FusionStorm held its first Data Center Summit on June 18, 2009, at the SuperNAP Data Center in Las Vegas. The event was designed to provide customers with insight into the benefits of the SuperNAP facility and the latest data center technologies.
FusionStorm provided customers with lodging at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, along with informative learning sessions and a tour of the SuperNAP facility. FusionStorm plans to host similar events in the future so that more customers have an opportunity to participate.
“This event provided a forum in which customers could exchange ideas with representatives from EMC, VMware and Cisco. The customers who participated also met with FusionStorm engineers and had an opportunity to see firsthand how Switch Communications is transforming the data center market,” said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm. “It was a tremendous success.”
Meeting Today’s Challenges
The Summit addressed some of the key issues facing organizations today, particularly the lack of adequate power to meet data center requirements coupled with rising energy costs. According to Gartner, 50 percent of today’s data centers do not have adequate space and power to meet the organization’s need through 2009, and energy costs are emerging as the second-highest operating cost (behind labor) in 70 percent of data center facilities.
Scalability is another challenge. Data centers built around “racked and stacked” servers and direct-attached storage cannot respond to changing business demands. New applications take too long to deploy, and network performance often suffers. Increased complexity and a lack of comprehensive management tools place additional burdens on IT staff, while security and compliance remain an afterthought.
“Business is pushing for more strategic use of IT services, yet 85 percent of IT spending goes to maintaining and operating legacy systems and equipment, leaving insufficient room to accommodate new innovations or unexpected activities,” said Conroy. “A lot of organizations view ‘cloud’ computing as a way to overcome these challenges and to provide flexible, secure access to applications and data sources. However, cloud computing requires new architectures and business approaches.”
A Walk in the Cloud
Cloud computing is a new style of computing where IT infrastructure is available as a ubiquitous, easily accessible, and reliable utility service conceptually similar to the telephone or electricity. The Data Center Summit addressed cost-effective ways to enable cloud computing, such as utilizing FusionStorm’s comprehensive array of managed hosting and managed services solutions.
VMware also provided an overview of vSphere, the first operating system designed for building a ”private” cloud infrastructure. vSphere offers the ability to create a vast, centrally managed and easily configurable pool of IT resources that organizations can dynamically parcel out as business needs arise and change. Through federation and common management services, vSphere brings the benefits of cloud computing — including fast deployment, low to no upfront cost, and pay as you go for what you use — to the internal infrastructure.
“The private cloud is a logical entity that enables IT to control and manage internal and external resources to provide flexible, scalable computing to the business using any type of industry-standard hardware,” said John Schwan, Director of Channel Sales, VMware. “This approach has significant advantages over other cloud computing models that have proprietary interfaces and require custom application development. It not only retains the flexibility of hosting existing or future apps without customization, but also can leverage and evolve existing skill sets to this new model.”
Bridging Performance Gaps
VMware has joined forces with Cisco and EMC to enable a pragmatic approach to cloud computing. Because virtualization requires new infrastructure capabilities, Cisco has developed a comprehensive data center solution portfolio designed to optimize the core network, WAN and unified computing systems.
“Today’s CPUs are running at about 3.2GHz, I/O at about 16Gbps and the standard interface at 1Gbps. So there’s a huge performance gap between the ability of the CPU to pump information in and out of the network and the network's ability to handle it,” said Doug Gourlay, Cisco’s VP of Data Center Solutions Marketing. “On top of that there’s the transition toward virtualization and the issue of scaling virtual machines and solving the problems associated with virtual machine sprawl. This is driving a new architectural approach in the data center.”
Cisco is providing customers with the ability to preserve capital investment in the network infrastructure through strategic upgrades within the existing physical plant. For customers ready to build out a new data center or expand the physical plant, Cisco offers an end-to-end unified fabric and simplified unified computing architecture that enables organizations to respond more quickly to changing business demands.
Navigating Change
EMC offers a full line of data center solutions, spanning infrastructure consolidation and optimization, backup, recovery and archival, business continuity, virtualization, and more. Storage consolidation reduces space and power requirements while providing more predictable performance and reliability. Data de-duplication further decreases the load on data center facilities by minimizing the amount disk space required for backups.
“Only a single instance of each globally-unique block of data is stored on the backup disk, reducing redundant copies of data,” said Conroy. “In addition to reducing storage requirements, this technology eliminates backup tapes, enhances security and reduces the load on the network by up to 95 percent.”
FusionStorm maintains strong partnerships with these vendors and Switch Communications to deliver a suite of SuperNAP offerings, including application hosting, private clouds, managed services, hardware-as-a-service, network services and facility services. FusionStorm has a unique ability to bring vendors, technologies and IT teams together to produce results.
“Traditionally, the focus has been on segmented ‘silos’ — legacy technologies, skill-sets and organizational barriers that are hard to break. In a service-oriented IT model, network, server, storage, security, application and facility services are coming together in the new data center,” Conroy said. “FusionStorm can help you successfully navigate this environment and utilize new data center solutions and services to meet today’s business demands.”