WHIT E PAPER Maximizing the Benefits of Virtualization and Consolidation in Midsized Firms with Network Storage

Sponsored by: NetApp Raymond Boggs January 2011

INT RODUCT ION

The twin concepts of virtualization and consolidation in IT environments are increasingly being applied by midsized firms to improve performance and gain efficiency. Improvement in the coordination of resources can result in greater competitiveness and lower costs. While virtualization of servers is the starting point for any consolidation effort, it needs to be accompanied by comprehensive IT infrastructure virtualization and consolidation. Coordinating storage resources is an essential part of any successful virtualization and consolidation effortresulting in maximum benefits.

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Key Benefits to Consolidation and Virtualization: Why Worth the Effort?

lDC outlined the benefits of consolidation and virtualization in a recent white paper, "Increasing IT Infrastructure Performance in Midsized Firms through Virtualization and Consolidation: Key Steps for Success." For midsized firms, the benefits of reduced IT infrastructure complexity, lower power and cooling costs, and space savings are all attractive, but the real long-term benefits are related to operational efficiency. Everyone likes to save money, but real business impact comes from making money, by having critical resources available to be effectively and efficiently deployed as needed to support initiatives that make a competitive difference. Supporting an environment with high business growth often leads to proliferation of hardware, encouraged by lower acquisition costs as well as different versions of applications and data, resulting in high cost for both capital equipment as well as inefficiency. In order to achieve operational excellence and sharpen key IT capabilities to yield improved business processes, it is essential to sustain and support an efficient, centralized vision of IT infrastructure based on virtualization and consolidation. To advance the goals cited in Table 1, it will be helpful to consider virtualizing and consolidating your IT infrastructure including both servers and storage.

T ABLE 1
Key Reasons/Motives for Virtualizing and Consolidating IT by Company Size (% of Respondents)
100249 Employees Improve performance/ throughput Improve management Improve flexibility Save space Save power/cooling costs 36.1 250499 Employees 38.0 500999 Employees 39.1 1,0002,499 Employees 44.9

34.4 35.2 28.7 17.2

34.3 28.3 27.7 20.5

30.7 27.4 30.7 24.7

27.5 34.8 21.7 30.4

Note: Multiple responses were allowed.

Source: IDC Custom Survey for NetApp, 2010

Choosing the right storage solution can be key in getting the maximum benefits from virtualization and consolidation. Traditional server storage infrastructure can often limit the flexibility and costs savings of any virtualization and consolidation effort. Network storage is an important prerequisite because it can help simplify data management, off-load protection tasks, and facilitate quick provisioning of new applications. In the next section we analyze the NetApp storage solutions for midsized IT organizations and examine potential efficiency benefits.

Essential Elements in NetApp Storage Solutions for Windows: Consolidating for Control, Performance, and Efficiency
IDC surveys indicate that over 60% of midsized firms run at least one Windowsbased network. These Windows IT environments need to support new applications and rapidly growing databases. Management of these IT environments can be a major challenge. IDC research has found that over half the technology spending of midsized firms is devoted to simply keeping things runningnot developing new initiatives, not expanding the capabilities that will improve the company's competitive position. The NetApp consolidation storage solution is designed to support the Windows-based environment that typical midsized firms rely on to run shared applications. NetApp storage for Windows environments is based on the concept of unified storage. This means that the NetApp networked storage system can function both as a storage area network (SAN) and as network-attached storage (NAS). This eliminates the need for different storage solutions for different applications. Allocating from a pool of storage can be a big advantage when consolidating and virtualizing IT infrastructure. NetApps built-in thin provisioning allows growing and shrinking individual storage volumes on the fly to support the change and growth of Windows workloads. Having

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the flexibility to reallocate available storage, to adjust capacity as needed, can enhance efficiency and avoid unnecessary storage investment. Note that this flexible provisioning capability can be overlooked if technology investment decisions are based solely on acquisition cost.

