Starting From Zero
A datacenter outage is not the best time to meet the new executive who oversees the IT Department. I’m trying to figure out why the entire facility is dark even though the emergency generator is howling, and this guy I’ve never seen before is asking questions. Turns out that he’s my boss’s boss’s boss’s new boss. Great.
Fast forward to a couple of days later, and I’m standing in the now fully operational datacenter with the same executive. He listens patiently to all of my explanations of which racks perform what functions, nods at appropriate intervals, then interrupts me to ask a single question. “How do we get out of the datacenter business?”
In most ways we’re a pretty typical enterprise IT operation. We have racks and racks of servers, terabytes of storage, and more VMs that we can easily keep track of. We run email, a massive proprietary ERP system, a series of business support applications, and the usual hodgepodge of single-use servers. We’re viewed as a cost center and have difficulty articulating to the lines of business how we affect their ability to get their jobs done. Our systems are pretty reliable (except when they’re not). We’re staffed with good people, most of whom have been doing the same job for years.
We’ve been stable to the point of stagnation. Our last major transformation was replacing the mainframe with the ERP system back in the late 1990s. We got serious about virtualization around 2010, but didn’t use that as an opportunity to change our IT operations practices. Virtualization just let us run a lot more servers on a smaller collection of hardware. We’ve tinkered around the margins a bit, but for the most part we’ve kept doing things the way we’ve always done them.
“How do we get out of the datacenter business?” It’s a deceptively straightforward question. Simply moving all the hardware into a colocation facility or running all the VMs in “the cloud” is insufficient. What’s really being asked is, “How do we provide more value, reduce the time to value, contain costs, and, while we’re at it, get out of the datacenter business?” Simply doing what we’ve always done, only on someone else’s hardware, will not accomplish the goal.
So we’re starting from zero. We’ve been handed the opportunity (along with a mandate) to transform the way we provide IT services to the business. Thankfully, the industry’s shift to cloud computing and web-scale operations has provided a wealth of examples and success stories to learn from. My plan is to document and describe the process in the hopes that it might be useful.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” — Lao Tzu