DaCEY Executive Summit and Awards Executive Forum 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Cobb Galleria Centre, Atlanta, Georgia
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
| Guest Moderators | Topics | |
|---|---|---|
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Diana Bolden Chief Information Officer Teradata Biography > |
Topic 1: Data Center Design |
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David Vordick, Chief Information Officer USEC, Inc Biography > |
Topic 2: Virtualization |
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Ronald Pepin Vice President of Data Center Operations National City Corporation Biography > |
Topic 3: The Quest for Going Green...not just a tree hugging exercise |
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Gene Viscelli Chief Information Officer King & Spalding LLP Biography > |
Topic 4: Managing your infrastructure to deliver superior operations and contribute to business advantage. |
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Dan Traynor Infrastructure Director Southern Company DaCEY Operations Award 2007 Finalist Biography > |
Topic 5: The Next Generation of Network Operations Centers..transforming from reactive to proactive |
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Rick Allen Vice President of Information Services Gwinnett Medical Center Biography > |
Topic 6: The Security Risks of Protecting Systems and Web Applications in a Virtualized IT World |
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Mark Middleton Systems Director Information Technology and Architecture CHRISTUS Health Biography > |
Topic 7: Keeping Up with the Escalating Demand for Storage |
Topic 1: Data Center Design
There are four core values that are the foundation of a data center design philosophy: simplicity, flexibility, scalability, and modularity. The data center continues to be one of the most costly expenses for today's organizations, but there are many ways to design a data center that can minimize cost down the road.
In designing a new data center, or upgrading an existing data center, there are many considerations including location, power, energy costs, security, fiber, disaster recovery, tax incentives and "going green". New data centers are consolidated, virtualized, reconfigured, blade-based and heavily automated.
Modern businesses are running more sophisticated applications and handling larger volumes of mission critical information every day. It's an accelerating trend that shows no sign of slowing in the near future. As a direct result, demand for data center facilities capable of housing systems and components that can relieve much of this burden in controlled, highly redundant environments has never been higher.
Discuss with your peers at this executive round table:
- Considerations in designing a new data center for the future, or retrofitting an existing data center
- Key solutions for space optimization and simplification in data center design
- Challenges and benefits of deploying high-density equipment in the data center
- Managing power and cooling to keep up with the increase in demand
- Virtualization, multicore processing, cloud computing and the effect on data center design
Topic 2: 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...
Many organizations are embracing virtualization technologies and are actually moving towards large scale implementations. 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
Topic 3: The Quest for Going Green...not just a tree hugging exercise
The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 has accelerated and expanded in 2008. Data Center and IT executives are considering 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 2007 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.
Rakesh Kumar, Gartner research vice president says the combination of financial, environmental and legislative pressure will force IT organizations to develop greener data centers. 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.
Even without environmental concerns, power and cooling capacity is currently the number one issue for today's data center executives. Data Centers can use 100 times the electricity per square foot of a typical office building, so greener data centers are vital both to meet business demands and reduce environmental impact. They provide the computing capacity for larger sustainability initiatives such as online collaboration, while also offering key opportunities for savings in both costs and carbon emissions.
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
- What companies are doing to deal with legislation requiring organizations to reduce their consumption of energy
Topic 4: Managing your infrastructure to deliver superior operations and contribute to business advantage.
Managing an organization's essential operation components including policies, processes, equipment, data, human resources, and external contacts is key to managing IT and supporting the business. In fact, reliable infrastructures that provide both operational excellence and the flexibility to respond to an enterprise's strategic changes can mean the difference between success and failure.
The major goals of managing an organizations infrastructure include:
- Reducing duplication of effort
- Ensuring adherence to standards
- Enhancing the flow of information throughout an information system
- Promoting adaptability necessary for a changing environment
- Ensuring interoperability among organizational and external entities
- Maintaining effective change management policies and practices
Top of mind issues for IT executives today and into 2009 include all aspects of the impact of virtualization on their environment, determining when dramatic changes to the legacy infrastructure will be necessary to support evolving business demands, utilizing power and cooling more effectively, opportunities for consolidation, managing storage growth, and controlling IT costs especially in a down economy .
