The document discusses opportunities for IT organizations to optimize their datacenter services over the next five years. As businesses look to grow and innovate following the economic downturn, IT will need to balance efficiency gains with flexibility to enable new initiatives. Datacenters of the future will require automation and standardized infrastructure that can adapt to changing workload demands. Many IT organizations currently lack the in-house expertise to implement private clouds and achieve this level of optimization, and may require external assistance to successfully transform their datacenters.

1. WHITE P APER
The Value of Smarter Datacenter Services
Sponsored by: IBM
Michelle Bailey Rob Brothers
Katherine Broderick
May 2011
IDC OPINION
www.idc.com
The next five years in IT will likely be some of the most exciting and demanding
for datacenter managers and the office of the CIO. In this post-recession period,
organizations will be setting in place strategies that will expand their core business
while mining for new market opportunities. For many, this business transformation will
F.508.935.4015
include new product development, mergers and acquisitions, geographic expansion,
cross-selling opportunities, and partnerships. Technology will be a critical enabler for
these new initiatives, and a diverse and efficient datacenter strategy will be essential.
While the emphasis has been on consolidation and cost reduction during the
P.508.872.8200
economic downturn, as IT organizations look to the future, success will be built on
streamlining processes, reducing complexity, and improving time to market. IT
organizations will be responsible for real IT transformation in the coming years and
not simply the cost reduction of the past. They will have to strike a balance between
integrating new applications and multiple infrastructure delivery models and
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continuing to support their already substantial IT portfolio.
The future datacenter will be a highly automated set of standardized infrastructure
where applications and data will be deployed and provisioned on systems and in sites
based on workload demand. New cloud-based technologies and methodologies will
expand the options for IT organizations to source hosting or outsourcing providers for
software, platforms, infrastructure, and datacenters at varying price points and
locations. The backdrop to all of these choices is the physical backbone of the
datacenter, otherwise known as facilities. Power and cooling will need to be flexible
enough to keep up with automated, virtualized, dynamic IT while keeping in mind
capacity limitations, efficiency, and budgets.
With these new demands being placed on IT and facilities, it is not surprising that in a
recent IDC survey of over 250 IT managers, more than one in five found that
their IT staff is not skilled enough to implement a private cloud. In another IDC survey
of over 400 IT decision makers, lack of in-house IT expertise is listed as a top
challenge to virtualization by over 22% of respondents. These two data points
indicate that for many IT organizations, the journey toward adding incremental value
to the business will require external help. In addition, the large number of forthcoming
sourcing options and technology decisions will challenge IT organizations to balance
their need to maintain control without inhibiting innovation. As time to market
becomes a differentiator in the economic recovery, speed of deployment must be
balanced against security, availability, and service levels across the IT organization.

2. Achieving this equilibrium will require IT organizations to plan carefully, conduct
ongoing monitoring and measurement, and draw on extensive experience.
IN THIS WHITE P APER
This paper provides an overview of how IT organizations can optimize across the
entire life cycle of their datacenters and build a strong foundation for future IT
operations. Opportunities for optimization remain strong, including increasing
efficiency on both the IT side and the facilities side, improving user support and
protection, and increasing the flexibility of the datacenter to be more responsive to the
business. With so many opportunities for CIOs and senior IT decision makers to focus
on enabling business improvements, this paper also includes suggestions on where
to start while keeping in mind a long-term vision.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Today, the most significant challenge for IT organizations is meeting the needs of the
business with their limited resources. As business goals change from cost cutting to
innovation and growth, IT organizations will have to rethink their datacenter strategy.
Many companies have already extracted significant cost reduction through extensive
consolidation, virtualization, and standardization programs and in doing so have built
credibility with the business. In addition, this improved architecture has laid the
foundation for the next phase of the datacenter, which will place automation and new
delivery models at the heart of supporting business change without trading off
significant cost increases or lower service levels.
These new delivery models speed time to market by decreasing deployment and
procurement time while increasing availability. To achieve these results and maintain
service levels, IT needs to increase predictability. IT needs to know the amount of
resources available (both on-premise and off-premise) along with resource utilization
for the past, present, and future. To obtain this predictability, many leading IT
departments are using sensors, software, and hardware to gather information about
their datacenter design and ongoing operations. This information is, unfortunately, not
enough to ensure predictable ebbs and flows in a datacenter. The next step is to
perform analytics on this large set of disparate data and optimize the datacenter for
efficiency, on both the IT side and the facilities side.
