Transform your data center into your competitive edge July 2016 TRANSFORM YOUR DATA CENTER INTO YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE 17 Introduction Digital innovations and the market disruptions introduced by technology giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon are pushing companies across all industries to turn to digital technologies and data- driven processes to stay relevant and competitive. Even businesses in traditional sectors like retail and manufacturing are responding to the need for digital transformation. For example, Walmart handles over 2.5 petabytes of data from more than a million customer transactions every hour,1 and GE analyzes over 1 terabyte of data a day from each of its new twin-jet engines for the Boeing 787.2 As today’s information-enabled businesses increase in number and data-intensity, they all face new requirements of unprecedented scale and complexity for managing their data, putting it to good use, and eventually turning data-driven insights into new services or innovative products. To further complicate the issue, in the near future companies will require 10 times the IT capacity yet they will not have 10 times the budget to deliver it. There is a need for a new approach across network, storage, and compute to deliver the scale, efficiency, and agility required to compete in today’s market realities. One such approach, contents hyperscale solutions, now enables these demands to be met across both public and private clouds. Digital Transformation 3 The pioneers of hyperscale infrastructure, like Turning Your IT Infrastructure Into Your Competitive Facebook, Google and Amazon, have long leveraged Edge the strategic value of their data centers by competing with lower operating costs, better performance, and enhanced agility. Today, the availability of hyperscale Defining Hyperscale 4 solutions facilitates a democratization of hyperscale Achieving Efficiency, Scale and Agility infrastructure. This allows operator and enterprise companies to take advantage of the benefits of hyperscale at whatever scale their businesses require. Hyperscale Efficiency 6 Cost Savings Across Capital and Operating Expenses This collection of highlights from our recent blog posts and publications provides context to the market forces and IT challenges that are making digital Software-Defined Infrastructure 8 transformation a necessity. It also offers insights into Creating a Programmable Data Center why hyperscale infrastructure is the solution that allows businesses to do more with less, while providing the flexibility to harness additional infrastructure to do Using the Right Tools for Transformation 10 more when your business demands it. Applying Lessons Learned 1 “Data, Data Everywhere,” Economist, February 25, 2010, economist.com. 2 Jon Gertner, “Behind GE’s Vision for the Industrial Internet of Things,” Fast Company, June 18, 2014, fastcompany.com. 2 TRANSFORM YOUR DATA CENTER INTO YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE Digital Transformation: Turning Your IT infrastructure Into Your Competitive Edge Finding strategic value in your IT infrastructure Technological advancement has ushered in a top-down Today’s business leaders are charged with and bottom-up digital transformation of businesses. modernizing and industrializing their IT infrastructures This bell cannot be unrung. Now, every company must from end to end. To achieve this goal, they must accept that it is, or should be, a technology company transform their company’s legacy IT infrastructures at the core. Regardless of its size or industry, every into strategic business assets that combine compute, business now depends on developers to build products data and network resources to generate top-line and services that drive enterprise-wide innovation. revenues more quickly and efficiently than their Technology no longer supports business; technology is competitors. Software and data are at the heart of this business. Without investing in technology and the transformation. How rapidly and effectively businesses developers who make it all work, companies will fail to can use them both will determine how well their adapt to the new marketplace. businesses adapt and thrive during the transformation process. As consumers, most of us accept technological change and adapt to it quickly. We see innovation as a right rather than a privilege. For companies, however, change is much more difficult. While every company is “If you are tasked with creating and executing a technology company, many have not yet accepted this fact, and even fewer have evolved to fully your company’s IT strategic transformation accommodate their own digital transformations.3 plan, then you are responsible for the most important plan in your company today, It is important for business leaders to understand that digital transformation is not just a technology issue. one that will define whether your company Total, successful transformation requires competence, is a future leader, a future follower, or future knowledge and sharing among peers as changes footnote.”1 impact networks, as well as business procedures and processes, in both the near- and long-term. Within enterprises, IT is changing from a support function that places limits on the business to a catalyst. This change allows businesses to move as fast as possible, respond to user needs and desires, gather data and learn from its analysis, and adopt innovative technologies that provide them with an edge for delighting customers.2 1 Geoff Hollingworth, Guidance on Your IT Transformation: Don’t Get This One Wrong, March 2016. 2 Seamus Keane, Accelerating Digital Industrialization in the Post-PC Era, April 2016. 3 Jake Ward, The Seven Stages of Digital Transformation, April 2016. TRANSFORM YOUR DATA CENTER INTO YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE 3 Defining Hyperscale: Achieving Efficiency, Scale and Agility Simply put, it would be impossible for data center operators to spend enough money or expand the footprints of their existing networks to adequately meet Going hyperscale the snowballing IT demands of the future. Therefore, Hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to they are migrating their monolithic, server-focused infrastructures to highly scalable, hyperscale scale by seamlessly adding compute, architectures so they can continue to do business memory, networking, and storage resources and prosper. to accommodate increasing volumes of A solution for new and increasing demands data and workloads. Hyperscale computing Built to handle the increasingly massive and complex is often associated with cloud computing workloads, hyperscale architectures set a brand new and the very large data centers owned by standard for data center performance, efficiency and 1 manageability, while simultaneously lowering their Facebook, Google and Amazon. total cost of ownership (TCO). By increasing overall scale exponentially, hyperscale enables data center operators to transform their networks to both accommodate unprecedented How it works demand and generate new revenue opportunities. Hyperscale reshapes existing data center Hyperscale also enables them to create space for architectures’ capabilities and workflows in much functionality and services that have yet to be the same fashion that digital technology transformed envisioned. In fact, the world’s first hyperscale data analog networks. It rethinks every aspect, entirely. centers—custom-built by Amazon, Facebook and Google—already have proven all of the above. The core components of hyperscale include: > Infrastructure hardware with a future-proof, disaggregated architecture that allows you to arrange compute, storage, and network resources from a variety of third-party vendors into central pools for dynamic, optimal use. > A software-defined infrastructure (SDI) that accommodates rapidly changing workloads by allocating resources dynamically. > Intelligent automation that helps to simplify operations, minimize risk, and reduce opex. 1 Mainstay, An Economic Study of the Hyperscale Data Center, January 2016. 4 TRANSFORM YOUR DATA CENTER INTO YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE Efficiency, modularity, programmability Hyperscale supports fail-fast mode of product Hyperscale frees up compute, storage and network development resources for optimal use by virtualizing their Operators also can save time and money by employing functionality and disaggregating them from specific fail-fast systems that enable them to quickly try workloads and large network components such as out new products at any stage of development, get servers. Adding programmability to the mix enables feedback, make adjustments, or terminate them before disaggregated resources to exist in pools from which fully launching them in the marketplace. Operators they can be plucked for use dynamically and at also can tear down apps and services as quickly as optimal times under the right circumstances. they launch them. This means they can rapidly discard unpopular or dated apps and services to free up Unprecedented flexibility and scale resources for new ones. They also can custom build Hyperscale architectures employ SDI techniques, services for specific events or periods of time. Intel® Rack Scale Architecture efficiencies, and emerging optical networking capabilities in the Faster TTM backplane to facilitate the intelligent, optimized and Fortunately for operators and their customers, cost-effective use of pooled network resources. Today, software-defined infrastructures and hyperscale data center operators are forced to architect and environments so profoundly transform the oversubscribe