Continuous Improvement And Flexibility Are Keys to Successful Data Center Transformation, Say HP Experts

Transcript of a sponsored podcast in conjunction with an HP video series on how companies can transform data centers productively and efficiently.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on The HUB -- HP's video series on data center transformation, go to www.hp.com/go/thehub.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on 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.

This is the first in a series of podcasts on DCT best practices and is presented in conjunction with a complementary video series. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here today, we’ll 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.

With us now to explain why DCT makes sense and how to go about it with lower risk, we are joined by our panel: 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.

Welcome to you all.

My first question goes to Helen. What are the major trends driving the need for DCT? Also, why is now such a good time to embark on such projects?

Helen 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: Now we’re going to go to Mark Grindle. 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.

Mark Grindle: Thank you, Dana. 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: Let’s now go to Bruce Randall. 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

Bruce 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.

Gardner: So we’ve discussed some of these major pillars of good methodological structure and planning for DCT. How do you get started? Are there some resources available to get folks better acquainted with these to begin executing on how to put in place measurements, knowing their current state, creating a planning process that's flexible and dynamic before they even get into a full-fledged DCT? So what resources are available, and I'll open up this to the entire panel.

Randall: 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.

Gardner: And then you’ve created this video series. You also have a number of workshops. Are those happening fairly regularly at different locations around the globe? How are the workshops available to folks just to start in on this?

A lot of tools

Grindle: We do have a lot of tools as I was mentioning. 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.

Gardner: I'm curious about these workshops. Are they happening relatively frequently? Do they happen in different regions of the globe? Where can you go specifically to learn about where the one for you might be next?

Grindle: 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.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on two major pillars of proper and successful DCT projects, knowing your true state to start and then also being flexible on the path to long-term milestones and goals.

I’d like to thank our panel, 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. Thank you to you all.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and thanks again for our audience and their listening and attention, and do come back next time.

For more information on The HUB -- HP's video series on data center transformation, go to www.hp.com/go/thehub.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast in conjunction with an HP video series on how companies can transform data centers productively and efficiently. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP's Liz Roche on Why Enterprise Technology Strategy Must Move Beyond the 'Professional' and 'Consumer' Split
• Well-Planned Data Center Transformation Effort Delivers IT Efficiency Paybacks, Green IT Boost for Valero Energy
• Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transforation as Priority, Says Research
• Data Center Transformation Includes More Than New Systems, There's Also Secure Data Removal, Recycling, Server Disposal
  

Tag-Team of HP Workshops Provides Essential Path to IT Maturity Assessment and a Data Center Transformation Journey

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on some fast-moving trends by addressing the need for data center transformation (DCT). We'll also identify some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

The pace of change, degrees of complexity, and explosion around the uses of new devices and increased data sources are placing new requirements and new strain on older data centers. Research shows that a majority of enterprises are either planning for or are in the midst of data center improvements and expansions.

Deciding how to best improve your data center however is not an easy equation. Those building new data centers need to contend with architectural shifts to cloud and hybrid infrastructure models, as well as the need to cut total cost and reduce energy consumption for the long-term.

An added requirement for new data centers is to satisfy the needs of both short-and long-term goals, by effectively jibing the need for agility now with facility decisions that may well impact the company for 20 years or more.

We are going to examine two ongoing HP workshops as a means for better understanding DCT and for accurately assessing a company’s maturity in order to know how to begin a DCT journey and where it should end up.

We're here with rather three HP experts on the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop and the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model Workshop. Please join me now in welcoming Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solution for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Helen.

Helen Tang: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager at HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Network Business Unit. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Edelmann: Thank you, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: And also Mark Grindle, Business Consultant for Data Center Infrastructure Services and Technology Services in HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Grindle: Hi, Dana. Thanks a lot.

Gardner: Helen, as I mentioned, this is a very difficult situation for organizations. Lots of conflicting data is coming in, and many changes, many different trends are impacting this. Why don’t we try to set the stage a little bit for why DCT is so important, but also why it's no easy task.

