WHITE PAPER
Software-Defined Datacenter: Evolving Datacenter Management and IT Skills Sponsored by: VMware Cushing Anderson March 2015
SITUATION OVERVIEW Over the past 10–15 years, thanks in large part to virtualization and the more recent emergence of cloud, datacenter architectures have shifted from being hardware centric to being software controlled. At the same time, application environments are being transformed with the use of modern development languages and continuous delivery strategies that result in frequent and ongoing changes to production code. Server virtualization has transformed the corporate datacenter into a more adaptable and efficient platform for business applications. This transformation is pervasive: IDC believes that more than 50% of all applications run on virtual machines. Virtualization has delivered enormous benefits such as reduced capital spending, greater asset utilization, and enhanced IT productivity. Moreover, virtualization is considered an indispensable software component of the corporate IT infrastructure. However, in many datacenters, the benefits of server virtualization have "stalled" because the evolution of people, process, and technology necessary to support the required technical and organizational changes within the organization is incomplete.
In many datacenters, the benefits of server virtualization have "stalled."
While virtualization delivers impressive initial productivity boosts, continuing improvements do not always meet management's expectations for operational efficiency. This stall often occurs because the rapid expansion and suboptimal deployment of virtual servers threaten to overload storage and datacenter network infrastructure, resulting in overprovisioning of storage capacity and sharply increased administration workloads. To ensure the benefits of virtualization, IT organizations must:
Fully evolve the technical infrastructure
Evolve the IT organization to the new infrastructure
Enhance the skills of the IT staff to ensure effective use of the new technologies
March 2015, IDC #254682
Technical Evolution It's clear that realizing the full benefits of virtualization requires more than strong service orientation and server virtualization. Virtualizing the other components of the datacenter — virtual storage systems, virtual networking, and virtual security layers — is essential. Technologically, virtualizing each of these components of a datacenter creates what is known as a "software-defined datacenter" (SDDC). And, as with server virtualization, the SDDC promises to deliver on a range of value propositions, including:
Accelerated time to value: IT effectiveness can be a competitive differentiator and strategic asset. Automated provisioning and management of key resources can drive business value. Agility in IT allows the organization to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace.
Higher system resiliency: When a failure occurs, the management software in the SDDC redirects workloads to other servers in the datacenter, avoiding outages and minimizing service-level recovery time.
Optimized IT and staffing spend: Maximizing the utilization of the physical infrastructure significantly increases the value of IT and staff investments and minimizes IT spending. Some enterprises cite more than 50% reduction in capital and operating expenses (capex and opex). Virtualization ensures high utilization with fewer physical resources, resulting in the IT staff spending less time on physical maintenance activities. And because much of a virtualized datacenter can be run using commodity servers, an organization can not only reduce costs but also avoid proprietary hardware lock-in.
Increased IT staff focus on innovation: Lower maintenance requirements combined with the SDDC's strong management framework enable cloud-scale operations with more reliability, less manual effort, and significant cost savings.
But while this level of technical innovation is essential and attainable, achieving it is insufficient to deliver fully on the promise of the SDDC. What's needed is equally important innovation in IT management and the skills of the IT workforce. Without the combination of innovating the physical and logical infrastructure, the IT management process, and the IT organization that runs the datacenter, enterprises risk costly implementations that fail to deliver the required benefits or, worse, deliver unreliable business systems.
FUTURE OUTLOOK While the SDDC is a transformative capability at its core, it has essentially the same components of a traditional datacenter. Both environments have compute, network, and storage components. In the virtualized environment, these components are "abstracted" to permit higher utilization, more efficient management, and more agile deployment (see Figure 1). Moving from a "physical" environment to a "virtual" environment enables automated and distributed or remote management of most activities. More importantly, a virtual environment supports efficient IT as a service, which can be turned on, modified, tuned, redeployed, or turned off with far more automation and control. To effectively leverage the change to the computing environment, the organizational structure must also change how it designs, deploys, and administers an effective SDDC.