For many CIOs and IT organizations, a lack of insight into this powerful information is
a constraint that many IT organizations are not even aware of. Further, in IDC's
experience, where this information is available, many are unsure of how to leverage
the data or are concerned with the risk of change, and so no decision is made.
Inaction can often be a by-product and a fear that if one change is made, it will cause
waves, sometimes resulting in downtime, across the datacenter floor. This
combination of not knowing where to start and the fear of making waves causes many
IT organizations to overlook the many opportunities that are present in today's
datacenters for increased efficiency, improved reliability, and increased flexibility.
2 #228261 ©2011 IDC

3. Opportunities for the IT Organization
Today's datacenters look very little like their predecessors, and this is attributable to
how much CIOs and IT organizations have worked to attain efficient, dependable,
agile datacenters for the business. The evolution from monolithic warehouses for IT
to modular designs optimized for IT has been a long road worth taking. Datacenters
of the future will evolve even further to address efficiency, on both the IT side and the
facilities side, simplifying management while maintaining uptime and speeding time
to market. To make smart, effective change in the datacenter, CIOs need to keep
in mind multiple goals simultaneously. They need to balance the goals outlined in
the following sections while moving forward because the datacenter today is so
interconnected.
IT Infrastructure Resource Efficiencies
Many datacenter managers have already made lengthy inroads to increase IT
resource utilization. IT managers have virtualized, increased the number of logical
servers per system administrator, and deployed tools in datacenters to manage the
environment more effectively. According to IDC's recent virtualization survey, in 2011,
one in five physical servers shipped will be virtualized. From the workload view, that
equates to 65% of all workloads running on a virtualized physical host. This difference
from the physical virtualization to the workload view is due to the increased density
possible with virtualization. In 2011, IT managers will deploy over seven virtual
machines (VMs) per host.
This new, highly virtualized world requires changes not only to the servers but also to
the storage, networking, process, and people sides of datacenter operations. As
shown in Figure 1, virtualization has driven an increased need for management
consolidation and cost control. Virtualization has decreased server spending and
decreased the cost of power and cooling systems, but it has increased management
costs greatly. This is largely because today's systems administrators handle virtual
machines in much the same way they handle physical machines. The explosion of
virtual machines depicted in Figure 1 by the red line exposes the virtualization
management gap that has come about in many of today's datacenters. On the
storage side, the explosion in virtualized computing requires smart, agile, highly
utilized storage resources. Networking needs to be able to see into servers, not only
at the physical level but also at the virtual level. This is essential for deploying policies
for VMs over the network.
Power and cooling, a historically stagnant, not agile part of the datacenter needs to
stretch and become malleable to keep up with today's virtual resources. As the
number of VMs increases and decreases and as the machines move physically
throughout the datacenter, it is essential for power and cooling to change airflows,
power draws, and temperatures accordingly. The stagnancy on the facilities side and
the increasing complexity on the IT side make the results of a recent IDC survey
expectable. As mentioned earlier, in a survey of over 400 IT decision makers, lack of
in-house IT expertise is listed as a top challenge to virtualization by over 22%
of respondents. This means that about one of every five IT departments has a lack of
internal expertise regarding virtualization. The need for external help with such a
crucial technology for the future of the datacenter is real. External datacenter service
©2011 IDC #228261 3

4. providers can help IT departments make the most of their resources, in terms of
process improvement, better management through tools and software, more accurate
analytics, and an objective point of view.
FIGURE 1
New Economic Model for the Datacenter
Worldwide Spending on Servers, Power and Cooling, and
Management/Administration
Customer Spending ($B) Installed Servers (M)
$300 Physical Server Installed Base (M)
Logical Server Installed Base (M) 80
$250 Power & Cooling Expense
Management Cost
Server Spending 60
$200
Virtualization
Management
Gap
$150 40
$100
20
$50
$0 0
'96 '97 '98 '99 '00 '01 '02 '03 '04 '05 '06 '07 '08 '09 '10 '11 '12 '13
Source: IDC, 2011
To address these growing concerns around management, power, cooling, and IT
infrastructure in the datacenter, many datacenter managers are charting a course
toward cloud computing. This long-term process will not be completed summarily but
will happen through a series of stages. Figure 2 depicts these stages and where most
datacenters and IT organizations fit today along their journey toward the private
cloud. The stages are:
 Pilot. Fifteen percent of datacenter managers are in this stage of testing
virtualization. Less than 10% of their servers are virtualized, and they are not yet
familiar with the virtualization management gap problem depicted in Figure 1.