Exciting times

Tang: Absolutely, Dana. As you said, there are a lot of difficulties for technology, but also if you look at the big picture, we live in extremely exciting times. We have rapidly changing and evolving business models, new technology advances like cloud, and a rapidly changing workforce.

What the world is demanding is essentially instant gratification. You can call it sort of an instant-on world, a world where everything is mobile, everybody is connected, interactive, and things just move very immediately and fluidly. All your customers and constituents want their need satisfied today, in an instant, as opposed to days or weeks. So, it takes a special kind of enterprise to do just that and compete in this world.

You need to be able to serve all of these customers, employees, partners, and citizens -- 0r if you happen to be a government organization -- with whatever they want or need instantly, any point, any time, through any channel. This is what HP is calling the Instant-On Enterprise, and we think it's the new imperative.

Gardner: When you say instant-on, it means that companies have to respond to their customers at almost lightning speed, but we are talking about infrastructures that can take years to build out. How do you jibe the two, the need to be instant, in terms of how you respond, but recognizing that this is a very difficult, complex, and timely process?

Tang: Therein lies the challenge. Your organization is demanding ever more from IT -- more innovation, faster time to market, more services -- but at the same time, you're being constrained by older architectures, inflexible siloed infrastructure that you may have inherited over the years. How do you deliver this new level of agility and be able to meet those needs?

You have to take a transformational approach and look at things like converged infrastructure as a foundation for moving your current data center to a future state that’s able to support all of this growth, with virtualized resource pools, integrated automated processes across the data center, with an energy-efficient future-proofed physical data center design, that’s able to flex and meet these needs.

Gardner: Of course, one of the larger trends too is that technology is just more important to more companies in more ways. This is not something you do just to support your employees. It really is core to most companies in how they actually conduct business, and is probably one of the chief determinants of their success.

So doing DCT is really part and parcel with how well you actually run your business -- or am I overstating it?

Tang: That’s absolutely true. We talked earlier about how being an Instant-On Enterprise is an imperative. Why do we call it that? Well, because these vast changes are coming, and you don’t have a choice.

If you look at just a few examples of some of these changes in the world of IT, number one is devices. I think you mentioned this earlier. There’s an explosion of devices being used: smartphones, laptops, TouchPads, PDAs. According to the Gartner Group, by 2014, that’s less than three years, 90 percent of organizations will need to support their corporate applications on personal devices. Is IT ready for that? Not by a long shot today.

Architecture shifts

Another trend that we see is some of these architecture shifts. Cloud obviously is very hot today, but two or three years ago a lot of CIOs pooh-poohed the idea and said, "Oh, that’s not real. That’s just hype." Well, the trend is really upon us.

Another Gartner stat: in the next four years, 43 percent of CIOs will have the majority of their IT infrastructure and organizations and apps running in the cloud or in some sort of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. Most organizations aren’t equipped to deal with that.

Last but not least, look at your workforce. In less than 10 years about half of the workforce will be millennials, which is defined as people born between the year of 1981 and 2000 -- the first generation to come of age in the new millennium. This is a Forrester statistic.

This younger generation grew up with the Internet. They work and communicate very differently from the workforce of today and they will be a main constituency for IT in less than 10 years. That’s going to force all of us to adjust to different types of support expectations, different user experiences, and governance.

Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner.

Gardner: So, as we recognize that the workloads, the requirements placed on IT are shifting, the data center needs to respond to that as well. I guess it’s important to know where you are, how well you have done in adjusting to what you have been serving up in the last several years in order to know what you need to do in order to be able to provide for these new requirements that we are describing.

Let’s start talking about one of these first workshops. It’s about the Maturity Model, a better understanding of where you are. I guess there is an order to these workshops. This one seems to be in the right order. You have to know where you are before you can decide where to go.

So let’s move to Mark Edelmann. Tell me a little bit about the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and why it’s important, as I said, to know where you are before you start charting the course in any detail to the future.