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FIGURE 1 Components of a Physical and Virtual Datacenter Virtualized Infrastructure
Compute
Network
Storage
Physical Hardware
Source: IDC, 2015
The Evolved SDDC Organization In a physical or traditional IT environment, the organizational structure is arranged around activities that occur at a similar time or in a sequence. Figure 2 illustrates the structure of a "typical" IT organization. The illustration highlights the roles that have responsibility for designing, deploying, and administering the physical and system infrastructure. This structure makes sense: There is logical flow in the columns — develop the application, manage the operations systems, and manage the network. This organization focuses strongly on the environment and the physical assets. Because the organization is functionally aligned, each function becomes the measure of success — not the outcome or stakeholder requirements. Therefore, it is also prone to silos — where one team (or column) acts independently and often in isolation from other teams. On the other hand, when an IT organization is evolving toward an SDDC, an important objective is to better serve the IT customer — its stakeholders and users. To do this, the IT organization must evolve, too. Recent IDC research found that more than 70% of IT organizations that moved to a software-defined network (SDN) either had restructured or planned to restructure their IT organization (see Figure 3).
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More than 70% of IT organizations that moved to a softwaredefined network either had restructured or planned to restructure their IT organization.
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Even though another common justification for evolving toward the SDDC is "efficiency," the organizational restructuring is not typically a "reduction" of functions and responsibilities. The SDDC provides an opportunity, even a fulcrum, to reassign network professionals to work on innovation and improve the value of IT. We found that after deploying SDN, enterprises seek to reassign networking personnel to higher-value roles rather than decimate their ranks with layoffs (see Figure 4).
FIGURE 2 "Typical" IT Organization Chart CIO
IT Security
Security Architect/ Admin
Risk Analyst
IT Business and Product Operations
IT Governance
IT System Operations
Application Development
Operations Management
Infrastructure Management
IT Strategy
Application and Database Architecture
Service Desk
Network Engineer/ Admin
IT Financial Analysis
Application and Database Development
Change Analyst
Storage Engineer/ Admin
PMO
Application and Database QA
Configuration Analyst
System Engineer/ Admin
Enterprise Architect
Application and Database Admin
Capacity Analyst
Datacenter Facilities Management
IT Vendor Management
Incident Analyst
Source: IDC, 2015
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FIGURE 3 Organizations' Plans to Restructure IT Department After SDN Deployment No plans (28.5%)
Yes — we have restructured (22.7%)
Yes — we plan to restructure (48.9%) n = 362 Base = enterprises that have deployed SDN Note: For more details, see SDN Survey: Big Changes for Datacenter Networking Operations and Personnel (IDC #249599, June 2014). Source: IDC's SDN Survey, April 2014
FIGURE 4 Organizations' Approach to Restructuring IT Department After SDN Deployment
Redeploy networking personnel to other tasks
Align better with other IT departments and teams
Reduce the size of the network operations team
0
20
40
60
(% of respondents) n = 362 Base = enterprises that have deployed SDN Notes: For more details, see SDN Survey: Big Changes for Datacenter Networking Operations and Personnel (IDC #249599, June 2014). Multiple responses were allowed. Source: IDC's SDN Survey, April 2014
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The target organization structure isn't radically different, but it now works more collaboratively and shares a clear focus on the customer and on business outcomes (see Figure 5).
The target organization structure isn't radically different.
