The Next I/T Transformation Things You Need to Know

Transcription

1 The Next I/T Transformation Things You Need to Know Over the years, the approach to information technology infrastructure has gone through many transformations. It evolved from monolithic centralized systems to distributed computing to client server and then back to server side computing with light weight clients. Each transformation provided a better understanding of core needs and resulted in substantial innovation. During each transition, the resulting discontinuity provided significant advantage to those who were able to foresee the change and leverage it early. Today, we are embarking on another major transformation founded on the lessons learned over the past few years. Three core issues are driving this change from at I/T perspective: Underutilization of I/T assets Complexity Security The issues are correlated with overriding business needs to: Continue to reduce cost and do more with less Compensate for resource limitations and the shortage of skills within the I/T community overall Stay in pace with business needs for applications and services which support the innovation necessary to compete Protect assets and ensure the privacy of information Business can no longer succeed merely by reducing cost and boosting efficiency. The new century has brought with it the need to innovate in order to allow employees and partners to make the most of business information in order to deliver new products and services quickly. While continuing to be diligent in managing cost, the business must support a growing collection of projects. It needs to be able to realign human capital and resources with core skills to facilitate balancing these scare resources across different projects that span the department, the business unit and even the enterprise. It s not about doing more with fewer people, but more about being able to do more with the people we have. It s about being able to quickly reallocate skills and physical assets to address the next critical business need and to create the flexibility necessary to rapidly accommodate changing missions. Underutilization of I/T Assets Several years ago a radical switch in the cost of I/T systems occurred. Hardware costs declined rapidly leading to the notion of commodity systems. Part of this trend was the result of competition facilitated by open systems. Moreover, it was driven by automation of manufacturing processes which dramatically reduced the cost of producing hardware. Since many decisions are based on the cost of acquisition with little consideration of long term affects, this trend precipitated two fundamental changes. First, Page 1 of 13

2 departments could afford to buy their own systems which allowed them to implement solutions that addressed requirements that were not being satisfied by central I/T in a timely fashion. Second, it allowed the central I/T organization to adopt the notion that clusters of low-cost commodity systems would help them meet the cost reduction goals mandated by the business. This approach solved an immediate need. Over time, however, as the number of commodity systems expands from tens to hundreds and on to thousands of servers within many enterprises, high hidden costs begin to surface. Administration costs associated with managing the large number of discrete server instances escalates. Software that is duplicated across many systems results in larger expenditures for acquisition, upgrades and support. These factors precipitated a radical change in the I/T cost model. While 60% of I/T spending was for hardware in 1995, today it is only 20% (figure 1). Contrast this with the increasing cost for people and software which today account for 70% of spending. In addition, the often overlooked cost of energy and floor space has suddenly become a significant consideration. Many enterprises must consider allocating funds for costly structural additions in order to be able to handle the growth in server farms. Some enterprises are finding that additional electricity is just not available in their area. The challenges are daunting and expensive to redress. Unfortunately, many of the operational costs remain hidden behind old cost allocation models as commodity system support costs are often misallocated to the central I/T system (mainframe). While initially insignificant, as the number of discrete systems grows, the costs become substantial. Misallocation of these costs often leads to suboptimal decisions having a real, yet perhaps unrecognized, impact on the business. For most large enterprises today, the cost of their distributed infrastructure far surpasses the cost of their traditional mainframe systems. Yet, the mainframe systems continue to perform most of the core business operations. As management surveys this situation, it becomes apparent that most of the distributed systems are running between 10% and 20% average utilization. This is not surprising and there are several core reasons for this. First, separate systems are justified by business unit or on a per project basis and the need to isolate workloads often dictate dedicated systems. So from an administrative and operational perspective, separate and discrete systems are a natural way to go. Second, the new workload software model is structured around the commodity hardware. New workloads often require several discrete moving parts; firewalls to support a DMZ, load balancers, intrusion protection appliances, reverse proxy authentication and authorization servers, security servers, web servers, application servers, data base servers and federation engines to name just a few. Each of these discrete systems needs to be sized in order to meet peak demands. Since peak demand is often hard to predict, capacity beyond the anticipated peak is typically deployed. Furthermore, while one component of the infrastructure could benefit from additional capacity at a given point in time, other components may be blessed with an overabundance of capacity that cannot be readily shared. The result is an over-engineered solution consuming vastly more energy and floor space than is necessary. But, it is argued, this remains acceptable because the hardware costs are deemed to be so low. The multiplier affect, however, along with the appearance of rising administrative costs is beginning to dispel this myth. When the peak demands of each system are tabulated it Page 2 of 13

