Assessing the Business Value of Open Compute Platform Datacenter Solutions

Transcription

1 IDC Solution Brief Assessing the Business Value of Open Compute Platform Datacenter Solutions Sponsored by: Nokia Giorgio Nebuloni Matthew Marden November 2016 Andrew Buss IDC OPINION There is a current shift in IT based on the move to the 3rd Platform and this is placing new demands on IT infrastructure. Demand for cloud means large-scale changes in on-premise datacenters becoming private clouds, as well as the rise of large-scale hosted or public cloud datacenters. This trend is accelerating and IDC believes that by 2020 half of all infrastructure capacity will be consumed directly by these environments. The scale of adoption of digital applications means that IT is becoming a bigger part of the business and operations, and making it as efficient as possible is becoming ever more critical. A rethink of the datacenter blueprint, with industrialization and energy efficiency in mind, is becoming unavoidable. Trying to achieve an optimized approach by implementing solutions from multiple vendors or standards can be challenging. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a community-driven approach designed from the outset to help achieve these targeted efficiencies. This IDC Solution Brief leverages IDC's research into the benefits achieved by organizations that have taken scalable approaches to their datacenter architectures such as private cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure deployments that share similar characteristics to the OCP approach. These organizations say they achieve more cost-effective, efficient, reliable, and agile IT operations through their investment in scalable datacenter architectures. In particular, they spend less on power and cooling (28% reduced), can support more servers per IT staff member (65% more), and reduce the impact of unplanned outages on their business operations (61% less productive staff time lost). In addition, their IT organizations have become more responsive to business demand, and they have the IT agility and flexibility required to meet evolving business opportunities and challenges. SITUATION OVERVIEW The transition to the 3rd Platform is underway. IDC estimates that $37.4 billion will be spent worldwide on infrastructure hardware for private and public cloud environments in 2016, including server, storage, and Ethernet networks. This equals 37% of overall infrastructure spending. By 2020, that number is expected to grow to $60.8 billion, or 50% of total spending, as cloud becomes the standard delivery mode. IT departments and service providers are being challenged to deliver applications and services quickly, at scale and with high quality, all while being cost effective. To do this, datacenter administrators need to overcome a number of challenges: November 2016, IDC #EMEA

2 Inefficient operations. Inefficiencies in the architecture and operations of many datacenters means that valuable budget that could be used for innovation and new services is being used up by routine operations that are not adding business value. IDC estimates that in traditional environments, for every dollar spent purchasing equipment, more than four dollars are spent operating it, including power, routine operations, and management. Time to market. Delivering cloud services in the form of IaaS capacity to internal or external customers is a race against time. Late deployments can mean customers are lost to other IaaS services. Operations teams still taking a traditional approach involving siloed purchases of network, compute, and storage, and manual set-up of nodes one-by-one, are at a disadvantage. Big Data readiness. Service providers, but also increasingly midsize and large corporations embarking on a digital experience journey, need infrastructure that can affordably store and process incredible amounts of data. This data is increasingly diverse and non-structured, including video files, high-definition pictures, and "dumps" of sensor or Internet-generated data. Workloads using those files include both outbound (e.g., web serving media, ecommerce websites, social media, Internet of Things architectures) and inbound (Big Data analytics, CCTV output, etc.). Recent IDC surveys show that despite being ranked below traditional applications like ERP, CRM, and in industry adoption terms, such inbound analytics workloads are much more likely to hold disproportionate amounts of storage, ranking number 2 after general-purpose IT management in the accounts using them. OVERVIEW OF THE OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT (OCP) The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure. From its inception in 2011 as a result of a Facebook datacenter refresh, the OCP has gained traction with a wide variety of datacenter suppliers and buyers and now has 18 Platinum members and 23 Gold and Silver members. The key goal of the OCP is to provide a platform whereby hardware innovations, driven by large webscale companies such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, are open sourced and made available as standard specifications to other buyers through a community of vendors able to deliver them. Having matured over the years, official OCP configurations span beyond just server hardware, and include storage, network, rack cabinet, and even server management specifications. IDC has been observing the establishment and adoption of the OCP into the enterprise and service provider markets, and identifies it as an important platform for driving a much more efficient, scalable, and agile datacenter architecture. BUSINESS BENEFITS OF ARCHITECTURES BASED ON THE OCP To understand the potential impact of taking an OCP datacenter architecture approach, IDC has considered interviews conducted with organizations that have taken scalable approaches to their datacenter architectures such as private cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure deployments that share baseline commonalities with the OCP approach. These interviews were conducted in the past two years with organizations that support significant IT operations and server bases (more than 200 business applications and 50,000 users on average) with their upgraded datacenter infrastructures. Generally, these organizations decided to migrate away from more traditional datacenter structures after concluding that their business operations required greater scalability, flexibility, and efficiency to navigate changing demand from both their employees and their customer bases IDC #EMEA