FIGURE 5 "Typical" IT Organization for a Software-Defined Datacenter
CIO
Program Management
IT Service Management
IT Governance
IT Customer Operations
SDDC Tenant Operations
SDDC Infrastructure Operations
Physical Infrastructure
Provisioning
Service Definition and Costing
SDDC Architect and Design
Infrastructure Architect and Design
Change Management
IT Strategy
Configuring
Service Design, Development, and Release
SDDC Deploy
Infrastructure Build
Service Desk
IT Financial Analysis
Monitoring
Service Provisioning
SDDC Manage
IT Vendor Management
Upgrades
Service Quality
Maintenance
Customer Relationship Management
IT Security (Security Engineer)
SDDC Operate (Support Operations Engineer)
Infrastructure Operate (Technical Operations Engineer)
Asset Management
Source: IDC, 2015
Enhance Skills to Effectively Leverage the SDDC Along with the changes in the "org chart" come essential changes in the capabilities, skills, and responsibilities of the IT staff. Three roles in Figure 5 illustrate these changes:
Support operations engineer, part of the SDDC Operate activity:
Responsibilities: Troubleshoots and resolves issues related to the use and provisioning of services; also responsible for identifying negative trends and issues by regularly reviewing the production environment
Key skills: Understanding the SDDC environment as well as the specific processes, procedures, and tools used to administer the SDDC
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Technical operations engineer, part of the Infrastructure Operate activity:
Responsibilities: Monitors the environment for compliance with standard operating procedures; manages the physical assets of the datacenter and reboots/replaces components as necessary
Key skills: Deep understanding of the SDDC's logical and physical environments; coordination with command center operations; capable of learning new technologies and procedures quickly
Security engineer, part of the IT Security activity:
Responsibilities: Monitors security threats and attacks; ensures user and access management are consistent with the access profile and reviews access rights and investigates discrepancies
Key skills: Solid knowledge of risks related to SDDC technologies and platforms; proficient at security operations in a virtualized environment as well as incident and threat response
And these roles aren't unique: Nearly every role in IT operations, networking, development, and support will be impacted by the evolution to the SDDC. Even advanced-level IT practitioners, engineers, and administrators must deeply understand a range of new skills, including:
How software-defined networks enable the SDDC
How SDDC components interact with each other
How to build the interactions between SDDC components
How to extend internal component and external component functionality to meet customer requirements
How IT business management changes in an SDDC environment
How capacity management, business continuity/disaster recovery, and compliance are all impacted by operating in an SDDC environment
How to optimize a virtualized infrastructure (SDDC)
Nearly every role in IT operations, networking, development, and support will be impacted by the evolution to the SDDC.
Some of these skills are technical — such as which configuration options govern what operational parameters — and some are conceptual — such as the strategic trade-offs of an approach or a technique. But whether the skills are tactical or strategic, fully training the IT organization is essential to meeting IT business objectives. IDC has found that the benefits of training are broad: 80% of IT managers believe that effective training is critical to the success of a project, and 74% believe training increases the chances a project will finish on time. Almost two out of three IT managers agree that ineffective training contributes to project failures (see Figure 6).
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FIGURE 6 The Value Propositions of Training Are Broad Effective training … Is critical to the success of a project
7%
Increases the chances a project finishes on time
7%
Facilitates the adoption of a technology
7%
Reduces the cost of projects
7%
Positively impacts the ROI of software
80% 74% 67% 70%
11%
72%
Ineffective training … 65%
13%
Contributes to project failures
% Disagree
% Agree
n = 479 Source: IDC, 2015
Evolve the Organization with a Plan Evolving the IT organization calls for the same focused effort needed to adopt and deploy the virtual and physical infrastructure of an SDDC. It requires an objective, a plan, and a process. The evolution of the datacenter organization and staff can't be done in isolation from the technical or business planning also under way. It's important, even essential, to consider the business objectives and desired relationship between the business and IT when developing the structure and ultimately the style of the IT organization.
Evolving the IT organization requires an objective, a plan, and a process.