3 becomes apparent that the sum of the peaks is always substantially higher than the peak of the sums (figure 2). The concept of clusters of commodity systems demonstrates an issue; it is difficult to share resources across different applications and different functional components supporting each application resulting in the underutilization of assets. Complexity Managing arrays or clusters of independent systems can be challenging. Even simple tasks that may take only ten or twenty minutes, consume lots of time when repeated hundreds or thousands of times. This leads to a growth in the number of support personnel. Even with automation tools, issues related to unique configurations require time to sort out. The result is often a multitude of unique software releases and versions throughout the enterprise. Indeed, it is not uncommon for large enterprises to discover that they don t have a valid inventory of everything that is installed and supporting the business nor do they know, with confidence, the service levels achieved or the exact composition of support infrastructure products that are deployed. Ongoing operations including monitoring to respond to situations, auditing, capacity planning, and service level and change management are significantly more challenging in a multi-system environment, especially where a multitude of operating systems and resource managers in employed. In addition, complexity associated with managing a multitude of interconnections between systems can be substantial. This uncovers the need for a system that is capable of sharing resources across multiple workloads with an end-end operational view of all component parts supporting the applications. The aforementioned challenges highlight the key advantage of a consolidated system, namely that a single operating system has a view across all moving parts, and can monitor the components, provision resources and adjust dispatching priority in real time measured in seconds as opposed to minutes. Security The multi-system environment presents unique challenges for security. First, it s difficult to establish a uniform, consistent and reliable security policy across all systems. For example, a policy change needs time to replicate across tens, hundreds or thousands of servers. In addition, the links between systems must be protected often forcing repetitive decryption and encryption of data affecting both the cost of accelerator hardware (especially when it can t be easily shared across physical platforms) and the management and distribution of security keys (digital certificates). Often, simplifications are employed and most frequently trusted internal networks are put in place to minimize this affect. However, security experts advise that nearly half of all security breaches are initiated from within the business. This has caused organizations like VISA to begin to advocate encryption of private information across all network connections (internet and intranet), end-to-end. Page 3 of 13

4 In addition to the security infrastructure management challenge, there is the issue of knowing where the servers are, what they are running, what private data may be on those servers and if it s being properly protected. Congressional initiatives such as Sarbanes- Oxley have brought this issue to the forefront. Virtualization The latest innovation to address the aforementioned challenges is the concept of virtualization. While not a new concept (virtualization technology dates back more than 30 years), it has gained renewed interest because of its potential to address many issues associated with physically separate systems. Virtualization allows a physical system to become many logical systems with the isolation characteristic of a separate physical system. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provide a test suite to ensure secure isolation of logical systems called the Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL). It is critical for systems offering virtualization to support this standard. In addition, resources such as storage devices and even supporting software infrastructure may be virtualized allowing several implementations to be treated as one from a management perspective. There are several approaches to virtualization: Hardware logical partitioning Virtual Machine partitioning Address Space isolation Grid Hardware partitioning, commonly referred to as logical partitioning, allows the hardware platform to support multiple operating system images. This type of virtualization is best for separation of environments such as test, development and where it makes sense to separate lines of business or types of applications that exhibit a markedly different runtime behavior (e.g. batch from online) or when separation from an administrative perspective is desirable. Software partitioning allows many virtual operating system images, commonly referred to as virtual machines, to run efficiently under the control of a hypervisor which is responsible for dynamically allocating the underlying hardware assets to the virtual environments based on their relative importance. This type of virtualization is well suited for both environmental and application isolation since the number of supported partitions can be extremely large. Another approach that is unique to the z/os operating system leverages the application isolation of the z/os address space allowing multiple applications to run under a single operating system image while ensuring the integrity and security of each application. Storage protection keys and hardware management of virtual address translation implemented by the System z hardware offer secure separation of workloads providing them with the efficiency of a shared physical memory. This approach minimizes the Page 4 of 13

5 number of operating system images, and hence complexity, by allowing application environments to be virtualized under the control of a single operating system. Combining virtualization techniques can eliminate single points of failure and facilitate horizontal scaling. For example, by distributing work across multiple logical partitions, each sharing the same physical resources, the operating system can be eliminated as a single point of failure yet the application can continue to benefit from access to all resources on the system. By placing logical partitions on separate systems in a tightly coupled environment such as a Parallel Sysplex (a multi-system configuration that is administered as a single system image that provides high speed data sharing with integrity), an entire physical system can be brought out of service while the application continues to serve users. This concept extends naturally to geographically dispersed systems offering near instantaneous recovery of one Sysplex with another to support metropolitan and regional disaster recovery. In the three styles discussed above, the approach is to bring the hardware assets to the application. Grid, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach by intelligently routing work and managing the applications running on a collection of systems. Clusters (a set of servers capable of running the same application) no longer have to be dedicated to one application and individual systems may be dynamically altered to run different applications at different points in time. In essence, clusters become dynamically configured. Virtualization goes a long way to address many of the issues outlined previously. Physical asset utilization can certainly increase because resources are no longer dedicated to applications. Change management is positively affected by the ability to share infrastructure and automate changes across virtual environments that are physically colocated. Complexity is reduced by sharing assets and policies across virtualized instances of application components. For example, a DMZ or a secure reverse proxy server may share the same hardware and security policy with the application server and data base server. Security is improved by eliminating network connections that require SSL endpoints, sharing key rings and providing an end to end view of the application environment for authorization control and auditing. Virtualization with System z The System z supports all of the virtualization styles mentioned above. It also offers some unique features that make virtualization a compelling option. Indeed, all System z configurations require hardware logical partitions today. It is implemented in the microcode and supports EAL level 5. In addition, the hardware performs several key features that are important. First, address translation is handled by the hardware. An application works with a virtual address which is dynamically mapped to real memory on demand. Second, hardware enforces storage protection keys ensuring that non-authorized applications may not access certain parts of the shared storage. In fact, this is a multilevel storage protection scheme designed to ensure the security of the environment. Both Page 5 of 13