Edelmann: Before we dive into the maturity model though, I recently bumped into a definition on Wikipedia about maturity and I thought it might be useful to consider your IT environment as you listen to this definition that I picked up.

"Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner. The response is generally learned rather than instinctive and is not determined by one’s age. Maturity also encompasses being aware of the correct time and place to behave and knowing when to act appropriately according to the situation."

Now, that probably sounds a little bit like what you might want your infrastructure to behave like and to actually achieve a level of maturity, and that’s exactly what the Maturity Model Workshop is all about.

Overall assessment

The Maturity Model consists of an overall assessment, and it’s a very objective assessment. It’s based on roughly 60 questions that we go through to specifically address the various dimensions, or as we call them domains, of the maturity of an IT infrastructure.

We apply these questions in a consultative, interactive way with our customers, because some of the discussions can get very, very detailed. Asking these questions of many of our customers that have participated in these workshops has been a new experience. We're going to ask our customers things that they probably never thought about before or have only thought of in a very brief sort of a way, but it’s important to get to the bottom of some of these issues.

As a result of examining the infrastructure’s maturity along these lines, we're able to establish a baseline of the maturity of the infrastructure today. And, in the course of interviewing and discussing this with our customers, we also identify where they would like to be in terms of their maturity in the future. From that, we can put together a plan of how to get from here to there.

Gardner: When you say a workshop, are these set up so that people physically go there and you have them in different places, or is there a virtual version where people can participate regardless of where they are? How does that work?

Edelmann: We've found it’s much more valuable to sit down face to face with the customer and go through this, and it actually requires an investment of time. There’s a lot of background information that has to be gathered and so forth, and it seems best if we're face to face as we go through this and have the discussion that’s necessary to really tease out all the details.

The impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors.

Gardner: I'd like to understand a little bit more, Mark, why you break out maturity versus installed base. Help me understand what it takes in order to succeed and what you typically find with these companies? Do they find that they are further ahead than they thought or further behind when we look at this through that distinct lens of maturity?

Edelmann: Most of our customers find out that they are a lot further behind than they thought they were. It's not necessarily due to any fault on their part, but possibly a result of aging infrastructure, because of the economic situation we have been in, disparate siloed infrastructure as a result of building out application focused stacks, which was kind of the way we approached IT historically.

Also, the impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors and so forth. Rationalizing all that can leave them in kind of a disparate sort of a state. So, they usually find that they are a lot further behind than they thought.

Gardner: And, because you've been doing this for quite some time and you've been doing it around the world, you have a pretty good set of data. You have some good historical trend lines to examine, so you have certain domains and certain stages of maturity that you have been able to identify.

Maybe you could help us understand what those are and then relate how folks can then place themselves on those lines, not only to know where they are, but have a sense of how far it is they need to go to get to that higher level of maturity they're seeking.

Edelmann: Sure. We can talk through that level of detail and you can familiarize yourself, at least verbally, with how this model is set up and so forth.

4x5 matrix

Picture, if you will, a 4x5 matrix. We examine the customer’s infrastructure in four, what we call, domains. These domains consist of technology and architecture, management tools and processes, the culture and IT staff, and the demand, supply, and IT governance aspects of the infrastructure and the data center operations. Those are the four domains in which we ask these questions and make our assessment.

From that, as we go through this, through some very detailed analysis that we have done over the years, we're able to position the customer’s infrastructure in one of five stages:

• The first stage, which is where most people start, is in Stage 1; we call that Compartmentalized and Legacy, which is rather essentially the least-mature stage.
• From there we move to Stage 2, which we call Standardized.
• Stage 3 then is Optimized.
• Stage 4 gets us into Automated and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and,
  
• Stage 5 is more or less IT utopia necessary to become the Instant-On Enterprise that Helen just talked about. We called that Adaptively Sourced Infrastructure.

We evaluate each domain under several conditions against those five stages and we essentially wind up with a baseline of where the customer stands.