 Consolidation. The majority of IT organizations are in the consolidation phase.
These IT organizations have experience with virtualization now and are seeing
savings in terms of physical server cost, power, cooling, and space. Although
their production environment runs on virtual IT assets, only ad hoc policies are in
place for management. These organizations are starting to see increased virtual
machine deployments and increased management costs.
4 #228261 ©2011 IDC

5.  Assured computing. One in four CIOs is in the assured computing stage. The
problem of management and visibility has been recognized and is starting to be
addressed. The IT processes and policies are partially integrated and
standardized, and VMs are becoming more mobile and reliable. Production-level,
mission-critical workloads are being run in this virtual environment.
 Private cloud. The virtualization management gap has been addressed in this
stage. Processes, policies, and automation tools are in place to make
administering a virtual server less cumbersome than managing a physical one.
Only 5% of CIOs are in this position, but many are headed in this direction.
FIGURE 2
Virtualization Maturity
Phase Pilot Consolidation Assured Private Cloud
Impact Computing
Staff Skills Little or no expertise Hands-on expertise; Formal training; Certification
some formal training certification required
desirable
Technology & Tools Simple static Simple Mobility: Portable Policy-Based
partitions Manual & Off-hours Applications: Automation;
Matched application Automated Failover Service Management;
pairs CMDB Implemented Life-Cycle Mgmt;
Self-Service Delivery
Financial Impact No substantial Measurable Hard Cost Justified TCO Variable costs
financial impact Savings: savings: recognized or
Consolidation chargeback models
Business Continuity
Power/Real Estate established
IT Process & Policies Skunk Works Ad hoc Partially Integrated Fully Integrated
Partially Fully Standardized
Standardized
Line of Business Hidden Revealed Transparent Engaged in
Governance Process
Application Usage Test Development Production: Production: Business Production: Service
Noncritical Critical Profiles & Catalogs
% of Customers 15% 55% 25% 5%
Average VM Density 4 6 10 35
Experience 9–12 months 9 months–2 years 1.5 –3 years 3–5 years
% Virtualized Servers <10% 25% 50% 80%
Source: IDC, 2011
The beginning stages of this maturity curve, the pilot stage and the consolidation
stage, present hard cost savings in terms of physical IT infrastructure, power, and
cooling. In the later stages, savings are presented in the form of total cost of
ownership (TCO) as the savings are largely in soft costs such as management and
downtime. Moving along this curve requires IT directors to focus not just on the
singular goal of increasing IT utilization but also on balancing reliability and flexibility.
©2011 IDC #228261 5

6. As stated earlier, a recent IDC survey found that of 250 IT manager respondents, more
than one in five believe their IT staff is not skilled enough to implement a private cloud. It
is clear that additional, external help will be needed to move along this virtualization
maturity curve. External datacenter service providers can help IT with an objective
viewpoint, advanced analytics (to see what the real issues are versus perceived issues),
and years of experience in multiple, diverse datacenter environments.
Improving Storage Efficiencies
IT organizations are being pulled in multiple directions simultaneously with pressures
for increased efficiency, flexibility, and availability through evolved deployment
models and opposing force from the growth in complexity of the IT environment and
shrinking budgets in already extremely lean organizational structures. Nowhere is this
juxtaposition more clear than in the world of storage. IDC expects storage capacity in
enterprises to soar through 2014 (see Figure 3). This growth in data is not only in the
structured data that is more familiar but also in unstructured data. Businesses are
already growing reliant on mining and analyzing this structured and unstructured data
for improved intelligence, competitiveness, and financial results. It is difficult to
imagine how IT will keep available, let alone gain value from, this growing, complex
data swamp.
