come down and force organizations onto new types of
technology infrastructure platforms they haven’t dealt within the past, it requires them to be
much more flexible when they have, in most cases, very inflexible facilities. That’s the strength
of DCIM and what it can provide just in that one instance.

10. But more-and-more, the business is expecting digital services to almost be instant. They want to
capitalize on the market at that time. They don't want to wait weeks or months for enterprise IT
to provide them with a service to take advantage of a new service offering. So it's forcing folks
into operating differently, and that's where converged management is poised to help these
customers.
Looking to the future
Gardner: Last word to you, Steve. When you look into your crystal ball and think about how
things will be in 3 to 5 years, what is it about DCIM rather and some of these services that you
think will be most impacting?
Wibrew: I think the trend we're going to see is a far greater adoption of DCIM. It's only
deployed in a small number of data centers at the moment. That's going to increase quite
dramatically, and this could be a much tighter alignment between how the facilities are run and
how the IT infrastructure is operated and supported. It could be far more integrated than it is
today.
The roles of IT are going to change, and a lot of the work now is still around design, planning,
scripting, and orchestrating. In the future, we're going to see people, almost like a conductor in
an orchestra, overseeing the operations within the data center through leading highly automated
and optimized processes, which are actually delivered by automated solutions.
Gardner: Very good. I should also point out that I benefited greatly in learning more about
DCIM on the HP website. There were videos, white-papers, and blog-posts. So, there’s quite a bit
of information for those interested in learning more about DCIM. HP Technology Services
website was a great resource for me.
We'll have to leave it there, gentlemen. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussion on improving the management and automation of data centers and facilities. We’ve
seen how IT operators and planners can keep their data centers from spinning out of control via
exploiting new data-center infrastructure management capabilities.
I want to thank our guests for joining us today. We’ve been here with Aaron Carman, the HP
Worldwide Critical Facilities Strategy Leader. Thanks so much, Aaron.
Carman: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Gardner: And also Steve Wibrew has been with us. He is the HP Worldwide IT Management
Consulting Strategy and Portfolio Lead. Thanks so much, Steve.
Wibrew: Thank you for listening.

11. Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to our
audience and come back next time for the next BriefingsDirect podcast discussion.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how organization need to deal with the impact that IT
and big data is having on data centers and how DCIM can help. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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