We've been doing this for a while and we've done a lot of examinations across the world and across various industries. We have a database of roughly 1,400 customers that we then compare the customer’s maturity to. So, the customer can determine where they stand with regards to the overall norms of IT infrastructures.

It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.

We can also illustrate to the customer what the best-in-class behavior is, because right now, there aren’t a whole lot of infrastructures that are up at Stage 5. It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.

Gardner: I want to make sure I've got this straight in terms of the order of these workshops and why how they play off of one another. Maybe, Helen, you could come back in and help understand which one you see people doing first and which one you think is the one that makes the more sense?

Tang: Both workshops are great. It's not really an either/or. I would start with the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, because that sets the scene in the background of how I start to approach this problem. What do I think about? What are the key areas of consideration? And, it maps out a strategy on a grander scale.

The CI Maturity Model Assessment specifically gets into when you think about implementation. Let's dive in and really drill deep into your current state versus future state when it comes to these five domains that Mark just described.

Gardner: Let's go now to the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop with Mark Grindle. First, do you share Helen’s perspective on the order, and what would people gain by entering into the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first? Then, you can then fill us in a little bit on what it's about?

Interesting workshop

Grindle: Thanks, Dana. I agree with what Helen said. It really is more structured if you do the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first and then follow that up with the Maturity Model. It's very interesting workshop, because it's very different from any other workshop, at least that I have ever participated in. It's not theoretical and it's also extremely interactive.

It was originally designed and set up based on HP IT’s internal transformation. So, it's based on exactly what we went through to accomplish all the great things that we did, and we've continued to refine and improve it based on our customer experiences too. So, it's a great representation of our internal experiences as well as what customers and other businesses and other industries are going through.

During the process, we walk the customer through everything that we've learned, a lot of best practices, a lot of our experiences, and it's extremely interactive.

Then, as we go through each one of our dimensions, or each one of the panels, we probe with the customer to discuss what resonates well with them, where they think they are in certain areas, and it's a very interactive dialog of what we've learned and know and what they've learned and know and what they want to achieve.

The outcome is typically a very robust document and conversation around how the customer should proceed with their own transformation, how they should sequence it, what their priorities are, and true deliverables -- here are the tasks you need to take on and accomplish -- either with our help or on their own.

It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.

It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.

Gardner: And the same question to you, Mark Grindle, about location. Is this something you prefer to do face to face as Mark Edelmann mentioned, or is this something that people can gather virtually or through road shows? How does it actually come to the market?

Grindle: It absolutely has to be face-to-face. We use a very large conference room and we set up these panels around the room. Each one of these panels is floor to ceiling and height. There are about 4 feet by 5, or 5.5 feet high, and we walk through a series of 10 panels that approaches each of the dimensions of transformation, as we look at it.

So having all the people in the room and being able to be interactive face to face, as well as reference panels that you might have gone through or that you are about to go through as different points in the conversation come up, is critical to having a successful workshop.

Designed around strategy

It's definitely designed around strategy. Most people, when they look at transformation, think about their data centers, their servers, and somewhat their storage, but really the goal of our workshop is to help them understand, in a much more holistic view, that it's not just about that typical infrastructure. It has to do with program management, governance, the dramatic organizational change that goes on if you go through transformation.

Applications, the data, the business outcomes, all of this has to be tied in to to ensure that, at end of the day, you've implemented a very cost-effective solution that meets the needs of the businesses. That really is a game-changing type of move by your organization.

Gardner: And, as part of some of the trends we mentioned, building these for the long-term means that you're building for operational efficiency. The total cost, of course, over time is going to be that ongoing operational penalty or, if you do it right, perhaps payback. How do you help people appreciate the economics of the data center, and how important is that to people in these workshops?

Grindle: The financials are absolutely critical. There are very few businesses today that aren’t extremely focused on their bottom line and how they can reduce the operational cost.