3 IDC's research shows that these organizations are achieving strong value through these scalable datacenter approaches. As reflected in Table 1, they have taken significant strides in making their datacenter operations more efficient in terms of power consumption. They can also support more users and servers per IT staff member, have minimized the operational and business impact of unplanned outages, and have made their IT infrastructure better able to react to business demand. TABLE 1 Benefits of Scalable Datacenter Infrastructure Average Benefit (%) IT infrastructure-related Number of servers Power costs Facilities costs 23% fewer 28% lower 14% lower IT staff productivity benefits Time spent keeping the lights on Servers per IT staff member Users per IT staff member 27% less 65% more 48% more Risk mitigation, unplanned downtime Frequency of unplanned outages Time to resolve Productive employee time lost 64% less frequent 38% less time 61% less Business agility Application development life cycle Time to provision VMs 41% faster 84% less time Source: IDC, 2016 Operational Efficiencies, Including Lower Power and Cooling Costs Powering and cooling datacenters has traditionally accounted for a significant ongoing cost of IT operations. Previous IDC research (see the European Managed Systems Survey, involving 300 European datacenter managers) showed that, according to operations teams, energy consumption accounts for around 17% of regular enterprise datacenter annual costs. Based on conversations with large datacenter operators, IDC believes that, for large service providers with streamlined operations, energy costs can easily exceed 50% of total operating expenses. With the typical power consumption of a 2-CPU server averaging 250W per server, organizations can easily spend more than $500 per year in electricity costs per physical machine, when including direct power plus 2016 IDC #EMEA

4 electricity for cooling, fans, and other facility elements (see IDC Footprint of the European Server Infrastructure, , IDC #GE11R9). IDC's research shows that organizations that invest in upgrading their datacenter architectures with modern, scalable compute bases can significantly decrease their energy consumption and lower their power and cooling costs. On average, organizations considered for this analysis that have pursued private cloud or hyperconverged infrastructure initiatives have lowered their power costs by an average of 28%. In particular, these organizations have benefited from leveraging higher performing servers to streamline their server environments (23% fewer servers on average) and being able to make more efficient use of their datacenter hardware through greater agility, increased levels of virtualization and cloud orchestration, and reducing infrastructure siloes. In addition to these benefits, Open Compute configurations are born with a high focus on energy efficiency. They achieve that with: Optimized airflow and free-air cooling at a server chassis and rack cabinet level, reducing the need to run air compressors and use energy for those Support for higher temperature operations, reducing demand for cooling The ability to fit more equipment/compute into the same footprint, reducing the need for additional square meters OCP approaches work best when orchestrated at system, rack cabinet, and datacenter level. This enables organizations to achieve optimal power usage effectiveness (PUE) that is, the ratio of total input energy into a datacenter versus the energy used to power IT equipment in it. A PUE of 2 means that in a datacenter drawing 2W of power, only 1W ends up powering server, storage, and network gear the rest being dispersed in cooling, inefficiencies, and airflow. Facebook, one of the OCP founders, disclosed data from its Prineville datacenter which was built around OCP and opened in At the end of 4Q15, the datacenter reached a PUE of In comparison, current new datacenter builds hover around a PUE of 1.5 and older facilities can easily have a PUE of 2. Facebook was not the only company boasting energy efficiency. On a much smaller scale, U.S. insurance provider Fidelity, operating around 10,000 servers globally, went on record to say that by using OCP it managed to squeeze energy consumption by 20% compared with traditional approaches. Service provider Rackspace also went on record to confirm it made considerable energy savings in its new OCP-based datacenters. Simplified Management and Operations While OCP products are primarily focused on improving hardware design, significant strides have been made thanks to the increased standardization of the management interfaces that can generate efficiencies for IT teams. IDC's research demonstrates that datacenter upgrades with more scalable architectures consistently achieve efficiencies for IT staff members who manage their environments. Thanks to features such as automation, orchestration, and other softwaredriven processes, IT infrastructure teams at these organizations spend 27% less time on day-today activities. For these organizations, this translates into significant efficiencies in terms of managing and operating their datacenter infrastructure. They can support 65% more physical servers and 48% more IT users per staff member after deploying more scalable, modern datacenter architectures that the OCP is designed to enable. OCP servers now support AMI baseboard management controller (BMC) or OpenBMC interfaces for remote booting, resetting, and so on. If organizations are able to leverage those interfaces, OCP platforms can be used effectively in combination with next-generation cloud orchestration 2016 IDC #EMEA

