Tiers for fears

							Tiers for Fears
The importance of a holistic approach between a data centre facility and the
equipment within it.


July 2012


For many organisations, ‘IT’ is split between two groups. The data centre
facility is provided and managed by facilities management, while the IT
equipment within the facility is provisioned and managed by the IT
department. This can lead to problems – and an outsourced, fully managed
solution can allow a business to concentrate on its strategy, rather than on
“keeping the lights on”.




Clive Longbottom                                Bob Tarzey
Quocirca Ltd                                    Quocirca Ltd
Tel : +44 118 948 3360                          Tel: +44 1753 855794
Email: Clive.Longbottom@Quocirca.com            Email: Bob.Tarzey@Quocirca.com




                            Copyright Quocirca © 2012
                  Tiers for Fears


Tiers for Fears
The importance of a holistic approach between a data centre facility and the equipment within
it.
  The datacentre         Many organisations use the facilities management group to manage the datacentre facility,
                         while the IT department manages the equipment held within the facility. This is no longer an
  facility and the IT    effective way of dealing with a datacentre – the requirements around energy distribution and
  equipment cannot be cooling mean that the facility and the IT equipment have to be looked at as a single system – a
  seen as being          system under constant change that requires deep domain expertise to manage effectively.
  separate
  Much datacentre        Installing new hardware, retrofitting datacentre facilities, implementing and maintaining
                         operating systems and applications does not add any value to the bottom line – in fact, it is a
  work does not add to hard cost to the business. Not managing the environment correctly can drive costs to the point
  the corporate bottom where 70–80% of an organisation’s IT budget is spent purely on such tasks – what is known as
  line                   “keeping the lights on”. This is unsustainable, and organisations should be looking at what their
                                 options are to free up more IT funds for investment in the business.

 Co-location, fully              Moving IT equipment from an owned facility to an external facility removes the need for
                                 expense on facilities management. Using managed hosting gives more savings on the need for
 managed hosting and             continuous systems management effort. Using a shared resource environment, such as a cloud
 cloud services                  platform, enables resources to be shared amongst a number of organisations, providing further
 provide good options            possible savings.


 However, moving to              An external provider should be able to demonstrate greater understanding of areas such as the
                                 need for a cohesive physical and technology security approach. Also, the need to apply a
 an external provider            ‘blended’ strategy, so that different workloads can be on different platforms as required, while
 should not be all               still making the most of datacentre network speeds for data sharing and movement, should be
 about cost                      regarded as a strong positive from an external provider that offers a ‘one-stop shop’.


 Adherence to                    Adopting best practices in datacentre design means that overall systems availability will be high
                                 and that overall systems flexibility and performance will also be optimised. Look for providers
 industry accepted               who are either Uptime Institute accredited or can demonstrate that their datacentres meet all
 best practices around           the Uptime Institute Tier 4 datacentre requirements.
 datacentre design
 should be looked for

 The relationship                Taking a view of “failure will be a cost” with a strategic service provider, such as an outsourced
                                 datacentre company, is not the best approach. Working on the optimal way to use the provider
 between an external             to advise on best steps forward when it comes to adoption of new technologies and platforms,
 provider and the                on where technical workloads should be best managed and when changes in direction should
 organisation has to             be considered will provide a much more beneficial approach. Specifically, when looking at a
                                 complex hybrid mix of systems crossing internal, external and public cloud-based functions and
 be based on trust –             facilities, a central, trusted point of technical expertise will be required.
 not financial penalty
 contracts


Conclusions
The trend is towards a blended mix of datacentre facilities – yet each datacentre needs to be a cohesive mix of facility and the
equipment housed within it. Using a ‘one-stop shop’ for external requirements makes a great deal of sense – and could define the
difference between those who use technology successfully to support their organisations, and those who end up being constrained
by their lack of capabilities.




              © Quocirca 2012                                   -2-
               Tiers for Fears



Background
A datacentre consists of two main parts – the facility itself and the equipment housed within it. Historically, the
facility was seen as being nothing much more than a shell, with basic capabilities for providing power and cooling,
and the main focus was on installing the equipment within the space available. However, as the use of the internet
increased, the need for the facility to be able to manage internal/external connectivity became an issue. Alongside
this, with increasing densities came the need for better cooling design and for optimised power distribution. Along
with this, the increased densities also led to weight problems and raised floors collapsing. Poor cable management
in the space under the raised floor could lead to further issues with cooling as air flows were impeded. The rapid
adoption of virtualisation has just compounded issues – no longer can the facility and the equipment be seen as
discrete issues: the linkages between the two areas are not tightly bound, and it is necessary to understand how
changes in one area will have impact on other areas across the whole datacentre.