Certainly, from the HP IT experience, we can show, although it's not a trivial investment to make this all happen, the returns are not only normally a lot larger than your investment, but they are year-over-year savings. That’s money that typically can be redeployed to areas that really impact the business, whether it's through manufacturing, marketing, or sales. This is money that can be reinvested in the business, and allowed to help grow the areas that really will have future impact on the growth of the business, while reducing the cost of your data centers and your operation.

Even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology.

Interestingly enough, what we find is that, even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology. You actually have to implement new technologies and robust technologies to help bring your cost down. Things like automations, operational efficiency, ITIL processes all help you drive the saving while you are allowed to upgrade your systems and your environments to current technologies and new technologies.

And, while we're on the topic of cost savings, a lot of times when we are talking to customer about transformation, it's normally being driven by some critical IT imperative, like they're out of space in their data center and they're about to look at building out a new data center or perhaps a obtaining a collocation site. A lot of times we find that we sit down and talk with them about how they can modernize their application, tier their storage, go with higher density equipment, virtualize their servers, they actually can free up space and avoid that major investment of the new data center.

Gardner: That gets back to the definition of maturity, where it might not necessarily mean bringing in trucks and pouring cement. It could very well mean transforming in a way that ekes out more productivity from your existing facilities before you rush into something new. Is that typically the case? How often does that really happen where you can wring out enough efficiency to postpone the actual new facility?

Grindle: It happens time and time again. I am working with a company right now that was looking at going to eight data centers and by implementing a lot of these new technologies -- higher virtualization rates, improvements to their applications, and better management of their data on their storage. We're trying to get them down into two data centers. So right there is a substantial change. And, that’s just an example of things that I have seen time and time again, as we've done these workshops.

A big part of this is working through what the customer really needs and what their business drivers really are. In some cases, we're finding out that brick and mortar aren’t really the right solutions for their data centers. They should look at collocation or even at more creative solutions like the HP Data Center POD, where you can stand up one of these containers filled with high density, very modern equipment, and meet all their needs without doing anything to your existing data center.

It's all about walking through the problems and the issues that are at hand and figuring out what the right answers are to meet their needs, while trying to control the expense.

What's next?

Gardner: Okay, I am starting to get it now. I see why these two workshops play off of one another, because you are laying out all the things that have happened at HP, what to expect, and what some of the alternatives are. That way you've got in your mind a set of alternative directions. Then, by doing the Maturity Model, you get a sense of where you are and where you can go, and putting the two together can start you on that path.

Let’s look at that future path a little bit. Folks have taken these workshops and gotten a better sense of the holistic full total equation. What usually happens next? What's the process from research, understanding, and knowledge to actually starting to hammer out a definition of what you and your particular situation as an organization should do?

Let me fire that first off at you, Helen.

Tang: As often happens, it depends. It’s based on your organization’s business needs. Where are you trying to go in the next year, two years, or five years? It’s also based on the level of constraint that you face right now in the data center.

We see one of two paths. In the more transformational approach, whereby you have the highest level of buy-in, all the way up to the CIO and sometimes CFO and CEO, you lay out an actual 12-18 month plan. HP can help with that, and you start executing towards that. You say, "Okay, what would be the first step?" A lot of times, it makes sense to standardize, consolidate. Then, what is the next step? Sometimes that’s modernizing applications, and so on. That’s one approach we have seen.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation. Then, we take a more project-based approach. It still helps them a lot going through these two workshops. They get to see the big picture and all the things that are possible, but they start picking low-hanging fruit that would yield the highest ROI and solve their current pain points.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation.

Often, in these past few years, it has been virtualization. What is my current virtualization level? How do I take it up to maximum efficiency? And then, look to adjacent projects. So, the next step might be consolidation, or automation, and so on.

Gardner: Mark Edelmann, same to you. Are there some typical scenarios that you've seen that folks when they have digested the implications from these workshops then have a vision or a direction, and what typically would that be?

Edelmann: Helen did a great job of outlining it, because different customers start at different places and they are headed for different places. Often, the journey is a little bit different from one customer to the other.