Discuss with your peers at this executive round table:
- Top priorities for managing your organization's infrastructure
- The impact of virtualization on IT operations and infrastructure
- Challenges and benefits of data center and server consolidation
- Achieving high performance by transforming data center infrastructure and operations
Topic 5: The Next Generation of Network Operations Centers..transforming from reactive to proactive
Network Operations Centers (NOC) are key to the success of an IT organization's ability to ensure that incidents are detected, prioritized, escalated and efficiently resolved around the clock, resulting in reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), improved uptime and higher quality support for the end user.
The majority of IT organizations are under considerable pressure to evolve to a next generation network Operations Center in order to fulfill the increasing demands of the business for 24x7 uptime and support. In order to fulfill emerging requirements, NOC's are being driven to do a better job of managing application performance, to implement more effective and automated IT processes, and to be able to troubleshoot performance problems faster.
A recent survey conducted by Ashton, Metzler and Associates of IT executives noted a wide range of factors that were driving change in the NOC. The top drivers of change were "greater emphasis on ensuring acceptable performance for key applications and the need for better visibility into applications." Other drivers included the desire for more effective processes, the need to have more effective communications, and the deployment of an IT service management process. They also noted that Security would be an emerging consideration and the possible merging of network and security operations would impact the NOC within the year.
Discuss with your peers at this executive roundtable:
- What functions a NOC performs today, and what will drive change in the future
- Benefits and challenges of implementing ITIL processes in the NOC
- Automated tools and technologies for monitoring and analysis
- Impact of converging voice and data networks on the NOC
- Benefits of outsourcing the NOC or keeping the NOC inhouse.
Topic 6: The Security Risks of Protecting Systems and Web Applications in a Virtualized IT World
Many organizations are embracing virtualization technologies and are actively moving forward with large scale implementations. Virtualization brings us new ways of doing things from managing desktop operating systems to consolidating servers. Virtualization has become a way to deconstruct fixed and relatively inflexible architectures and reassemble them into dynamic, flexible and scalable infrastructures.
Virtualization offers organizations the opportunity to reduce costs and increase agility, however, if this is done without implementing best practices for security, virtualization may actually increase costs and reduce agility, according to Gartner Inc. "Virtualization, as with any emerging technology, will be the target of new security threats," said Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner Fellow.
In addition, one of the biggest challenges in securing Web applications in a virtualized world is how to test the applications in an environment that is identical to that of the live application without risking data corruption or disruptions to customers.
ther Security issues include the following:
- Patching and reboots in virtualized platforms
- Keeping track of security on two tiers, the physical host security and the virtual machine security
- The loss of segregation of duties for administrative tasks
- Immature and incomplete security and management tools
- Conducting security assessments on virtualized applications
The need for cross-platform virtual security to secure both virtualized and physical environments is clear. New emerging technologies for virtual machine security are an investment that must be considered before this technology outruns security best practices even further.
Discuss with your peers at this executive roundtable:
- How companies are dealing with complicated maintenance windows in a virtual server environment, and if their ability to apply patches has significantly changed because of this environment.
- How companies are securing virtual machines and how existing configuration guidelines have changed or should be changed.
- What tools and technologies enterprises are using to help manage the security in this new environment.
- How companies are dealing with segregation of duties issues for administrative tasks.
- How to conduct vulnerability assessments on virtualized applications and the concept of virtual testing.
Topic 7: Keeping Up with the Escalating Demand for Storage
Gartner predicts that by 2011, users will install 6.5 times the amount of terabytes that they installed in 2007. Storage growth and the ability to manage it are extremely challenging issues.
As companies face greater volumes of data, adequate storage and retrieval of that data is also becoming a serious concern. Issues such as storage cost and government regulation are converging, forcing companies to rethink their basic approach to data storage. High-end storage is very expensive, and using top-shelf storage for all data assets is no longer a cost-efficient solution. Even more importantly, companies are increasingly obligated to meet regulatory and legal requirements. An organization must now account for what data they have, where it is located and who is accessing it.
New technologies such as server virtualization and the new class of SOA applications, has created the need for IT organizations to architect and build storage infrastructures and storage management systems to meet demands into the future.
Discuss with your peers at this executive roundtable:
- How to significantly improve storage utilization and reduce hardware and operational expenses.
- Data archiving and retention architecture, policies and practices.
- Managing and retrieving structured and unstructured data.
- Technologies and products to help achieve regulatory compliance and security around data.
- The impact of virtualization in the data center and its impact on storage.