Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect: Continuous improvement and flexibility are keys to successful data center transformation, say HP experts

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The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion targets two major pillars of proper and successful data center transformation (DCT) projects. We’ll hear from a panel of HP experts on proven methods that have aided productive and cost-efficient projects to reshape and modernize enterprise data centers.

Learn about the latest trends buttressing the need for DCT and then how to do it well and safely. Specifically, we’ll delve into why it's important to fully understand the current state of an organization’s IT landscape and data center composition in order to then properly chart a strategy for transformation.

Secondly, we'll explore how to avoid pitfalls by balancing long-term goals with short-term flexibility. The key is to know how to constantly evaluate based on metrics and to reassess execution plans as DCT projects unfold. This avoids being too rigidly aligned with long-term plans and roadmaps and potentially losing sight of how actual progress is being made -- or not.

This is the first in a series of podcasts on DCT best practices and is presented in conjunction with a complementary video series.

With us now to explain why DCT makes sense and how to go about it with lower risk, we are joined by Helen Tang, Worldwide Data Center Transformation Lead for HP Enterprise Business; Mark Grindle, Master Business Consultant at HP, and Bruce Randall, Director of Product Marketing for Project and Portfolio Management at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Tang: We all know that in this day and age, the business demands innovation, and IT is really important, a racing engine for any business. However, there are a lot of external constraints. The economy is not getting any better. Budgets are very, very tight. They are dealing with IT sprawl, aging infrastructure, and are just very much weighed down by this decade of old assets that they’ve inherited.

So a lot of companies today have been looking to transform, but getting started is not always very easy. So HP decided to launch this HUB project, which is designed to be a resource engine for IT to feature a virtual library of videos, showcasing the best of HP, but more importantly, ideas for how to address these challenges. We as a team, decided to tackle it with a series that’s aligned around some of the ways customers can approach addressing data centers, transforming them, and how to jump start their IT agility.

The five steps that we decided that as keys for the series would be the planning process, which is actually what we’re discussing in this podcast: data center consolidation, as well as standardization; virtualization; data center automation; and last but not least, of course, security.

IT superheroes

To make this video series more engaging, we hit on this idea of IT as superheroes, because we’ve all seen people, especially in this day and age, customers with the clean budget, whose IT team is really performing superhuman feats.

We thought we’d produce a series that's a bit more light-hearted than is usual for HP. So we added a superhero angle to the series. That’s how we hit upon the name of "IT Superhero Secrets: Five Steps to Jump Start Your IT Agility." Hopefully, this is going to be one of the little things that can contribute to this great process of data center modernizing right now, which is a key trend.

With us today are two of these experts that we’re going to feature in Episode 1. And to find these videos, you go to hp.com/go/thehub.

Gardner: Mark, you've been doing this for quite some time and have learned a lot along the way. Tell us why having a solid understanding of where you are in the present puts you in a position to better execute on your plans for the future.

Grindle: There certainly are a lot of great reasons to start transformation now.

But as you said, the key to starting any kind of major initiative, whether it’s transformation, data center consolidation, or any of these great things like virtualization, technology refresh that will help you improve your environment, improve the service to your customers, and reduce costs, which is what this is all about, is to understand where you are today.

Most companies out there with the economic pressures and technology changes that have gone on have done a lot to go after the proverbial low-hanging fruit. But now it’s important to understand where you are today, so that you can build the right plan for maximizing value the fastest and in the best way.

When we talk about understanding where you are today, there are a few things that jump to mind. How many servers do I have? How much storage do I have? What are the operating system levels and the versions that I'm at? How many desktops do I have? People really think about that kind of physical inventory and they try to manage it. They try to understand it, sometimes more successfully and other times less successfully.

But there's a lot more to understanding where you are today. Understanding that physical inventory is critical to what you need to understand to go forward, and most people have a lot of tools out there already to do that. I should mention that those of you who don’t have tools that can get that physical inventory, it’s important that you do.

I've found so many times when I go into environments that they think they have a good understanding of what they have physically, and a lot of times they do, but rarely is that accurate. Manual processes just can't keep things as accurate or as current as you really need, when you start trying to baseline your environment so that you can track and measure your progress and value.