6 virtual machines running Linux and address spaces running under the control of z/os leverage these features. The result is a resilient system that allows multiple applications to run together without compromising each other. The System z is ideally suited for virtualization because of its ability to efficiently manage mixed workloads. Virtualized environments are, by their nature, mixed workload environments. They require an efficient multi-level cache and fast context switching in order to run near rated speed under the unique demands of a multiapplication environment. In addition, when multiple applications are sharing resources, it is essential to have an efficient way to ensure that priority work is serviced first. Without this balancing act, bottlenecks may appear. Even for a single application that depends upon multiple runtime components (e.g. the web server, the application server and the data base server) it is critical that these resources work together and that resources are dynamically allocated to ensure harmony. A delay within the web server would affect the other components and the application overall. Of course, in periods of peak demand, it is essential that the system work on the most important tasks first. This requirement is served by the workload manager built into the z/os kernel and by zvm in support of virtualized Linux images. Systems z also benefits from the non-disruptive dynamic sparing of components that occurs under the covers by the operating system and microcode. As the name implies (z stands for zero downtime), redundant hardware components and specialized software that redirects work around a failing component without application awareness are key attributes of a virtualized environment. As the components involved in the execution of the application are virtualized in order to make optimal use of resources it becomes ever more important that the system is resilient. Fast recovery is often not an option since an outage may cause queuing delays that are undesirable and affect operations for an extended period of time. The System z provides an architectural design that integrates a variety of technologies to achieve a heterogeneous network of systems in a box. Today, System z augments its native processors with custom cryptographic accelerators, System Assist Processors and scores of processors to offload I/O processing from the application processors (figure 3). Future implementations are expected to integrate the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture vastly expanding the systems ability to support extreme graphics and compute intensive processing through its ability to perform more than 250 billion floating point operations per second. This may eliminate, for instance, the need to transfer data to another platform in order to perform a complex analysis saving the operational costs associated with the transfer task and avoiding the security challenges associated with replicated data. What is of paramount importance is that this capability will integrate into the system in order to leverage a cohesive design to ensure security, integrity, high availability and application transparency. It will open the door to a set of applications that tightly integrate business processing with compute intensive processing to support financial, insurance, law enforcement and military applications. It will no longer be necessary to build complex relationships between different systems in order to serve the needs of diverse workloads Page 6 of 13

7 relating to a single application while avoiding the complexity of securing and prioritizing a multi-system environment. The multiprocessor design of the System z has been extended to support the notion of specialty processors. These processors are able to dynamically offload work from the general purpose processors in order to achieve hallmark price performance for specific critical industry workloads. By adding specialty processors to an existing System z configuration execution of Linux, Java and database processing applications achieve breakthrough price performance. Consider the advantage of being able to consolidate 20 physical server platforms onto a chipset the size of your hand while not affecting the execution of existing mission critical applications (figure 4). The reduction in energy consumption and floor space is obvious. What may not be obvious, at first glance, is the value of incrementally adding the new workload to an environment that supports the security, availability and disaster recovery already in place to support existing mission critical workloads. This value is best summarized in one word; leverage. System z affords the opportunity to leverage an existing investment and extend the benefits of that investment to new workloads. Just by Showing Up New workloads inherit many benefits just by showing up on the system. The existing disaster recovery infrastructure may be leveraged since the new workload is merely a collection of common artifacts that may be easily added to the existing policy. Tasks such as capacity planning, security audit and file backup may be added to the existing automation policy. The Sysplex Distributor, built into z/os, performs Workload Manager driven distribution of requests across a Parallel Sysplex circumventing systems under stress and outages. DB2 data sharing and shared message queues allows for extremely efficient sharing of resources across multiple systems. Internal propagation of security identity under the control of a common security policy, administered independently from the application, that spans multiple systems delivers the necessary protection. From a day to day operational perspective, resource managers such as the application server, the database server and the security server are started tasks managed and recovered by system automation. Messages routed to the console are logged for post event analysis and may drive automation tasks to minimize human intervention and the potential for error. Since many core business processes execute on System z today, new workloads manifested by the application server, may access these resources directly over cross memory connections. Not only does this provide greater efficiency, it offers improved security since network connections are avoided. There is no need to specify unique user ID s and passwords in the application server since identity propagation may be managed by the z/os security subsystem and controlled exclusively by security personnel. Security certificates may be managed by the z/os security subsystem, supporting both clear key and secure key (the key is stored in tamper reisistent hardware and is never visible in Page 7 of 13