At the outset, the IT organization must not be designed to "run the gear" but must be established to provide specific services and functions to the business itself at a pace and in a style that the organization expects. This may be in response to business plans, competitive pressures, or other external trends in products, services, or customer relationships and also in response to the technical sophistication or strategic intentions of the business organization. The IT organization's structure and specific positions will be built to address these business drivers and goals. And the near- and midterm priorities of the business will be used to establish the style of and an appropriate culture for the IT organization. With nearly every current IT role impacted by virtualization and the SDDC, the commitment of IT leadership and employees to the change is essential to success. For IT leadership, this commitment comes from the
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business case of moving toward the SDDC. For IT professionals, the commitment comes through the professional development and career advancement potential of participating in the evolution of the datacenter. Establishing the right training program for each role and employee typically begins with either a formal or an informal assessment of each individual to map his/her current capabilities and potential against the roles required in the new IT organization. Mapping specific individuals to roles will highlight organizational strengths and developmental opportunities and establish the as-is/to-be conditions that must be fulfilled by a training and development program. Enhancing the skills of individuals or teams to meet the new responsibilities will require multiple approaches: For most positions, developing current employees for new roles will be most appropriate and straightforward. For some positions, it might be more appropriate to hire IT professionals with specific experience. And there may not be a desirable fit for everyone based on employees' strengths and career aspirations. Satisfying the emerging organizational needs will require continuous attention. But more importantly, the process isn't completed at cutover. The IT infrastructure will continue to evolve to include more workloads and more supported functions and will provide increasing value to the organization. To fully support and align with the business IT outcomes, the IT organization will likely need to continue to evolve as well. This means that the training program must include ongoing training to continue to enhance the skills of the IT staff to continue to improve the utilization and maximize the benefits of the SDDC. Because of the critical nature of the task and the risk of getting it wrong, the evolution of the IT organization will often require external assistance to:
Develop the processes, coordination, and target IT organization
Provide training to enhance the skills of the team to achieve benefits from the SDDC
The Benefits Are Worth It
The evolution of the IT organization will often require external assistance.
But the benefits are significant. With a properly designed and deployed SDDC managed and optimized by well-skilled staff, organizations can realize a range of performance benefits. As part of private, public, and/or hybrid cloud, there are more controls associated with the deployment and provisioning of resources and there is greater accountability. This leads to several important benefits, including:
Accelerated time to value: The SDDC is viewed by business users and executives as a competitive differentiator and strategic asset. In the SDDC, the business organization can respond quickly to changes in the marketplace.
Higher system resiliency: The SDDC provides a flexible and stable platform for any application, including innovative services such as high-performance computing, big data, and latency-sensitive applications. When a failure occurs, the management software in the SDDC automatically redirects workloads to other servers, minimizing service-level recovery time and avoiding outages.
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Optimized IT and staffing spend: By pooling and assigning resources, the software-defined datacenter increases utilization of the physical infrastructure, increasing the value staff deployment and investments.
Increased IT staff focus on innovation: The SDDC management framework helps eliminate complex or brittle management scripts. This enables cloudlike operations, frees the IT staff from "break/fix" activities, and enables the IT staff to focus on tasks that drive innovation and improved service.
In fact, as the datacenter becomes more mature and agile, the IT organization can become responsive to requests from end users. Organizations should expect to achieve the following benefits with a properly deployed and administered SDDC:
Reduce the tendency of teams to operate in silos and increase collaboration, which also reduces duplication of activities in other teams
Enforce and ease deployment of standards across the organization, ensuring a more efficient service orientation
Reduce basic support needs to allow IT to focus on innovation, improving the business value of technology assets
Help IT efficiently and credibly charge back resources to stakeholders, enabling stronger shared services models and proper allocation of IT expenses to stakeholders, increasing the visibility into investment options, and enabling the accurate evaluation of business priorities
Improve reliability and speed the introduction of new technology capabilities to the business
CONCLUSION Increasingly virtualized application workloads require architectural and operational change. Traditional datacenter approaches to IT, whether in architecture or operations, will neither scale nor provide the agility that businesses require as they adopt private and hybrid cloud. When an SDDC is properly deployed and when the IT organization evolves to administer and maintain it, the value propositions of the technology are impressive:
Accelerated time to value
Higher system resiliency
Optimized IT and staffing spend
Increased IT staff focus on innovation
These benefits can be realized only by accelerating the evolution of the datacenter, which involves transforming technology, transforming processes to manage the datacenter, and transforming the IT staff with increased and ongoing training. The successful adoption of an SDDC will often require application of both implementation and education services.
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The successful adoption of an SDDC will often require application of both implementation and education services.
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