Thinking about applications

Of course, beyond the physical portions of your inventory, you'd better start thinking about your applications. What are your applications. What language are they written in? Are those traditional or supportable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) type applications? Are they homegrown? That’s going to make a big difference in how you move forward.

And of course, what does your financial landscape look like? What’s going in the operating expense? What’s your capital expense? How is it allocated out, and by the way, is it consistently allocated out.

I've run into a lot of issues where a business unit in the United States has put certain items into an operating expense bucket. In another country or a sub-business unit or another business unit, they're tracking things differently in where they put network cost or where they put people cost or where they put services. So it's not only important to understand where your money is allocated, but what’s in those buckets, so that you can track the progress.

Then, you get into things like people. As you start looking at transformation, a big part of transformation is not just the cost savings that may come about through being able to redeploy your people, but it's also from making sure that you have the right skill set.

If you don’t really understand how many people you have today, what roles and what functions they’re performing, it's going to become really challenging to understand what kind of retraining, reeducation, or redeployment you’re going to do in the future as the needs and the requirements and the skills change.
You really need to understand where they are, so you can properly prepare them for that future space that they want to get into.

You transform, as you level out your application landscape, as you consolidate your databases, as you virtualize your servers, as you use more storage carrying all those great technology. That's going to make a big difference in how your team, your IT organization runs the operations. You really need to understand where they are, so you can properly prepare them for that future space that they want to get into.

So understanding where you are, understanding all those aspects of it are going be the only ways to understand what you have to do to get you in a state. As was mentioned earlier, you know the metrics of measurement to track your progress. Are you realizing the value, the saving, the benefit to your company that you initially used or justified transformation?

Gardner: Mark, I had a thought when you were talking. We’re not just going from physical to physical. A lot of DCT projects now are making that leap from largely physical to increasingly virtual. And that is across many different aspects of virtualization, not just server virtualization.

Is there a specific requirement to know your physical landscape better to make that leap successfully? Is there anything about moving toward a more virtualized future that adds an added emphasis to this need to have a really strong sense of your present state?

Grindle: You're absolutely right on with that. A lot of people have server counts -- I've got a thousand of these, a hundred of those, 50 of those types of things. But understanding the more detailed measurements around those, how much memory is being utilized by each server, how much CPU or processor is being utilized by each server, what do the I/Os look like, the network connectivity, are the kind of inventory items that are going to allow you to virtualize.

Higher virtualization ratios

I talk to people and they say, "I've got a 5:1 or a 10:1 or a 15:1 virtualization ratio, meaning that you have 15 physical servers and then you’re able to talk to one. But if you really understand what your environment is today, how it runs, and the performance characteristics of your environment today, there are environments out there that are achieving much higher virtualization ratios -- 30:1, 40:1, 50:1. We’ve seen a couple that are in the 60 and 70:1.

Of course, that just says that initially they weren’t really using their assets as well as they could have been. But again, it comes back to understanding your baseline, which allows you to plan out what your end state is going to look like.

If you don’t have that data, if you don’t have that information, naturally you've got to be a little more conservative in your solutions, as you don’t want to negatively impact the business of the customers. If you understand a little bit better, you can achieve greater savings, greater benefits.

Remember, this is all about freeing up money that your business can use elsewhere to help your business grow, to provide better service to those customers, and to make IT more of a partner, rather than just a service purely for the business organization.

Gardner: So it sounds as if measuring your current state isn’t just measuring what you have, but measuring some of the components and services you have physically in order to be able to move meaningfully and efficiently to virtualization. It’s really a different way to measure things, isn’t it?
The more data you have, the better you’re going to be able to figure out your end-state solution, and the more benefit you’re going to achieve out of that end state.

Grindle: Absolutely. And it’s not a one-time event. To start out in the field -- whether transformation is right for you and what your transformations look like -- you can do that one-time inventory, that one-time collection of performance information. But it’s really going to be an ongoing process.

The more data you have, the better you’re going to be able to figure out your end-state solution, and the more benefit you’re going to achieve out of that end state. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, the environment changes, and you’ve got to constantly keep on top of it and track it.