To deal with this, various vendors and industry bodies have developed sets of best practices or design templates for
datacentres. The one that is seen as being the ‘standard’ is provided by a US industry body, The Uptime Institute.
The Institute’s best practice guidelines describe the basic capabilities for four tiers of datacentre.

For those organisations that follow the design criteria for a specific tiering, they will then find that the resulting
datacentre will provide certain capabilities that will have a direct effect on how well IT supports the business. Not
only this, but by following such best practices, management of the total IT capability will be easier; embracing new
technologies and changing from one platform to another will be less of an issue; and the business will gain greater
flexibility, along with less systems downtime and so be more competitive within its markets.

However, even for organisations creating their own datacentre that follow the Institute’s guidelines, running the
datacentre still presents issues. Equipment still needs managing – patches and updates need to be tested and
applied; equipment needs to be maintained, monitored and managed. All this requires skilled personnel who are
adding little to the business’ bottom line. Within IT, these tasks are seen as “keeping the lights on” – just ensuring
that the IT platform is available and is capable of carrying out its job. Multiple research studies have shown that
these tasks can take up to 80% of an IT budget, leaving just 20% to be used for investment in new capabilities. This is
unsustainable, and organisations are increasingly looking for ways of shifting more emphasis to how money can be
used to provide new capabilities.

From Quocirca’s view, the best way to achieve this is to move to an external datacentre model. Whether this be
through the use of colocation, dedicated managed hosting or shared cloud-based hosting is down to a mix of
variables – but by using an external datacentre facility, Quocirca believes that organisations can gain the flexibility
and system availability required to compete in today’s markets.


Colocation, managed hosting and cloud
An in-house datacentre comprises the facility and all the equipment required to maintain an IT platform for the
business. This equipment ranges from the IT systems themselves – servers, storage and network equipment –
through to power distribution systems, cooling, uninterruptable power supplies (UPS), environmental monitoring
systems and emergency systems, such as fire suppression. Historically, an in-house datacentre facility has had a
useful planned life of around 7–10 years, with changes to the equipment used across the facility often extending this
to 15 years or more. However, changes in equipment densities, in the use of modular systems and in power and
cooling systems means that many datacentres only have useful lifecycles of around 3–5 years now – and re-fitting
may not be possible due to the impact this could have on the business. However, moving to an external facility can
mitigate the problems.




          © Quocirca 2012                                -3-
               Tiers for Fears


The starting point for moving towards an externalised system is to use an external datacentre facility where you
house your own IT equipment. This colocation approach means that a third party takes responsibility for building
and managing the building that the equipment is housed in, along with facilities such as power distribution, cooling,
connectivity to the internet, environmental monitoring and physical security. The space within the facility is divided
into separate spaces for customers, either completely via walls to create defined computer rooms or, more
generally, via secure fencing to create ‘cages’.

Colocation avoids the need for an organisation to pay for high-capital expense items such as computer room air
conditioning (CRAC) systems or UPSs, and also allows connectivity availability to be improved through sharing the
cost of multiple different connections via different providers across all those using the facility. However, the general
IT equipment costs, along with all the software, maintenance, upgrades and patching costs, as well as the cost of the
skills to carry these tasks out, remain with the customer.

Managed hosting moves responsibilities further over to the external company. Here, the third party owns not just
the building, but also owns the IT equipment and takes responsibility for maintaining this through monitoring and
managing the overall platform, replacing equipment as it fails or reaches the end of its useful life. In this case, the
hardware is still dedicated to the customer – there is no sharing of the systems between one customer and another.
The platform may be provided to the customer ‘bare’, with the customer supplying everything from the operating
system upwards, or as a more managed platform. Here it may be just the operating system that is provided, or it
could include application server software or even a full application or service, such as e-mail, document sharing and
so on. In this case, the third party takes all responsibility for patching and updating the software under their control,
further reducing the areas of technical issues that the customer has to manage.

Finally comes cloud – a highly virtualised, shared environment, where resources can be provisioned ‘on-the-fly’ to
workloads through creating and dynamically allocating virtual pools of resources, including server CPU, storage and
network bandwidth. Again, this may be provided in one of three basic service offerings, as such:
     Platform as a Service (PaaS) – a bare-bones system where the customer installs everything themselves
     Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – a platform that will include at least the operating system and often more
     Software as a Services (SaaS) – a full implementation of an application or service, such as customer
          relationship management, enterprise resource management or other business solution

However, all of the above are still critically dependent on the datacentre facility itself. No matter how well the IT
equipment is put together, if there is insufficient power available, or if cooling is implemented in a manner that does
not effectively maintain the IT equipment within its operating envelope, then there will be failures of systems that
will impact the overall availability of the platform.