8 memory) operations, to provide consistent security management across the end to end application environment. The net value proposition is founded on leverage. It is the ability to deploy new workloads, developed using a common platform agnostic programming model, onto an existing environment that is resilient, scalable and managed today. The incremental cost of adding this workload to the existing environment is marginal, given the pricing model associated with specialty processors, even without accounting for the total cost savings accrued by leveraging the operational environment. When total cost of ownership is considered, the savings can be astounding. Conslusion The ability of System z to absorb new workloads offers substantial benefits. It delivers best of breed virtualization to address underutilization of assets with compromising security; it simplifies the environment by providing control logic which manages the endto-end application environment allocating resources on-demand while uniformly applying necessary security constraints. The common programming model addresses the need to consolidate skills and more effectively leverage them across many projects. The fast provisioning of new virtualized server instances (minutes instead of days) radically alters the time to respond to new business opportunities while allowing for physical assets to be shared and redundant costs to be eliminated. While some enterprises are consolidating discrete physical systems onto server farms and physically locating them on a common data center floor in an attempt to gain control of operational costs, others are eliminating the discrete systems and consolidating onto virtual server instances that benefit from the mixed workload attributes of System z. They are benefiting from the ability to share physical resources across applications while delivering the secure isolation that is essential. They are leveraging their existing investment in System z, funded by traditional business applications, and taking advantage of the landmark price/performance offered by the zaap and ziip. This is allowing them to co-locate new workloads with existing applications and data while taking advantage of the availability, security, and disaster recovery infrastructure in place today. For many, adding processor chips to their existing Sysplex offers the lowest cost of acquisition and when management benefits are tabulated, the total cost of ownership advantage can be extraordinary. Developers are being freed from the task of building and maintaining their own test systems while avoiding the need to requisition additional assets in order to move forward with testing in support of new projects. Best of all, they are finding that the incremental cost of adding the second, third and fourth application is so small that applications that may not have been deemed candidates for the System z are now being deployed. Many enterprises have more than 100 new Java applications running on the Parallel Sysplex alongside their traditional COBOL applications. Best of all, the application developers have not had to alter their applications or their development methodology. Page 8 of 13

9 Activating a zaap or ziip requires no additional floor space and consumes the energy of a standard house light bulb, 65 watts. So, a side benefit is the reduction in their energy bill and, in some instances, the ability to avoid acquiring a new facility. The new System z delivers the ability to take server consolidation to a new level, one that dramatically lowers cost, simplifies the infrastructure, supports sound environmental policy and facilitates faster deliver of innovative new applications. The advent of a consolidated system that brings the strength of multiple technologies under the covers of a unified management infrastructure is a transformation that must be understood. Page 9 of 13

10 Figure 1 Personnel Expenses have Become the Dominant Component of TCO 10% 20% 43% 27% Based on IBM Scorpion customer analyses Page 10 of 13

11 Figure 2 Variance: a web portal with 13 servers organized into 3 tiers Load Sum of the peaks Relative Load Peak of the sum Average Peaks Web Peak App Peak DB Peak Total Peak File Server DB Server APP6 APP5 APP4 APP 3 Inf 2 Inf 1 APP2 APP 1 WEB3 WEB2 WEB1 The peak of the sum is significantly lower than the sum of the peaks Page 11 of 13

12 Figure 3 System z9 Up to 336 Power PC processors for I/O operations I/O DEVICE DRIVERS 10 more for offload APPLICATION CODE SOME OS and Crypto OPERATING SYSTEM & SYSTEM RESOURCE MGT ESCON Channels PCICA PCIXCC FSP (Cage Controller) DCAs Motor Drives Service Processors and more EVERY EXECUTION UNIT HAS A DEDICATED CROSS-CHECK PROCESSOR FOR SYSTEM RELIABILITY, STABILITY AND INTEGRITY IBM eserver z9-109 superscalar CMOS 54-way SMP Tuned for system utilization, industry leading RAS, system security and data integrity Page 12 of 13

13 Figure 4 Datacenter Mainframe Page 13 of 13