You mentioned that a lot of people are going towards virtualization. That becomes an even bigger problem. At least when you’re standing up a physical server today, people complain about how long it takes in a lot of organizations, but there are a lot of checks and balances. You’ve got to order that physical hardware. You've got to install the hardware. You’ve got to justify it. It's got to be loaded up with software. It’s got to be connected to the network.

A virtualized environment can be stood up in minutes. So if you’re not tracking that on an ongoing basis, that's even worse.

Gardner: Bruce, you’ve been looking at the need for being flexible in order to be successful, even as you've got a long-term roadmap ahead of you. Perhaps you could fill us in on why it’s important to evaluate along the way and not be even blinded by long-term goals, but keep balancing and reassessing along the way?
For more information on The HUB -- HP's video series on data center transformation, go to www.hp.com/go/thehub.
Account for changes

Randall: That goes along with what Mark was just saying about the infrastructure components, how these things are constantly changing, and there has to be a process to account for all of the changes that occur.

If you’re looking at a transformation process, it really is a process. It's not a one-time event that occurs over a length of time. Just like any other big program or project that you may be managing you have to plan not only at the beginning of that transformation, but also in the middle and even sometimes in the end of these big transformation projects.

If you think about these things that may change throughout that transformation, one is people. You have people that come. You have people that are leaving for whatever reason. You have people that are reassigned to other roles or take roles that they wanted to do outside of the transformation project. The company strategy may even change, and in fact, in this economy, probably will most likely within the course of the transformation project.

The money situation will most likely change. Maybe you’ve had a certain amount of budget when you started the transformation. You counted on that budget to be able to use it all, and then things change. Maybe it goes up. Maybe it goes down, but most likely, things do change. The infrastructure as Mark pointed to is constantly in flux.

So even though you might have gotten a good steady state of what the infrastructure looked like when you started your transformation project, that does change as well. And then there's the application portfolio. As we continue to run the business, we continue to add or enhance existing applications. The application portfolio changes and therefore the needs within the transformation.
Even though you might have gotten a good steady state of what the infrastructure looked like when you started your transformation project, that does change as well.

Because of all of these changes occurring around you, there's a need to plan not only for contingencies to occur at the beginning of the process, but also to continue the planning process and update it as things change fairly consistently. What I’ve found over time, Dana, with various customers, as they are doing these transformation projects and they try to plan, that planning stage is not just the beginning, not just at the middle, and not just the one point. In other words, it makes the planning process go a lot better and it becomes a lot easier.

In fact, I was speaking with a customer the other day. We went to a baseball game together. It was a customer event, and I was surprised to see this particular customer there, because I knew it was their yearly planning cycle that was going on. I asked them about that, and they talked about the way that they had used our tools. The HP tool sets that they used had allowed them to literally do planning all the time. So they could attend a baseball game instead of attend the planning fire-drill.

So it wasn’t a one-time event, and even if the business wanted a yearly planning view, they were able to produce that very, very easily, because they kept their current state and current plans up to date throughout the process.

Gardner: This reminds me that we've spoken in the past, Bruce, about software development. Successful software development for a lot of folks now involves agile principles. There are these things they call scrum meetings, where people get together and they're constantly reevaluating or adjusting, getting inputs from the team.

Having just a roadmap and then sticking to it turns out to not be just business as usual, but can actually be a path to disaster. Any thoughts about learning from how software is developed in terms of planning for a large project like a DCT.

A lot of similarities

Randall: Absolutely. There are a lot of similarities between the new agile methodologies and what I was just describing in terms of planning at the beginning, in the middle, and the end basically constantly. And when I say the word, plan, I know that evokes in some people a thought of a lot of work, a big thing. In reality, what I am talking about is much smaller than that.

If you’re doing it frequently, the planning needs to be a lot smaller. It's not a huge, involved process. It's very much like the agile methodology, where you’re consistently doing little pieces of work, finishing up sub-segments of the entire thing that you needed to do, as opposed to all of it describing it all, having all your requirements written out at the beginning, then waiting for it to get done sometime later.

