Equipping And Automating Data Centres For The Cloud Pt.1

By Victor Ng and Cat Yong

Whatever the cloud may be called or perceived, and whatever technologies are added to it in future, what it fundamentally seeks to achieve remains unchanged – cost savings and productivity. This was the consensus of participants of NetworkWorld Asia and Asia Cloud Forum’s June 2012 breakfast roundtable discussion in Kuala Lumpur, which was hosted by BMC Software’s regional country manager, Nick Lim and APAC CTO, Suhas Kelkar.

There is agreement that the cloud does offer benefits and value, but that the journey to achieve it is long and arduous, especially when there are higher-ups to convince and legacy IT that has yet to yield ROI.

Technology today has become so much more advanced and the ways to achieve productivity has increased – along with the associated costs. The workplace and workforce demographics are changing, with expectations including mobility, consumerisation of IT and flexibility, embodied in trends such as BYOD.

Cost savings seem almost impossible for many organisations, especially the ones who have a lot of legacy to deal with. Edwin Ding (AmCorp Group CIO) candidly commented that while we like the idea of flexibility, sharing, higher availability and the use of other new technologies, we would also like to pass the buck to vendors in terms of SLAs. “Ultimately, we can’t just write off existing investments; three years is a long time to ROI and we can’t justify it. We have internal challenges as well. It’s hard to migrate or switch out equipment and maintain 99.999% uptime.”

Hon Fun Ping (Cuscapi VP) found security a moving target, especially in the cloud. When we have almost got security worked out, suddenly there is a new virus, a new bug or a new technology to handle. So the chase goes on.

Alain Boey (SVP and head of Transformation Management Office, BSN) believes that a lot more needs to be done to demystify cloud computing especially at the regulator level for the highly-regulated financial services industry (FSI). Hon observed that even regulated financial institutions need Internet banking to be competitive.

Prof Suhaimi Napis (UPM) was helpful with real-life examples of using open-source solutions to save costs for virtualisation, developing and securing a cloud infrastructure.

Mok Sew Wah (Sunway Technology Group CEO) rightly observed: “If you can’t answer the ‘whys’, forget about the ‘hows’.” He added: “CIOs should be thinking about value and not just cost.”

IT is tasked with generating value in other intangible forms – productivity, quality of service, better management of resources and so on – so automation has its role to play. Virtualisation is a key building block towards the cloud, and automation is the key to unlocking the real value of cloud computing. In the end, (VP and IT Head, AIA Shared Services) Sandeep Pandey’s opinions and personal experiences about how IT departments can create overall value for the organisation served as a shining example for everyone else.

Below are excerpts of the discussion on “Why is equipping and automating data centres essential for the cloud?”

Value from the cloud

Victor Ng: The reality is that we have cloud implementations out there. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution and any solution available still needs to be customised for organisations to see what value it yields.

Edwin: While I think the challenge today on the cloud infrastructure is basically cost – how to share costs and getting the right skillsets to manage, implement, enable and control mobility and access – the cloud certainly has benefits for disaster recovery. Ever since the Japanese tsunami, the cloud is becoming quite widespread because it allows geographical replication. But how do we breach the gap, especially with concerns over allowing data being stored in another country?

Suhaimi: I’m more inclined towards private community clouds. We hope soon to have a federated identity with digital certificate for the research and education community. The Malaysian Identity Federation and Access Management (MYIFAM) has been approved by International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) to be the National Certification Authority for the R&E community and Member Integrated Credential Services is the natural second step. We wish to extend this to the cloud and other services, including resource sharing among participating research and educational institutions. Everybody within the community needs to have a digital certificate to access resources, not just a user ID and password. A secure and trusted framework for sharing and collaboration is necessary.

Mok: Whatever you are coming up with, under whatever name, I have this business need – to be more agile. I want to be mobile so I can enable and empower my people to do business. I think all the companies represented here are, if not globalising, at least going regional. ‘I’ve reinvested in a certain amount of things, be it my in-house developed solution or one bought off the shelf. I’m happy and using it now, but please help me make it accessible to my people wherever they go, using whatever methodology or technology you have.’ I think that is the challenge or expectation from the business perspective. As a CIO, you have to categorise your IT initiatives – what’s mission-critical, what is just for enhancements, what is a must, and so on.

Sandeep: We are looking at service consolidation first before infrastructure consolidation because people are more important for us. It’s more important to get the right kind of talent who would be able to support your roadmaps or strategy for your organisation. Hence (the focus on) shared services first, before we can look at how we can approach consolidation more effectively while empowering business units. 

Suhas Kelkar: We will eventually get to a point where resources (compute, network, storage) become a commodity or utility that organisations have to use. To me, the cloud is not about a specific technology but a philosophy. Organisations will have to start thinking in terms of service-based IT. Technologies will come and go, but to make your IT more agile, more responsive, more service-oriented, is what will persist. And that’s the much more important thing. So while there are lots of meaning ascribed to the cloud, to me it’s all about taking your IT organisation to the next level of maturity. – http://www.networksasia.net   

(To be continued at Part 2 tomorrow…)