FIGURE 3
Worldwide Enterprise Storage System Capacity Shipped,
2008–2014
80,000
60,000
(PB)
40,000
20,000
0
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Source: IDC, 2011
According to IDC's latest enterprise storage forecast (Worldwide Enterprise Storage
Systems 2010–2014 Forecast Update: December 2010, IDC #226223, December
2010), the quantity of petabytes shipped is expected to increase at a compound
annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50% over the course of the next four years (refer back
to Figure 3 for additional detail). The ongoing management of enterprise storage
6 #228261 ©2011 IDC

7. systems will always play a critical role in any IT environment. With businesses moving
from standalone systems to virtualization, and from local applications to cloud, the
task of maintaining these devices internally is becoming increasingly complex for IT
staff. It is IDC's opinion that because of the complexities and proprietary nature of
storage subsystems, utilizing experts who work with these systems on a regular basis
and who have industry best practices on how to deploy and support these arrays is
the best way to get the most value, performance, and reliability from these IT assets.
Datacenter Flexibility to Adapt to Changes in Demand
Datacenters of the future will be built with modularity in mind. These buildings will
really be big computers that adapt and change their operations to respond to the
needs of the business. This flexibility is achieved through predictable, repeatable
designs that can be easily monitored and measured during operations.
To achieve these modular, amendable designs, IT organizations will construct
greenfield (new implementation) and retrofit datacenters. Both greenfield and retrofit
datacenters will achieve more efficient equipment, better standardization, more
evolved processes, longer life cycles, and better overall TCO than those in the past.
To attack these issues and make the most of the IT organization's investment, CIOs
need to consider their organization's innate abilities and possibly get external help.
It is sometimes difficult to see the forest through the trees and really identify what the
sources of problems are. This is an essential stage for choosing what the priorities
will be in new or retrofitted datacenters. With IT budgets not getting any larger, it is
important for datacenter design teams to identify what is really important to future
designs and operations. These priorities need to be identified and their value needs to
be quantified in terms of downtime, dollars, and people. This quantification increases
the likelihood of these priorities surviving strict budgets. These strategic design
choices are difficult, but they can really set up the IT organization for success down
the road.
In addition to achieving flexibility in the on-premise datacenter, IT organizations are
increasingly looking to off-premise solutions for flexibility and the freedom to focus on
critical workloads internally. These public cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS)
solutions require IT organizations to prioritize what should be moved to the cloud and
what should remain on-premise. In platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, new
frameworks for application development need to be worked out (to be easily portable
to the cloud and back). In the case of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions,
capacity planning needs to extend beyond the four walls of the datacenter onsite and
out to the cloud.
The options for increasing savings, flexibility, and reliability abound. In fact,
many CIOs find themselves with so many options that it's difficult to know where
to begin. In many cases, the help of an outside partner is necessary to determine
how to go about making a change and how to make sure the solution is effective.
The use of datacenter services can be a wise choice for many datacenter managers
at this fork in the road. This presents yet another choice, which is who to ask for help.
There are quite a few factors to consider when evaluating who should be IT's partner
in the datacenter.
©2011 IDC #228261 7

8. FACTORS TO CONSIDER WHEN EV ALU ATING
DATACENTER SERVICES
As enterprise IT departments struggle with the challenges of maximizing the
performance of their IT landscape, many need help from external datacenter service
providers to facilitate that process across the IT ecosystem. These services help
datacenter managers identify opportunities where they can succeed today and set
themselves up for more success tomorrow. After many years of covering the
datacenter environment, IDC has identified the following best practices for IT
departments that are evaluating high-quality services for optimizing the datacenter.
Key Potential Success Factors
Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together
Extensive knowledge across all aspects of the IT landscape — from facilities to IT to the
customization required for specific solutions — is a critical consideration when selecting a
datacenter service provider. Knowledge of all aspects of the datacenter has never been
more pertinent. Today, the datacenter is interconnected, mobile, and dynamic, with VMs
moving, tools automating, and power and cooling flows changing frequently. Breadth of
knowledge is vital from storage to computer room air conditioners (CRACs). At the same
time, datacenter managers should not give up depth of expertise for breadth.
System-level knowledge is just as important as understanding the connections
between systems. Both systems and datacenter operations are possible opportunities
for optimization, and both are potential sources of downtime. IT managers need a
partner in the datacenter that understands not only how complicated these
environments are but also how to simplify daily operations. The true help in today's
datacenter is making operations appear automatic and simple but simultaneously
keeping track of the physical backbone (infrastructure and facilities).
