Treat the illness, not the symptoms

Organizations are like most individuals when it comes to suspicions that something is wrong with them: they put off the trip to the doctor rather than be given some potentially bad news. Instead, they continue to treat the symptoms and refuse to admit that they are likely not treating the illness.

In this case, I am speaking of an illness that is so widespread that it affects virtually (err, no pun intended) every organization - yet very few have realized it and begun to take action to cure the illness. The illness is "The Way We've Always Done It" Paradigmitis.

"The Way We've Always Done It" Paradigmitis is likely crippling your business right now. You see it and feel it every time you walk into the data center, read a utilization summary, or see your energy costs: resources are grossly under-utilized, applications are over-provisioned for peak demand, power consumption and costs are increasing, and you are running out of room and time. These are the symptoms of the illness; however they are not the illness itself.

The illness is an inability of the IT organization to function efficiently and optimally by providing a real-time infrastructure to business units. It is the direct result of separate operating and business units within an organization telling IT what they want instead of contracting for what they need. It is insidious because it is universal, has been around since the dawn of the data center, and, like a chronic illness, we have simply learned to live with it.

So, in our denial, we treat the symptoms. Under-utilized physical resources (servers) are doubled, tripled, quadrupled as virtual resources - more supply is created from existing resources. Applications that were suffering from performance or availability issues now have a larger pool of (virtual) resources to draw on, and these resources are statically allocated to applications based again on what the business unit says it wants. IT has taken a pill and treated the symptoms, but the illness is still there- growing more virulent and insidiously positioning itself for a massive infection of the entire enterprise.

When the effects of treating the symptoms have worn off, organizations will see that they are still quite ill. Only then the illness will present itself in the form of 100s or 1000s of idle physical and virtual servers, business units that want even more resources, and IT is right back to buying infrastructure - attempting to treat the symptoms. At that point, the symptoms will be too acute to treat with the same bandage being used to cover the bigger problem.

You can take action today and confront the underlying issue:

1. Realize that the data center doesn't have a utilization problem, it has an allocation problem. Resources are allocated statically at deployment time, and not dynamically at run-time. The resulting infrastructure is “siloed” and inflexible, which leads directly to under-utilization.
2. Realize that the allocation problem is caused by an IT resource delivery model that is predicated on delivering servers to the business based on peak demand scenarios - giving them what they want - instead of delivering a consistent quality of service to the business applications - giving them what they need, when they need it.
3. Commit to changing the status quo - actually do something to address the issues outlined above by shifting the focus from statically managing resource supply to dynamically addressing resource demand.

Call it a voluntary paradigm-ectomy.

The illness is real, and so is the cure. The question is, are you going pop a few pills, or are you going to call a doctor?

(Yes, we make house calls :)