Services centricity
Like Chamley, the push to virtualisation is changing the way Aalders’ team works, as they shift beyond managing infrastructure to managing services. “They no longer just do an application or a database or a technology, but they have become service-centric,” he says.
For Melbourne-based RMIT University, the next step in the virtualisation journey involves the ongoing virtualisation of its access network infrastructure using OpenFlow-based technology from HP.
RMIT’s deputy director for infrastructure delivery within its Information Technology Services team, Ben O’Neil, says the university has witnessed a 700 per cent increase in BYO devices coming onto the network in the past two years.
“That exponential growth that we are seeing in the field has put a lot of stresses on systems that typically are very expensive to scale,” he says. “What we have started to do is look to SDN to programmatically apply those services at the access network level.
“A lot of RMIT’s IT transformation over the past few years has been user-centric. So when we looked at SDN we looked at how it could solve and improve the end user experience – their performance, their access, their security.”
The move to SDN is allowing RMIT to better manage its network traffic, as traditionally many of the packets passing through the core received no added value, but generated a high cost overhead through the resources used to move them around.
“What we are really wanting to avoid is needing to do large-scale repeated upgrades of our core infrastructure,” O’Neill says. “That equipment already equates to 16 per cent of the IT infrastructure costs at RMIT, so if we need to expand that 700 per cent you are talking a lot of money, and that percentage would grow substantially.”
O’Neill says managing network traffic in this way should also speed delivery of services, as packets will traverse less infrastructure, and allow for the reduction in size and capacity of some firewalls. The results could be significant.
“The expectation I’ve set with the IT steering committee has been that we think we can pull out a million dollars a year in running costs,” O’Neill says. “I would expect it’s the exact same business case in many places.
“If you can’t explain the benefits to a CIO in eight minutes you are doing something wrong – it is that straight forward.”
RMIT began deploying HP OpenFlow switches in April 2012, with 550 seats now deployed and another 2000 expected to be added by March next year. The goal for 2015 is to have 10,000 of the university’s 20,000 swapped over by the year’s end.
The university is also writing its own SDN applications in partnership with its School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is encouraging students to develop for the network.
“They were super keen to take that on and the lecturers were very supportive,” O’Neill says. “This year, they are very keen to start taking this into the curriculum.”
O’Neill says the process of rolling over to OpenFlow has been relatively simple. OpenFlow-enabled switches and routers are simply configured in a traditional fashion at implementation and then switched over to the SDN controller one port at a time.
“You can leave the legacy configuration in place and tell that port to be driven by the OpenFlow controller,” O’Neill explains. “If the controller fails for any reason or of the flows aren’t working, or something is happening that you can’t quite get to the bottom of, it’s quite easy to turn the controller off and let the legacy traditional network configuration take over in an instant.”
But will redefining the data centre in software ultimately lead to reduced costs, and finally allow IT to get on with assisting the business, rather than maintaining itself?
For Woolworth’s Chamley, the ongoing virtualisation of his infrastructure holds the promise of making this possible.
“For me it is about getting off all hardware, getting off all tin,” Chamley says. “I don’t want to be constrained by a data centre. I need portability of my workloads. And three or four years ago that may have been from one data centre to another, but now it includes public cloud providers. And that’s where the flexibility comes in.”
“As we head into what I’ve been calling infrastructure 3.0, it’s all about abstraction. It’s about the orchestration tool sets which are no longer technology-specific, but enable you to manage the entire infrastructure substrate and give you automation.
“And ultimately the net result of infrastructure 3.0 is getting infrastructure off the critical path.”
Virtual data?What do you do when you run out of hardware to virtualise? You virtualise the data itself.
At the vanguard of this emerging capability is the US-based developer, Actifio, whose technology virtualises the so-called copy data (multiple copies of the same data in an organisation) to create a single maser copy that can then be used for activities such as disaster recovery and test and development.
This has the benefit of both significantly accelerating the creation of new environments while reducing data storage requirements and creating a more reliable backup regime.
Sydney-based law firm, Henry David York (HDY), is using Actifio to virtualise its data environment, having already virtualised almost all of its server and storage infrastructure.
Its manager of business technology solutions, Alex Clonaris, says the use of a copy data tool has significantly improved the reliability of HDY’s data recovery strategy, and enabled faster staging of test & development environments.
“Staging and testing take up production time,” Clonaris says. “By having multiple environments available to be spun up dynamically, you speed up the time it takes to do testing and move on to the next iteration.
“What that means is we’re able to speed up the delivery of applications to the business.” That aligns well with Clonaris’ goal to reduce the time HDY invests in managing infrastructure and focus more on using IT to deliver value for the business.
“What we’re investing a lot in now is the concept of the business technology solutions piece,” Clonaris says. “It is a consolidating approach, working with each group and trying to refine their processes and what we can do to help them. That is where we see the biggest value moving forward.”
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