Thinking Globally
Datacenter service providers with experience across multiple geographies, multiple
datacenter environments, and various stages along the virtualization maturity curve
are invaluable. No two datacenters are alike, and IT organizations should be looking
for a datacenter service provider that has seen it all.
Experience across products and geographies adds value to datacenter services in
two ways. First, datacenter service providers with experience working in multiple
environments understand the common dilemmas faced by datacenter managers and
the solutions that are time-tested and work. Second, these service providers work
with clients at all stages of the virtualization and cloud maturity curves. They can help
the datacenter go from the earliest stages of adoption to the late stages of automation
and cloud usage models. This can be done in one large project, one small project, or
a series of smaller projects because of the large product lines available from
datacenter service providers with experience and expertise.
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9. Being Credible Quickly
The growing complexity of IT environments requires a detailed, coordinated approach
to identify, diagnose, and resolve specific issues in the IT infrastructure. Today's
datacenter systems and operations are kept in disparate spreadsheets and
workbooks with little method in place for continuity or the ability to replicate what
works. Bringing in a datacenter service provider with systematic time- and customer-
tested strategies specific to a given datacenter environment will have positive effects
in the long term. This approach also makes moving along the evolution curve that
much easier because as the business and IT scale, systems, datacenter capacity,
and operating procedures can scale as well.
Delivering Rapid Return with a Strategic Goal in Mind
Datacenter managers need to choose projects with quick ROIs while keeping in mind
the 15- to 20-year life cycle of their brick-and-mortar datacenter. These projects need
to have a quick but, more importantly, lasting payoff for IT in terms of efficiency and
availability. These "quick wins" are great on their own and also in the beginning
stages of larger projects. These up-front successes pave the way with business units
and executives for further optimization. At an organizational level, they allow IT to
demonstrate its relevance and ability to deliver for the business. The rapid returns of
early projects are crucial to the long-term viability of budgets and approval for
strategic shifts and initiatives.
Understanding the Importance of Analytics Throughout the Datacenter
Life Cycle
Datacenter analytics is an emerging field within the IT organization. While customers
have long had a surplus of information on their server, storage, and networking
devices, as well as mechanical and electrical equipment, the ability to capture this
data for meaningful analytics that provides a holistic view of the datacenter remains
aspirational for many.
In IDC's experience, information capture on systems and facilities is the beginning of
any IT transformation project and, until recently, has been an extremely manually
intensive task. With the advent of virtualization comes a new wave of systems
management tools that are enabling more automated data capture across the entire
datacenter. This information is continuously captured, increasingly in real time, from a
variety of sources, including statistics on utilization, deployment and provisioning
tools, orchestration and governance practices, health monitoring systems, as well as
failover and disaster recovery activities.
This large body of information for the enterprise datacenter opens the possibility for
higher-level analytics that can intelligently provide insight across the entire life cycle of
the datacenter that will optimize both day-to-day tasks and ongoing operations of the
entire facility. Predictive analytics opens the possibility of taking a wide variety of
disparate data and sorting through what is really relevant to set in place accurate, long-
range planning strategies. Imagine a datacenter where a site-based outage is predicted
before it happens by understanding system, application, and power dependencies along
with historical information on system, application, and utility performance. From this
incident, analytics could suggest a new architecture or blueprint for the datacenter.
©2011 IDC #228261 9

10. The real benefits of this type of analysis are twofold. The first benefit is in improved
day-to-day operations; the second, and most important, payoff is in using these
analytics as part of a feedback loop for continuous improvement. Datacenter analytics
not only can be part of a cycle of making daily improvements but also, once a change
is made, can be recalibrated to drive a new set of analytics that constantly drives an
enhanced datacenter environment and a more predictable, repeatable service.
This type of continuous improvement should of course be tied to business metrics so
that the datacenter is fully aligned with the organization. These metrics include
projected revenue growth, profit margins, customer service requirements, and new
business or regional expansion.
These New Solutions Require Support
In many cases, enterprises assume that because they have virtualized their
datacenter environment, they will not need support for the infrastructure and software.
This most certainly is not the case. The main reason for this is that the complexity of
these configurations can cause even the savviest end users to need help when things
go wrong. Whether it be a hardware or software issue or a user error, when the
servers are running mission-critical workloads, they require external support services.