You’re actually adapting and changing, as things occur. What's important in the agile methodology, as well as in this transformation, like the planning process I talked about for transformation, is that you still have to give management visibility into what's going on.

Having a planning process and even a tool set to help you manage that planning process will also give management the visibility that they need into the status of that transformation project. The planning process, also like the agile, the development methodology allows collaboration. As you’re going back to the plan, readdressing it, thinking about the changes that have occurred, you’re collaborating between various groups in silos to make sure that you’re still in tune and that you’re still doing things that you need to be doing to make things happen.

One other thing that often is forgotten within the agile development methodology, but it’s still very important, particularly for transformation, is the ability to track the cost of that transformation at any given point in time. Maybe that's because the budget needs to be increased or maybe it's because you're getting some executive mandate that the budget will be decreased, but at least knowing what your costs are, how much you’ve spent, is very, very important.
One other thing that often is forgotten within the agile development methodology, but it’s still very important, particularly for transformation, is the ability to track the cost of that transformation.

Gardner: When you say that, it reminds me of something 20 years or more ago in manufacturing, the whole quality revolution, thought leaders like Deming and the Japanese Kaizen concept of constantly measuring, constantly evaluating, not letting things slip. Is there some relationship here to what you’re doing in project management to what we saw during this “quality revolution” several decades ago?

Randall: Absolutely. You see some of the tenets of project management that are number one. You're tracking what’s going on. You’re measuring what’s going on at every point in time, not only with the cost and the time frames, but also with the people who are involved. Who's doing what? Are they fulfilling the task we’ve asked them to do, so on and so forth. This produces, in the end, just as Deming and others have described, a much higher quality transformation than if you were to just haphazardly try to fulfill the transformation, without having a project management tool in place, for example.

One thing that I would start with is to use multiple resources from HP and others to help customers in their transformation process to both plan out initially what that transformation is going to look like and then give you a set of tools to automate and manage that program and the changes that occur to it throughout time.

That planning is important, as we’ve talked about, because it occurs at multiple stages throughout the cycle. If you have an automated system in place, it certainly it makes it easier to track the plan and changes to that plan over time.

A lot of tools

We have a lot of tools. One of the ones I want to highlight is the Data Center Transformation Experience workshop. And the reason I want to highlight because it really ties into what we’ve been talking about today. It’s an interactive session involving large panels, very minimal presentation and very minimal speaking by the HP facilitators.

We walk people through all the aspects of transformation and this is targeted at a strategic level. We’re looking at the CIOs, CTOs, and the executive decision makers to understand why HP did what they did as far as transformation goes.

We discuss what we’ve seen out in the industry, what the current trends are, and pull out of the conversation with these people where their companies are today. At the end of a workshop, and it's a full-day workshop, there are a lot of materials that are delivered out of it that not only documents the discussions throughout the day, but really provides a step or steps of how to proceed.

So it’s a prioritization. You have facility, for example, that might be in great shape, but your data warehouses are not. That’s an area that you should go after fast, because there's a lot of value in changing it, and it’s going to take you a long time. Or there's a quick hit in your organization and the way you manage your operation, because we cover all the aspects of program management, governance, management of change. That’s the organizational change for a lot of people. As for the technology, we can help them understand not only where they are, but what the initial strategy and plan should be.

You brought up a little bit earlier, Dana, some of the quality people like Deming, etc. We’ve got to remember that transformation is really a journey. There's a lot you can accomplish very rapidly. We always say that the faster you can achieve transformation, the faster you can realize value and the business can get back to leveraging that value, but transformation never ends. There's always more to do. So it's very analogous to the continuous improvement that comes out of some of the quality people that you mentioned earlier.
We always say that the faster you can achieve transformation, the faster you can realize value and the business can get back to leveraging that value, but transformation never ends.

The workshops are scheduled with companies individually. So a good touch point would be with your HP account manager. He or she can work with you to schedule a workshop and understand that how it can be done. They're scheduled as needed.

We do hold hundreds of them around the world every year. It’s been a great workshop. People find it very successful, because it really helps them understand how to approach this and how to get the right momentum within their company to achieve transformation, and there's also a lot of materials on our website.