Streamlining Management Through NetApp System Manager and Virtual Storage Console
In addition to reducing overhead and administration costs, an effective virtualization and consolidation effort also helps free up IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives that can provide the business with a competitive edge. Improving management tools and controls can further help to shift the reactive role of IT staff to a role that is more proactive, one in which they take the initiative rather than always having to respond to the latest crisis. An effective server and storage management solution provides an appropriate level of control and the ability to proactively manage based on timely information. The NetApp System Manager and Virtual Storage Console (VSC) provides a comprehensive set of functionality to configure and automate management. The IT administrator can easily maintain and automate operations, anticipate potential problems, and take corrective measures. This is especially important in midsized firms in which resource constraints require higher management efficiencies. These firms often advance with VMware solutions for virtualization but may not have storage specialists on staff to strategize and optimize the storage component of virtualization and consolidation initiatives. The NetApp System Manager and VSC provide information on storage capacity, provisioning, cloning, and backup management capabilities. When combined with the NetApp SnapManager suite, an effective approach to virtualization and consolidation can be implemented. The management resources available through the System Manager and VSC console can be useful at every stage of the storage management lifecycle: SetupAutomated discovery of storage resources, helping optimize host settings and providing host and controller capacity and status views DeploymentProvision datastores, create and customize VM clones MaintenanceProvide patches and updates, manage deduplication, size and expand datastores as appropriate ProtectionVSC can also back up VMs and datastores, restore rapidly to desired level of granularity, replicate VMs to DR sites in a timely way RetirementManage cleanup by unregistering VMs, detaching them from hosts, and destroying storage objects In addition to supporting popular VMware solutions, NetApp also provides similar management tools for Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center and has

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integration with Citrix XenServer that can help IT administration simplify and automate common tasks.

The Critical Role of Protection

Comprehensive protection of critical data and high availability of applications and infrastructure are increasingly the rule rather than the exception at midsized firms. They will play an important part as these IT organizations respond to changing demands associated with new and expanding workloads, with the IT infrastructure needed to provide data protection to enable business continuity and the fulfillment of compliance obligations. Inevitably, ideal protection and availability goals for any virtualization and consolidation effort must be balanced by recognition of practical business necessities. This is where management guidance is especially useful, so that the trade-offs between cost and convenience are properly considered. NetApp storage has built-in and add-on features and functionality for data protection and availability that can meet virtualization and consolidation goals. Built-in capabilities such as RAID-DP allow the storage system to continue serving data even when two disks have failed. Additionally, NetApp offers the ability to take nearinstantaneous point-in-time copies of all dataapplication, files, and virtual machinesthrough its Snapshot capability. This can be integrated with Windows Shadow Copy Service and VMware's vCenter. Manual or automatic backup copies or Snapshot copies can be provided depending on user requirements. NetApp also offers application-aware protection capabilities through its SnapManager suite, allowing consistent backups of applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and virtual machines including VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V. If the need arises, Snapshot copies can be centrally archived using NetApp SnapVault technology, and data storage can be replicated using NetApp SnapMirror functionality to another NetApp system in the same or remote location for additional protection. This can be done over IP networks, which are increasingly being used by midsized firms over Fibre Channel as a means for connecting storage to servers.

CHALL ENG ES AND OPPO RT UNIT IES: KEY CONCERNS AND POT ENT IAL PIT FALL S
Any comprehensive IT shift has fundamental risks associated with it, which makes it appropriate to anticipate the inevitable senior management question: Is this investment really necessary? With that in mind, it is useful to consider three areas, moving from the general to the specific, which can guide the pace and direction that virtualization and consolidation initiatives should take: Change in Company/Industry Context. The changing nature of your industry and the competitive environment in which you operate will dictate the level of IT flexibility and adaptability necessary for continuing success.

