Storage is critical enterprise infrastructure, and how best to protect these environments to ensure the safety and recovery of the data that resides there is pretty darn important. But is this sometimes a bit overlooked by enterprise architects thinking more about big-picture strategies than nitty-gritty details?

Perhaps. Consider, for example, that physical to virtual infrastructure transitions present the best chance nearly any organization will have for some time to rearchitect its backup methodology, says Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage Practice at TheInfoPro (a division of 451 Research). After all, a large-scale change like that doesn’t happen every day. You have to “exploit that opportunity, because you may not get it again for another 10 years,” he says.

Yet, when laying out the frameworks for physical to virtual infrastructure projects, most enterprise architects won’t have a ready answer about accomplishing backup redesign, he says. That has to change: Just as enterprise architects have a role in helping simplify server environments, so too should they play a part in reducing management overhead — i.e., the cost factor — for data protection. “This is a way of protecting the business; it’s not the business,” Coulter notes. “The time you spend doing this isn’t creating business value.” Yet, according to Storage Study Wave 15 done in 1H2011 by TheInfoPro, backup remains the largest storage time-sink (see chart below).

Complexity has had a long reign when it comes to storing, managing and protecting data, going back to the days of purely physical environments. Without guidance from enterprise architects, the addition of virtualization, on- and off-premises clouds, and SaaS solutions, can further complicate data management and protection — certainly during the period of time when organizations are transitioning to these new technologies and environments.    

David Liff, VP, Global Marketing, at CA Technologies, sees the enterprise architect as bringing the risk assessor’s eye to the job, to apply recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) principles appropriate to each specific business process, across whatever swaths of technology are in place or moving into place, and ideally enabling all protections via a single ergonomic console. “Architecting storage used to be about making sure you had enough storage and that it was working. That’s now a given,” he says. “Now it’s about driving risk management around storage architectures, based on the business process defining RPO and RTO.”

The amount of data the enterprise is willing to lose and the amount of time it is willing to wait to recover information depends on the impact that each specific loss-and-recovery effort will have on the business. It may be okay to lose a day’s worth of human resource transactions and to wait two weeks to recover HR data, but clearly it’s a very different story for the transactions and data involved with online trading system processes, for example. There, the requirement may be to restore back to just one minute or one transaction ago, and to do it instantly. While storage architects are themselves being asked to think more about protection according to RPO and RTO objectives, they should be defining those SLA goals in consultation with enterprise architects, Liff says.

Indeed, the enterprise architect should make it a point to be involved now more than ever. After all, enterprise architects regularly deal with governance issues, and increased regulatory and legal requirements — such as producing digital records in a timely manner as part of electronic discovery of evidence during litigation — demand good storage architecting and data protection practices. 

The enterprise architect also is needed now, more than ever, to help guide backup and recovery strategies because the enterprise has to move away from using many technology solutions to manage and protect distinct environments — physical, virtual, cloud — to a solution that can range across these platforms and across their various vendors, while seamlessly accommodating different business process Service Level Agreements. “That’s a challenge that creates churn,” Liff says. “Storage is known for high levels of complexity, and in large organizations you have teams of experts running different solutions, but their expertise is not portable. These teams are passionate about what they do and emotionally attached to what they know, too. Once you get to the business-driven goals of RTO and RPO, you need someone who’s outside of just the storage world — the enterprise architect — to decide what is the way forward to a more comprehensive solution that gives you granular control at a very high level.” (Today there are just a very few solutions that fit the bill, including CA Technologies’ ARCserve, he says.)

However you’re contemplating addressing storage in the new year, Coulter makes an important comment about getting these architectures right, especially in light of all the work most enterprises have been doing around server virtualization and the growth in capacity that that’s been driving. “Get it wrong and you will spend more and more on storage, and that eats into the savings [virtualization can deliver] on the server side,” he says.

How are you planning to help your enterprise get storage right? 

