DaCEY Awards - Summit Executive Forum 2007

Thursday, November 15, 2007
Crowne Plaza Ravinia Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Ravinia Ballroom F

Guest Moderators
	Helen Berg Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer Merge Healthcare DaCEY Awards 2007 Judge Biography >	Topic 3: Virtualization
	Jeremy T. Gilbertson, CTS, RCDD Business Development Manager Graybar Atlanta, AFCOM Member DaCEY Awards 2007 Judge Biography >	Topic 1:Data Center Consolidation
	Dan Traynor Infrastructure Director Southern Company DaCEY Awards 2007 Nominee Biography >	Topic 2: Green IT in the Data Center

Topic 1:Data Center Consolidation

A typically complex, distributed, and heterogeneous IT environment is very difficult and expensive to manage and can lead to escalating operational costs, inflexible infrastructure, and ever-increasing difficulties in meeting service levels. Consequently, the proliferation of system silos found within the majority of enterprises today is not sustainable in the long term.

There is increasing pressure on IT organizations to improve service levels, increase availability and reduce costs. Organizations are striving to achieve these goals through better manageability of their IT environment. By its nature, being the central location for shared computing resources, the data center is the single most concentrated, complex and strategic component of the IT environment, and therefore is the starting point for pursuing reduced complexity and better manageability.

One approach to achieving these goals is through data center consolidation. In simplifying the environment and increasing its manageability, data center consolidation offers a number of business benefits, reduced costs (of staff, building and complexity) , keeping up with business challenges, improving service levels and availability, and minimizing the impact of external pressures.

There are various types of data center consolidation opportunities, which lead to significant cost reductions and better manageability. These range from consolidation of physical locations to consolidation of people, resources, processes, networks, servers and applications.

In all of these cases, the planning and execution of the data center consolidation have immense implications on the availability/disruption and the level of IT services delivered. In addition, the ability to effectively plan for a data center consolidation directly impacts the IT organization's ability to perform the implementation on time and on budget.

Planning a data center consolidation requires knowing your current state -- exactly what you have, where it is and its configuration and connectivity -- and designing your desired state. It also requires the ability to communicate all future plans to the appropriate individuals for approval and implementation. Finally, successful data center consolidations are predicated upon having the systems to effectively and efficiently manage and report on the status of the project throughout its duration.

Discuss with your peers in this round table session:

How Data Center consolidation can allow a more efficient use of resources and improve your IT risk management posture
The challenges and benefits of consolidating your data centers
How to ensure you keep the best IT employees and the skills needed to run the new environment after consolidation
How to make the business case for consolidation to the senior executives and communicating to the enterprise

Topic 2: Green IT in the Data Center

The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will accelerate and expand in 2008. Data Center and IT executives must consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny.

A federal law enacted in December compels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to examine power consumption in data centers, evaluate what technology manufacturers are doing to increase energy efficiency and determine what incentives could convince companies to adopt more energy-efficient technology. The European Union is studying the level of carbon emissions from computer equipment. Down the road, local and federal governments in the United States and abroad may end up penalizing organizations that operate inefficient data centers, according to Rakesh Kumar, Gartner research vice president. The combination of financial, environmental and legislative pressure will force IT organizations to develop greener data centers, says Kumar. By 2011, Gartner predicts, a quarter of new data centers will be designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum negative environmental impact. But what that means may vary by organization. "There's no generally accepted, standardized way to build a green data center," says Kumar.

How much an enterprise can save by evolving to green data centers varies by enterprise, however, reducing electrical power consumption is an enterprise imperative for numerous reasons in addition to financial ones. Successful energy consumption reduction not only enables enterprises to reduce operating costs, it also delays costs associated with new, unnecessary equipment and building new data centers that are increasingly expensive.

There are many steps and considerations involved in transforming a traditional data center into a green data center that uses green data center servers and storage.

Discuss with your peers at this executive round table:

The benefits and challenges of transitioning to a Green Data Center
The limitations of data center growth due to power, cooling limitations, and floor space availability..and how green data centers can help
How successful energy consumption reduction can help enterprises to reduce operating costs

Topic 3: Virtualization

Today, most Data Centers are made up of many large independent systems. That is, they have a server running an operating system (eg. Windows, Linux, Solaris etc,), with storage attached, running a particular application. That stack of hardware and software has been its own "silo," and there can be hundreds and sometimes thousands of these silos in the data center of today's larger enterprises. This proliferation has made management very difficult....

That's where "Virtualization" comes in. Virtualization brings us new ways of doing things from managing desktop operating systems to consolidating servers. What's also interesting is that virtualization has become a way to deconstruct fixed and relatively inflexible architectures and reassemble them into dynamic, flexible and scalable infrastructures.

Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies - with service-level, policy-based active management - resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency.

Discuss with your peers at this executive round table:

How Virtualization constitutes an "RTI" (Return on Technology Investment)
The benefits and challenges of adopting Virtualization technologies
How to effectively manage virtualized applications and resources in the enterprise environment
How virtualization can reduce infrastructure cost and improve flexibility and resiliency