Approach to Support and Deployment Needs to Change
Despite the fact that enterprises do need to support their environments, how they support
the [virtualized] environment does need to be different from the traditional server support
model. Because their mission-critical data will be on fewer servers, when something goes
wrong, it can have a broad impact across many departments in the organization. The
ability to contact a vendor that has intimate knowledge of the environment will be crucial.
IDC interviewed a customer at an IDC virtualization forum that was in the process of
"devirtualizing" its environment at a significant cost because it did not go through a robust
planning process. As a result, the customer virtualized several applications that did not
work well together on the same physical server, which led to significant application
performance problems. The situation deteriorated to such an extent that the customer
determined that the best remedy was to devirtualize and then start again. These issues
and others are significant, and IDC believes that enterprises need to enlist organizations
that have performed complex virtualization implementations.
Choice of Support Vendor
Virtualized datacenters require a vendor that can support the entire environment rather
than just one technology asset. As a result, selecting a vendor that has a robust support
portfolio and can look across all of the assets that are required to support the business
processes becomes increasingly critical in a highly virtualized environment.
IBM SERVICES OFFERINGS
IBM has all of the factors that IT organizations should consider when choosing a partner in
datacenter operations and design services. IBM has breadth of offerings, deep expertise,
a systematic approach, an experienced team, great support, and industry-leading
analytics. IBM's strengths are the breadth of its offerings and the ability to deliver a holistic
10 #228261 ©2011 IDC

11. set of services that identify interdependencies across the IT portfolio and provide analytics
that can optimize across the entire life cycle of the datacenter. IBM addresses the
datacenter during the entire life cycle across IT and facilities. Key services include:
Extend
IBM extends the life of the datacenter and the life cycle of IT assets with server
virtualization servers, storage automation, and middleware optimization. These
services allow IT managers to defer constructing a new datacenter or procuring new
IT equipment. At the same time, these services increase the efficiency of the systems
that are already in place in terms of power, cooling, space, and personnel time.
 Server Optimization and Integration Services. In terms of virtualization, most
datacenter managers have already virtualized the "easy workloads," and they do
not know where to go with more complicated virtualization projects in terms of time,
resources, and skill sets while providing a strong ROI for the business. IBM
services work with datacenter managers to virtualize complex Wintel workloads.
IBM utilizes an outside tool and partner called CiRBA to automatically collect
workload characteristics and interdependencies. Then IBM runs profiling to
determine which workloads are good virtualization candidates. The profiles break
down into six patented workload scenarios. IBM virtualizes the appropriate
workloads using a standard factory model for faster implementation and a
repeatable model. This service leaves IT with efficiencies from consolidated
physical servers, a quick virtualization plan, and lowered power and cooling costs.
 Intelligent Storage Service Catalog. The rapid explosion of structured and
unstructured data predicted by IDC will lead to a storage management
conundrum for IT organizations. IBM can automate storage provisioning to speed
time to market and decrease management costs. This IBM service also frees up
storage architects so they can focus on adding incremental value to the business
rather than maintaining and managing existing storage. The Intelligent Storage
Service Catalog defines common application-based standards, maps the
standards to the appropriate storage, and builds the corresponding catalogs and
requests. The process is policy based for ease of repeatability. This service can
increase storage utilization, decrease management time, and decrease the
demand for tier 1 storage.
 Middleware Design and Strategy Services. The shift toward application
rationalization is happening in many datacenters as IT organizations take a
hard look at efficiencies, virtualization opportunities, and the amount of time
they spend on management (not innovation). This process is important in
the middleware environment as well. IBM combines its performance and
relationship analysis multiple error diagnostic (ParaMedic) tool, which identifies
abnormal performance bottlenecks from unusual CPU utilization, with
performance and capacity evaluation services (PACES). PACES analyzes and
optimizes workloads by looking at Web response times. This process enables
IBM and the IT organization to model performance outcomes before the actual
implementation. In the end, IBM uses these tools to speed middleware
consolidation and optimization so that IT managers have what they need and do
not need to manage what they do not need.
©2011 IDC #228261 11

12. Rationalize
IBM's services help datacenter managers perform a portfolio rationalization of their
datacenter. Many environments today are reactionary and have not established what
assets, management, and designs are necessary to be proactive for the business.