Datacentre tiering
The Uptime Institute’s four-tier model for datacentres is aimed at providing a set of best practice guidelines that an
organisation can follow to create a datacentre that is fit for its purpose. The variables that any organisation has to
take into account when looking at implementing any change within an organisation are:
     Cost – what is the upfront capital and on-going running costs?
     Risk – what impact will there be on my business risk?
     Value – how does this change impact the business’ bottom line?

Many organisations tend to fixate on the first of these variables, neglecting the other two. However, Quocirca finds
that organisations that go for ‘lowest cost’ solutions tend to end up with high business costs further down the line.
In the case of a lowest cost datacentre solution, for example, the concomitant higher system downtime may have a
business cost that massively outweighs the expected savings.




          © Quocirca 2012                                 -4-
               Tiers for Fears

The four datacentre tiers defined by the Uptime Institute’s can be précised as such:
     Tier 1 – A single, non-redundant architecture with 99.671% or greater availability (less than 29 hours of
         site-created downtime per year)
     Tier 2 – Includes site infrastructure redundancy to ensure availability levels of 99.741% or greater (less than
         22 hours of site-created downtime per year)
     Tier 3 – Multiple data paths to all IT equipment, multiple power supplies to all IT equipment and matched
         to a specific topology, minimum availability of 99.982% (less than 6 hours of site-created downtime per
         year)
     Tier 4 – All cooling equipment to be dual- or multi-powered as well as the IT equipment. A full fault-tolerant
         topology with capability to provide greater than 99.995% availability (less than 30 minutes of site-created
         downtime per year)

Many in-house datacentres will fall into the Tier 1 and Tier 2 categories (or even below these). As organisations have
expanded to become 24x7 global organisations and have become ever more dependent on the IT platform,
providing systems where around a day per year of downtime is expected is no longer good enough. Those
organisations looking to build their own new datacentres have to be looking to at least Tier 3, and those where the
business losses caused by any downtime could be large will have to look to a Tier 4 facility. It should also be noted
that the availability figures are stated as ‘greater than’ – many datacentre facilities that meet the criteria for Tier 4
have demonstrated zero downtime across extended periods of time.

However, Tier 3 and Tier 4 datacentres require an approach where IT and facility skills are brought together in an
extremely close manner, and also need continuous monitoring and management to be in place, along with constant
review to ensure that changes in technology at any level are able to be considered and embraced where applicable.



Outsourcing the cost and risk
A new datacentre can cost millions of pounds to build, with on-going running costs as well as redesign and refit costs
as required. Even then, it is likely that the cost of ensuring that there is sufficient systems redundancy in place will
force an organisation to cut costs somewhere, and settle for a datacentre that is below their ideal expectations.

An external third party can build a datacentre with completely different business aims. Rather than having to
balance the cost, risk and value for a single company, this can be done across a number of customers. Therefore, a
shared facility can be built. Although the cost of a facility to house equipment for multiple organisations will be
inevitably higher than one for a single organisation, the incremental costs are lower. Therefore, a facility built for 10,
20 or 50 customers can either be built more cheaply – or can be built to a higher specification.

By building to a better specification, the risk for all the customers is also lowered. Greater equipment and
connectivity redundancy can be provided at a cost below that which a single organisation could carry.

Skills can be bought in, maintained and the cost shared across the multiple customers. The organisation’s own skills
can be focussed on the areas that are more important to the business, such as what is the best approach to
providing a solution to a specific business problem or how to create a more effective and efficient business process,
rather than focussing on the basic IT work of managing the infrastructure.

The external third party should provide a range of services to its customers as well. At a colocation level, the facility
owner should work with the customer to ensure that how their equipment is installed within their cages or rooms is
to best practice levels, ensuring that the best levels of systems availability are maintained through ensuring that
energy distribution and cooling can be adequately managed via the facility. For those using managed hosting and
cloud services, the external third party should provide visibility as to what is happening within the system so that
decisions can be made at the right time; for example, as to whether to purchase more resources, whether to move a
workload from one environment to another or suchlike.




