Virtualizing Enterprises: ChallengesHarrick M. VinVice President and Chief ScientistTata Research Development and Design Centre, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)January 2010

January 2010

Enterprise Goals

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Adaptive

• Adapt easily to different business contexts, regulations, M&A, … • Responsiveness to market and customer needs

Agile

• Rapid introduction of new products / services / business processes

Efficient

• Meet & exceed business and customer expectations (service levels)• Minimize total cost of operations

Enterprise Goals

January 2010

Enterprise Transformations

•Key message:– Many “how to transform” mechanisms … Yet, transformation is

difficult – Challenge: What, when and why ! (It’s all about policies)

• Analytics-led automation

•Key discussion topics:

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Key Message

Why analytics-led transformations?

How does it work? What can it do?

Virtualization in Enterprise: Example

January 2010

Enterprise IT Transformation Challenges

1• No single optimization mechanism meets all

requirements

2• Many different realizations of each

mechanism• Different implementations are suited for

different environments

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• Each optimization mechanism has cost, benefits, risks, and side effects• Key challenge: Deciding on what, when and

why? • “One-size-does-not-fit-all” Custom

strategy reqd for each environment• Suitability depends on “as-is” state

4 • Scale and complexity of “as-is” state

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Why Analytics?

Today’s best practice: Manual, intuition-based strategy derivationImplication: Many implementation “surprises” Many failed transformation programs

January 2010

Analytics-led Transformations

Analyze

Plan

Transform

Prepare

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Transformation planner; Address the “what”, “when” and “why” questions

Execute the transformation strategy using various “how” mechanisms & processes

Monitor an operational enterprise; data cleansingand preparation for analytics

Analyze “as-is” state; Joint analysis of business process, applications & infrastructureUnderstand operations support

Industry Best Practices

EmergingTechnologies

How Does It Work?

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1 Analytics-led Transformation:

Fact-based & Automated Strategy Derivation

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January 2010

Virtualization in Enterprises

The pain: High cost of operating enterprise IT

• Large numbers of dedicated, under-utilized servers

Virtualization benefit: Right-sizing of server environment

• Virtualization Consolidation of physical servers Higher utilization

Many “strategy derivation” questions:• What target server platform and configuration should one select?• Which servers should one consolidate together?• What will the target server utilization be?• What, if any, will be the impact on application performance?• In what order should one migrate to the virtualized state?• What will the benefits of server consolidation be? …

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Virtualization

January 2010

Deriving Enterprise Virtualization Strategy

Many choices

• Many different target server platforms and configurations• Many virtualization technology implementations (w/ cost & applicability

constraints)

Many constraints• Business constraints

• Technology refresh plan and processes (depreciation and refresh intervals)• Data center consolidation strategy and schedule; application retirement• Restrictions on consolidating infrastructure for different business

processes• Technology constraints

• Restrictions on consolidating different architectural and OS platforms• Applications requiring special-purpose hardware

• Usage constraints• Separate development and production environments • Consolidate servers with out-of-phase resource utilization patterns

Requires systematic exploration of the solution space

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Virtualization

January 2010

iTransform• What does it do?

• How does it do it?

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VirtualizationDEMO

iTransform: A transformation strategy planner

• What to do? When to do? Why to do?

Example: Right-sizing and placing of servers• The what: • Select target platform(s) and virtualization technologies• Determine the consolidation plan: Technology, business and workload

constraints• The when: Derive a transformation schedule: Minimize risk … maximize rewards• The why: Derive a business case

Input data

• Application & infrastructure inventory, utilization, growth plans & cost (CapEx and OpEx)

Approach: Systematic exploration of the design space

• Codify constraints, benefits and side effects of transformation implementations

January 2010

Beyond Virtualization

From virtualization to clouds …

• Clouds offer different deployment options for virtualized environments• Many different cloud providers

• Different cost-benefit tradeoffs and constraints

… And beyond

• Mainframe, storage, network, desktop, application/tech stack, labor, …

Challenges

• Lots of optimization dimensions and mechanisms• Scale and complexity of as-is state

Research opportunities• Automate as-is state analysis• Formalize transformation strategies: cost, benefits, risks, side effects• Dependencies between transformation strategies• Systematize and automate strategy derivation

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Concluding Remarks

For more information, contact:Harrick Vin (harrick.vin@tcs.com)

January 2010

Infrastructure Fact: Scale & Complexity

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30,000+ servers 5+ OS w/ 20+ versions 10+ database products 2500+ app server instances25+ middleware envr.35+ programming languages200,000+ desktops 10+ petabytes of storage 197,000 e-mail boxes, …

Infrastructure Inventory

4000+ business apps

Average age: 3.5+ years

10-20 years: 190+

20+ years: 60+

Significant overlaps

25+ account opening apps

10+ authentication apps

12+ credit decision engines

15+ BI tools, …

Top-tier bank in the US

The Problem

January 2010

Infrastructure Fact: Scale & Complexity

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The Problem

January 2010

Infrastructure Fact: Scale & Complexity

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Silo-based understanding Little understanding of the global picture !

Application Dev Teams

CapacityPlanning

OperationSupport

CompliancePlantMgmt

Security

The Problem

For more information, contact:Harrick Vin (harrick.vin@tcs.com)