IBM's rationalization services include:
 Datacenter Strategy. IBM's datacenter strategy helps business balance the goals
of budget, availability, and expanding services. The necessity for tools is apparent in
many IT organizations as this exercise is not undertaken with much regularity, and
the risk of not taking a hard look at overall datacenter strategy is too risky not to do
it. IBM uses cash flow analysis, outage analysis, and capacity planning tools to set
up the datacenter for success. In particular, the capacity planning and resiliency
tools are patent-pending, leading-edge tools developed in collaboration with IBM
Research. The capacity planning tool provides a new level of predictability that can
be used to plan for the next 10–20 years. The tool empowers decision making and
improved performance through the use of complex modeling and Monte Carlo
simulations to determine the best way to meet the unpredictable demands of
datacenter capacity in the future. The datacenter strategy service is useful for
datacenter managers wondering where to start while keeping the delicate balance of
the datacenter (budget, availability, and expansion) in check.
 Datacenter Consolidation and Relocation. This patent-pending technology
maps dependencies of all IT assets up to the application level. Analytics for
Logical Dependency Mapping (ALDM) is ideal for datacenter relocation or
consolidation. ALDM allows datacenter managers to focus on application
availability during datacenter moves and consolidation because what runs
together unfortunately goes down together. With this new technology, this risk is
mitigated because the dependencies are known. In a world where the cost of
moving a datacenter can sometimes equal or exceed the cost of building a new
datacenter, this technology is very valuable.
Design
As noted earlier, the physical backbone of the datacenter is often forgotten when
these transitions and services come in to play. With IBM, this is not the case; it has
expertise in datacenter design, construction, and operation from its worldwide hosting
and outsourcing businesses. This experience can be brought in to help datacenter
managers figure out how to retrofit, expand, or build a new datacenter. The services
that help IT organizations go down the path of datacenter capacity expansion include:
 Scalable Modular Datacenter (SMDC). This package is for new datacenter needs
in small to midmarket companies that are experiencing capacity, availability, or
flexibility limitations. The package includes a preintegrated enclosed rack with
cooling, onsite services and consultation, and a power distribution unit (PDU). The
greatest value-add here from IBM is the "single throat to choke." With small to
midmarket companies sometimes lacking facilities knowledge or staff bandwidth,
having a single point of contact to provide project management services and
manage other vendors is invaluable. This solution is a great place to start a new
datacenter footprint without going through a massive project.
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13.  Portable Modular Datacenter (PMDC). This solution is a great way to add
capacity to an existing site, create a new point of presence, increase disaster
recovery capabilities, or gain capacity in remote areas. IBM also offers preintegrated
datacenters in shipping containers (20 feet long and 40 feet long) with facilities
included. The specification includes cooling, uninterruptable power supply (UPS),
fire suppression, batteries, and remote monitoring. IBM is vendor neutral for
IT equipment, although of course, it can populate the container with IBM IT systems
as well.
 Enterprise Modular Datacenter (EMDC). This IBM service for enterprise clients
supports modularity from the first stages of the datacenter build. By building
modularity into the datacenter design from the ground up, enterprises avoid costly
retrofits down the road and improve flexibility to meet changing business
requirements. The EMDC is essentially a "shrink-wrapped," standardized datacenter
between 5,000 square feet and 20,000 square feet in size. This approach to
enterprise-level datacenter construction provides just-in-time compute for the
business without overprovisioning today for tomorrow's computing requirements.
Datacenter managers undertaking the building of a new datacenter have a plethora of
choices, and making the correct decision, in many cases, will impact the datacenter for
the next 15 to 20 years. This is a difficult situation to be in due to the unpredictability of
IT's needs over the course of the future, lack of information, and lack of perspective.
IBM datacenter life-cycle cost tools can help rightsize the trade-offs in terms of capital
expenditure (capex) and operational expenditure (opex) for different types of cooling
(one of the longest-term impact decisions in datacenter design). IBM uses these tools to
design the modular datacenters mentioned in this section.
Manage
A common problem for datacenter managers today is making more time for their staff
to focus on strategically critical projects rather than mundane day-to-day tasks. These
day-to-day tasks need to be accomplished to keep the datacenter, IT, and the
business running but are not adding incremental value to IT or the business. To solve
the problems of today's datacenter and increase flexibility, efficiency, and reliability,
IT needs to focus on incremental improvements rather than keeping the ship afloat.