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Staff and Management Flexibility/Adaptability. Internal company pressures may drive or slow the adoption of new solutions. To what extent is senior management supportive of consolidation and virtualization efforts? Are there branch or regional office concerns that might represent serious inertia that could complicate moves to more centralized technology approaches designed to improve organizational efficiency, but at the expense of local autonomy? While not really technology based, some of these concerns could seriously complicate the speed with which new solutions could be effectively implemented. The Issue of Standards in Moving Forward. Firms will have to consider carefully their future standards preferences to make sure that the virtualization and consolidation moves they make will be consistent with their long-term IT infrastructure directions. With that in mind, it should be noted that NetApp storage for Windows is compatible with the major virtual environments: VMware, Microsoft Hypervisor, Citrix XenServer.

ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE: THE NEXT STEPS T OWARD VIRT UAL IZ AT ION AND CONSOL IDAT IO N
Given the challenges and opportunities noted in the previous section, the work needed to move forward with an effective virtualization and consolidation plan might seem daunting, but it is well worth the effort. While there are a variety of resources available from both technology providers and VARs and resellers who offer the necessary provisioning, the real work must be done by you, the technology user, as you follow five basic steps to maximize efficiency gains and return on your investment: 1. Assess current Windows environment. Examine and inventory the current hardware and software environment across company locations to confirm exactly what is in place. Use this opportunity to identify applications and workloads that should be retired. Also identify areas of investment, such as application upgrades, irrespective of your decision to virtualize and consolidate. 2. Design and plan for consolidation and growth. Identify areas in which compute and storage needs are the greatestnow and in the future. These are the high-impact opportunity areas that will help build the business case for consolidation and virtualization investment. Include intangible areas like improved competitiveness as part of this assessment. While some numbers will be difficult or even impossible to estimate, it does not mean they are not important. Craft plans for virtualization and consolidation using the right technology partners and vendors, as discussed below. 3. Implement approach for consolidation and virtualization. Isolate and test the new approach in controlled trials, evaluate results, then refine and expand. A gradual rollout can help generate proof points and build internal enthusiasm, especially for large environments. In addition to standard metrics, keep an eye out for unanticipated benefits that might provide special value to your company.

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4. Migrate existing data to new solution. Where possible, support redundancy during migration to avoid potential disruptions. While running multiple solutions will add time and cost, the conservative approach in cutting over to a new system is invariably the safest. 5. Deploy across organization for maximum impact. Staging across locations at the most basic level provides wide staff exposure, with greater depth added over time. While this approach may frustrate some users eager to gain access to all the functionality potentially available, it will help provide consistency throughout the organization and minimize regional differences in deployment progress.

For firms managing a Windows environment, the opportunity to improve efficiency and performance through virtualization and consolidation is significant in terms of potential impact on the business. The variety of workloads and the proliferation of hardware and the multiple tools used to manage a firm's IT environment inevitably are associated with complexity, inefficiency, and serious risks and costs to the business. Evolving an IT infrastructure through virtualization and consolidation can help offset those inefficiencies. However, achieving those attractive benefits is no small undertaking, and may require expertise outside your firm to enable success. You currently may be working with a trusted technology advisor such as a reseller, systems integrator, or value-added reseller. These firms can bring to your initiative their experience and skills in helping similar firms succeed with virtualization and consolidation. The ideal source would be familiar with the technology and related issues, but also with your industry and the kinds of requirements that will be essential for success in a changing, competitive world. Of course, the ideal is to build from your existing environment in the most effective way possible. In a similar way, it is important to participate actively in the selection of the right technology provider for virtualization and consolidation by spending time researching and evaluating the solutions provided. While the core virtualization technology is critical, its also important to assess how network storage can help the firm maximize the benefits of virtualization and consolidation. This is one of the key strengths of NetApp's storage solution: providing a single pool of storage to manage the virtualized and consolidated Windows environment while providing easy-to-use tools to flexibly support and grow the business. Combined with partner expertise, this approach can provide access to the resources needed for an effective virtualization and consolidation initiative.

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