The Maturity Model Workshop you might think of as being at a little lower level than the Data Center Transformation Workshop. As a result of the Maturity Model Workshops, we produce a report for the customer to understand -- A is where I'm at, and B is where I'm headed. Those gaps that are identified during the course of the assessment help lead a customer to project definitions.

In some cases, there may be some obvious things that can be done in the short term and capture some of that low-hanging fruit -- perhaps just implement a blade system or something like that -- that will give them immediate results on the path to higher maturity in their transformation journey.

Multiple starting points

There are multiple starting points and consequently multiple exit points from the Maturity Model Workshop as well.

Gardner: Mark Grindle, same kind of question. How do people take what they've gathered here to use it? Any stories or anecdotes about what you have seen people do with this that has helped them?

Grindle: Mark and Helen were both right in their comments. The result of the workshop is really a sequence series of events that the customer should follow up on next. Those can be very specific items, like gather your physical server inventories so that that can be analyzed, to other items such as run a Maturity Model Workshop, so that you can understand where you are in each of the areas and what the gaps are, based on where you really want to be.

It’s always interesting when we do these workshops, because we pull together a group of senior executives covering all the domains that I've talked about -- program management, governance -- their infrastructure people, their technology people, their applications people, and their operational people, and it’s always funny, the different results we see.

I had one customer that said to me that the deliverable we gave them out in the workshop was almost anti-climatic versus what they learned in the workshop. What they had learned during this one was that many people had different views of where the organization was and where it wanted to go.

It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head.

Each was correct from their particular discipline, but from an overarching view of what are we trying to do for the business, they weren’t all together on all of that. It’s funny how we see those lights go on as people are talking and you get these interesting dialogs of people saying, "Well, this is how that is." And someone else going, "No, it’s not. It’s really like this."

It’s amazing the collaboration that goes on just among the customer representatives above and beyond the customer with HP. It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head. It ends up motivating people to start taking those next actions and figuring out how they can move their data centers and their IT environment in a much more logical, and in most cases, aggressive fashion than they were originally thinking.

Gardner: It sounds like a very powerful exercise for a lot of different reasons. For those folks interested, how could they learn more about these workshops? Are there some resources out there whereby they go to find them? Let me start with you, Helen.

Tang: The place to go would be hp.com/go/dct.

Gardner: That’s pretty straightforward. Any other thoughts Mark and Mark about where you could go to pursue information if you were starting to get interested in these workshops?

Edelmann: Well, it’s probably not a big surprise, but to learn more about the CI Maturity Model, you can go to hp.com/go/cimm.

Gardner: And Mark Grindle?

Grindle: I agree with both of those. Obviously your HP account rep can help you. We have an HP IT Forum coming up soon. For people who are attending, we do mini workshops during this event. We set up a day that individual customers can come in for an hour and we walk them through each one of the panels very quickly and give them a flavor for what the full workshop would look like. There are a lot of options here for people to get a better understanding of the workshop and how it can help them.

Gardner: So, you can get the appetizer before the entrée?

Grindle: Absolutely.

Gardner: Well, thank you. You have been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the need for DCT and some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

I would like to thank our guests. We have been joined by Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions for HP Enterprise Business. Thanks again, Helen,

Tang: Thanks, Dana. Always a pleasure.

Gardner: And Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager, HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Networking Business Unit. Thanks to you, Mark.

Edelmann: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Mark Grindle, Business Consultant, Data Center Infrastructure Services in the Technology Services within HP Enterprise Business. Thanks to you.

Grindle: Thank you, Dana. It was great being here.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP's Instant-On Enterprise Initiative Takes Aim at Shifting Needs of Business and Government
• Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transformation as Priority, says Research
• Well-Planned Data Center Transformation Effort Delivers IT Efficiency Paybacks, Green IT Boost for Valero Energy
• Data Center Transformation Includes More than New Systems; There's Also Secure Data Removal, Recycling, Server Disposal