The problem is that there are a finite number of IT staff members, so IT managers
need a datacenter service provider to accomplish maintenance and day-to-day
chores, thereby freeing up internal IT staff to focus on helping the business. IBM's
services to help manage the IT environment include:
 Managed Server Services. IBM's Enterprise Server Managed Services provide
monitoring and management of the IT infrastructure, including servers,
middleware, storage, and databases. IT organizations that utilize this service and
give up an essential but not incrementally valuable task, free up these
administrators to innovate, create value-adding services for lines of business,
and focus on more mission-critical work. This IBM service is available for System
Z and System I platforms with local service delivery where offshore delivery is
noncompliant. Native language delivery and support are available for Japan,
Korea, and China.
©2011 IDC #228261 13

14.  Managed Storage and Data Services. Given the oncoming explosion of data
and storage capacity and management demands being placed on IT, IBM's
Enterprise Managed Storage Services are rather timely. This service features
flexible, scalable, resilient storage capacity on demand for clients. Disk, archive,
backup, and restore management services are available as part of a fully
managed solution. These services include reporting, monitoring, management,
and allocation-based pricing. The location options abound from an IBM service
delivery center, a hosting center, or a customer's datacenter. In terms of
connectivity, storage area networks (SANs) and local area networks (LANs) are
available. This highly secure service from IBM cures the headache of many
datacenter managers looking to offload some of the data onslaught to free up
internal resources for more strategic initiatives.
 Tivoli Live Monitoring Services. For datacenter managers facing repeated
instances of downtime and a deluge of alerts, IBM offers Tivoli Live Monitoring
Services. This service allows datacenter managers to have greater visibility into
the incidents from their infrastructure without installing management tools. IT
organizations are constantly looking for better insight around availability,
capacity, and energy efficiency. Tivoli Live Monitoring Services uses intelligent
automation and policy-based alert monitoring to limit issues resulting in
downtime. This ultimately frees up IT staff to focus on problems affecting
business performance.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
The future outlook for external services in the datacenter is bright. Now that most of
the easily virtualized workloads are consolidated, the next hurdles for many IT shops
are to decrease management time and resources, increase availability, and expand to
support the business. Many of these process and soft issues are difficult to address
from within the organization. Bringing in an external point of view, both to help the IT
director choose where to begin while maintaining balance between resource
limitations, availability, and expansion and to see the forest through the trees, is, in
many cases, a valuable endeavor.
IDC believes that the opportunity for IT managers to gain knowledge, strategic insight,
and an improved IT environment from datacenter service providers will grow as more
companies move along the virtualization management curve. For datacenter service
providers, the keys to success are breadth and depth of expertise, proven strategic
insight, global experience, and analytically driven actions.
CHALLENGES/OPPORTUN ITIES
Challenges
 Datacenter managers are still focused on day-to-day survival instead of
long-term excellence. IBM needs to get these IT organizations to think differently
about their IT and facilities environments.
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15.  Cloud computing and the rise of off-premise computing is a tempting proposition
for some datacenter managers. Luckily, IBM has a strong hosting offering that
complements its internal services offerings.
 Changing behaviors is difficult. To really increase datacenter efficiency, agility,
and availability, IBM needs to effect change at an organizational level.
Opportunities
 With a large, ongoing post-recession buildout of enterprise-class datacenters to
replenish an outdated and out-of-capacity supply, IBM's timing is impeccable.
 IBM has the ability to cross-leverage its other lines of business, including
systems and hosting. IBM can either be best-of-breed one-stop shopping or work
with other vendors in the datacenter to provide what the situation requires. This is
a true comparative advantage in the market today.
 Virtualization is at the point in its adoption curve where complexity is really
becoming the limiting factor. IBM can help datacenter managers optimize that
last mile.
CONCLUSION
Today's datacenters have solved one problem (physical server sprawl) with
virtualization and are not dealing with a resulting problem (management and virtual
server sprawl). Many CIOs know they need help, but they do not know where the best
place is to begin optimization for flexibility, reliability, and efficiency. Many times there
are trade-offs between goals, and, unfortunately, stagnancy is not a viable option.
IBM's datacenter services are meant to help. Datacenter managers have many
options to choose from with the assistance of a reliable, proven partner. IBM's
breadth and depth of analytically backed offerings are proven not only through
measurement and analysis but also in its own outsourcing and customer datacenters.
For datacenter managers on the road to optimization or those looking for where to
begin, IBM is an excellent place to start.
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