          © Quocirca 2012                                 -5-
               Tiers for Fears

The external third party should also be able to offer additional services that minimise risk, such as managed backup
and restore or business continuity services. The use of technologies such as multi-packet labelling services (MPLS)
can ensure priority and quality of service for mixed data traffic, enabling better levels of performance for voice and
video services than an organisation may be able to manage on their own.

The relationship between the customer and the datacentre provider has to be one of trust – the customer should be
in a position to outline their business strategy to the external third party and know that they will then provide
advice on the best way to meet that strategy through the provision of the right technical platform. This is then not a
static decision – as the customer’s markets change, the external third party will need to be able to work with the
customer to ensure that they remain competitive and that the IT platform adapts to meet the changing needs.



Building the value
What does an external third party datacentre provider offer that adds value to an organisation? At a basic level, the
‘grunt work’ of IT is removed from the business – all the patching and updating, the equipment provisioning,
monitoring and management and so on are all removed as tasks that the organisation has to deal with. This enables
the IT department to become facilitators to the organisation, providing advice on what is the best way to reach a
required outcome, rather than focusing on the more mundane technical areas where they may have become
bogged down in the past. The provision of a highly available IT platform for the organisation enables better
assurance that business can be maintained, and also enables faster reaction to market dynamics through the
implementation of new processes and software technologies within shorter timescales.

A top-end managed services provider should be able to offer a range of services that provide a customer with a
spectrum of choices to fit not only with their technical needs, but also with their less-definable perceptions. For
many, the idea of moving towards a non-owned platform is still a step too far, yet colocation makes a great deal of
sense to them. However, as time progresses, it may become apparent that certain workloads are less important and
can be carried out far more effectively and less costly on a managed hosting or clouded platform. If a managed
service provider can offer a full range of platform choices from colocation to cloud, then they can work with the
customer to ensure that the right workload is on the right platform at the right time as far as the customer is
concerned. By ensuring that all the choices are within the same datacentre facility, the use of core network
technologies ensures that these different platforms can deal with workloads at the fastest possible speed, so
removing latencies and other performance issues that could be encountered through maintaining each platform in
different facilities.

As the technical risk and absolute costs are placed more on the third party’s shoulders, the organisation can have
greater visibility and knowledge of the costs associated with the platform itself, and so can plan more directly as to
how the rest of its IT budget should be invested in new capabilities.

A ‘sinking fund’ of money set aside to re-fit an existing or build a new datacentre is not required – it is down to the
third party to ensure that not only is the platform kept up to date, but also that future expansion needs are covered
through extending their existing facilities or through building new ones.




          © Quocirca 2012                                -6-
               Tiers for Fears


Conclusions
When reviewing a datacentre strategy, it is important to look at more than the technical aspects of a facility or the
IT equipment housed within it. The organisation must look at how it needs to balance the business costs and risks
and make informed decisions around this – rather than just tactically aiming for a ‘least cost’ solution.

Therefore, areas such as ensuring that the right workload is running on the right technology engine at the right time,
along with ensuring that workloads can be moved from self-managed to externally-managed environments as the
organisation’s needs determine must be taken into account.

Organisations must also consider whether some of the human aspects of managing a technology platform are better
served by others. For example, does it make sense for an organisation that should be focusing all its efforts on retail,
finance, manufacturing or other commercial activities to be diverting human resources to the installation and
maintenance of commodity operating systems and equipment drivers? Should facilities management be focusing on
where best to invest its budget on ensuring a good working environment for employees and a good visiting
environment for customers and prospects, or be focusing on how best to put together the cooling and energy
distribution to reliably maintain the technology platform for the business?

Many advisors see such decisions as a three-way stark choice – that everything should be kept within an owned
datacentre; that everything should be put into a co-locational datacentre, or that everything should be outsourced
to the cloud.

However, the end result for the majority will be a mix of approaches, particularly in the short to medium term. The
business will want some workloads to be kept on equipment managed by themselves in facilities managed by
themselves. Others will be more than happy to use a co-locational facility to avoid expensive retrofits or new-build
when their existing datacentre facility comes up for review. Others will look towards the public cloud to fill in
functionality that they do not have available in their own internal or external datacentre.

This means that the end result will be a hybrid environment. However, using different providers for each different
requirement will just lead to further problems in effectively managing workloads and meeting the dynamic needs of
the business. By choosing a single provider who can manage a mixed co-location, infrastructure/platform as a
service (I/PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) platform, workloads can be better managed and the business more
optimally supported.