What matters most to enterprise architects as private clouds take shape at their organizations? The same issues that always matter: standards, repeatability, governance and structure.

Yet, I would say that all those things matter more than ever with private clouds. They are not, after all, just highly virtualized data centers times 10, and cannot function — as many virtual environments have managed to do — by fitting old and perhaps loose operational processes into a new paradigm. The private cloud is too dynamic, too invested in the concept of constant change, to get by with out-of-date configuration items or less than rigorously controlled change-management processes that only increase risk.

The agility of a private cloud cannot be compromised by lags in delivering IT services that result from poorly documented, automated and orchestrated processes across platforms, applications and IT groups. Private cloud ecosystems must be architected with an eye to controlling everything: how applications fit into the new infrastructure; how resources are automatically reclaimed from discontinued services; how charge-backs are handled in order to avoid overreaching by business units.

Support for moving these principles from paper to private cloud infrastructure has been lacking, however. For the enterprise architect, private-cloud development work has been akin to freehand-sketching of a draft on a vast, blank canvas — a lot of time spent on figuring out which brushes to use and what colors go where.

What is really needed is a detailed “color-by-numbers” kit to bring the complete picture to life. The emergence of the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) standardized, converged infrastructure is a first step in this direction. It uses prepackaged technologies from Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel to deliver integrated, modular units of on-demand computing capacity required by enterprise private clouds. The Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform or stack of processing power, storage and virtualization technology provides a solid, highly repeatable and ultra-standardized way of building the new data center, removing a lot of the risk from the process and speeding time to value.

From the enterprise architect’s perspective, Vblock platforms are also a safe bet for interoperability and compatibility when bursting to the public cloud, given the tremendous number of service providers that also use the VCE converged infrastructure.

The Color-by-Numbers Kit Gains More Detail

Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE, in essence, give the enterprise architect the broad outlines of the color-by-numbers picture he or she is creating, as well as a plot for using primary colors to fill in those outlines. But the enterprise architect also needs a seamless way to drop into that picture more fine lines and degrees of shading to optimize the racking, stacking and tuning that VCE enables.

Think, for example, about how manual processes for just about everything — from change and configuration management to app provisioning and security — still account for most of the enterprise’s IT labor and costs. And now think of the opportunity that exists for the enterprise architect to help reduce that overhead by moving to policy-based, model-driven configuration and governance, or by directing the automation of the entire identity lifecycle of users. Think, too, about instituting a structure that enables IT to leverage a catalog of reusable software components in the creation of compute clouds; that directs abstracting applications from their underlying infrastructure to support agility; or that champions an environment where services are charged for by the quantity of allocated resources. 

With service management, service assurance, service automation, virtualization management, capacity management and security solutions from CA Technologies for use with Vblock platforms, enterprise architects can describe a framework for IT and the enterprise that realizes the agility and efficiency of private clouds.

To enable enterprises to achieve greater financial, efficiency and environmental advantages of cloud computing, CA Technologies, with its Vblock platform-certified solutions, initially focuses on ways where self-service automation, orchestration and accounting capabilities are required to deliver a reliable and scalable environment:

• Helping deliver virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment faster by embedding the common policies and controls required for checking in, checking out, reserving billing; and
• Capacity planning in preparation for migration of Tier 1 enterprise applications to the Vblock platform.

Taken together, the Vblock platform predefined private cloud ecosystems and the ability of CA Technologies to manage these stacks give the enterprise architect not only a full artist’s toolkit, but also the means to readily make use of it. Now that the enterprise architect has the ability to enforce standards, drive repeatability, enable governance and conform to structure, the business gains quicker time to deployment and better time to value, while minimizing risk.

What are you doing with your architecture to speed time to value in your data center or via private cloud? 

CA and VCE are business partners and as part of this relationship, from time to time, engage in joint marketing. No fees or monetary benefits were exchanged between the two in relation to this post. This discussion post is presented for your informational purposes only and is presented, to the extent allowed by applicable law, “as is” without warranty of any kind.