          © Quocirca 2012                                -7-
About Blue Chip
Blue Chip is a data centre services provider delivering a full range of managed cloud solutions and services from its
Tier 4 design data centre. Blue Chip can provide both traditional and bespoke solutions around the following:
      Co-Location
      Managed Hosting
      IaaS
      Traditional and On Demand Disaster Recovery
      Backup Solutions
      Systems Management
      Networking
      Maintenance
      Product Solutions

Blue Chip’s highly secure data centre includes features such as three point entry systems with perimeter fencing,
dual gates, 24/7 CCTV, dual power and backup systems, secure offsite replication, high availability solutions and
multiple Tier 1 communications. The premises is wholly owned, managed and maintained by Blue Chip.

Specialising in both IBM midrange and Intel, Blue Chip is one of the first providers of IaaS on an iSeries platform
delivering a one stop shop for On Demand access across all IT systems.

Systems and applications are all monitored and controlled by Blue Chip’s onsite Network Operating Centre (NOC)
using Blue Chip’s Systems Management application. Bespoke alerts and intelligent monitoring ensures that your
systems are operating correctly and efficiently. This solution can also be deployed on-site at the customer premises.

Blue Chip’s data availability solutions provide effective alternatives to traditional business continuity. More cost
effective, these services combine backup, DR and high availability into one managed service. Recovery is now
possible instantaneously with no budget required for redundant DR services.

Founded in 1987, Blue Chip has 25 years of experience and skills delivering IT Services.

Regardless of whether you are transitioning from an internal system, third party or vendor solution, Blue Chip’s
project management team provides specific implementation resources to ensure everything runs smoothly and to
plan. Post transition, a dedicated Service Delivery Manager will be responsible for the day-to-day management of
the solution.

Blue Chip can be contacted at:

Blue Chip Customer Engineering Ltd
Franklin Court
Priory Business Park
Bedford
MK44 3JZ
UK

Tel : +44 (0)1234 224400
Fax : +44 (0)1234 831580
Email : info@bluechip.co.uk
               Tiers for Fears



REPORT NOTE:                              About Quocirca
This report has been written
independently by Quocirca Ltd             Quocirca is a primary research and analysis company specialising in the
to provide an overview of the             business impact of information technology and communications (ITC).
issues facing organisations               With world-wide, native language reach, Quocirca provides in-depth
seeking to maximise the
                                          insights into the views of buyers and influencers in large, mid-sized and
effectiveness   of    today’s
                                          small organisations. Its analyst team is made up of real-world
dynamic workforce.
                                          practitioners with first-hand experience of ITC delivery who continuously
The report draws on Quocirca’s            research and track the industry and its real usage in the markets.
extensive knowledge of the
technology     and     business           Through researching perceptions, Quocirca uncovers the real hurdles to
arenas, and provides advice on            technology adoption – the personal and political aspects of an
the approach that organisations           organisation’s environment and the pressures of the need for
should take to create a more              demonstrable business value in any implementation. This capability to
effective     and       efficient         uncover and report back on the end-user perceptions in the market
environment for future growth.            enables Quocirca to provide advice on the realities of technology
                                          adoption, not the promises.

                                          Quocirca research is always pragmatic, business orientated and
                                          conducted in the context of the bigger picture. ITC has the ability to
                                          transform businesses and the processes that drive them, but often fails to
                                          do so. Quocirca’s mission is to help organisations improve their success
                                          rate in process enablement through better levels of understanding and
                                          the adoption of the correct technologies at the correct time.

Quocirca has a pro-active primary research programme, regularly surveying users, purchasers and resellers of ITC
products and services on emerging, evolving and maturing technologies. Over time, Quocirca has built a picture of
long term investment trends, providing invaluable information for the whole of the ITC community.

Quocirca works with global and local providers of ITC products and services to help them deliver on the promise that
ITC holds for business. Quocirca’s clients include Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, O2, T-Mobile, HP, Xerox, EMC, Symantec
and Cisco, along with other large and medium-sized vendors, service providers and more specialist firms.

Details of Quocirca’s work and the services it offers can be found at http://www.quocirca.com

Disclaimer:
This report has been written independently by Quocirca Ltd. During the preparation of this report, Quocirca has
used a number of sources for the information and views provided.

Although Quocirca has taken what steps it can to ensure that the information provided in this report is true and
reflects real market conditions, Quocirca cannot take any responsibility for the ultimate reliability of the details
presented. Therefore, Quocirca expressly disclaims all warranties and claims as to the validity of the data presented
here, including any and all consequential losses incurred by any organisation or individual taking any action based
on such data and advice.

All brand and product names are recognised and acknowledged as trademarks or service marks of their respective
holders.