5 software such as OpenStack, as well as more traditional system management tools for open source and proprietary software environments. In both cases, the objective is the automation of resource deployment and a reduction in the administrative burden. When setting up cloud service delivery or other specific services (e.g., a Big Data analytics cluster) to internal or external customers, manual configurations must give way to automated processes, as that is the only approach that works in the self-service world. This not only enables organizations to dedicate administrators' time to plan and support new services, but also improves the experience for the end consumer of the resources developers and business units. Reliability IDC has also found that organizations that upgrade with modern, scalable datacenter infrastructure benefit from improved system robustness and application reliability. In part, these benefits relate to putting in place new hardware designed to handle the demands and scalability of new business applications and services, but they also tie back to these types of servers being designed for resiliency and with features such as automatic failover and zero-impact upgrades. This not only means less frequent outages (64%) and faster resolution (38%) when they do occur, but also that these organizations can leverage their upgraded datacenter environments to pursue their business objectives with significantly lower risk of interruption to their employees or business operations (61% reduced on average). Accelerated Time to Value IDC's research also indicates that organizations that move to more scalable datacenter architectures enable their IT organizations to better support their businesses through more timely delivery of compute resources and ultimately applications and services. Breaking down siloes and enabling scalability of physical resources helps to limit infrastructure-related bottlenecks throughout the application development process. As a result, organizations considered for this analysis have reduced their application delivery times by an average of 41%, meaning that essential applications and services are getting to employees and customers much sooner. OCP infrastructure is designed for deployment at scale, with ease of racking equipment and integrating into the management environment. In the era of scalable workloads, demand for capacity from internal or external customers can be hard to predict. IDC observes very strong deployment practices coupled with OCP deployments, and in particular the idea that hardware building blocks are delivered in rack cabinet packages, pre-installed by the OCP supplier or integrator, and ready to host software immediately after being connected to the grid. Instead of a myriad of vendor proprietary racking standards, the OCP is designed to be much more standardized and interchangeable. Instead of days spent cabling and connecting components on the datacenter floor, the hardware stack can be ready to use in hours after delivery. Other advantages include the fact that by planning in a modular fashion, virtually all of the stumbling blocks around network traffic and power distribution are removed. The best practice here is that of maintaining a low number of solid best practice configurations, and to let the software do the job of workload management and scheduling. IDC maintains that the modularity advantages are becoming notable not only for large-scale web players, but also for enterprises and telecommunication and managed service providers that have high-potential workloads in the analytics, telecommunication service, or cloud infrastructure spaces. Using the OCP positively forces facility and IT operation planning to come together and make stronger long-term decisions IDC #EMEA

6 QUANTIFIED BUSINESS BENEFITS OF SCALABLE DATACENTER ARCHITECTURES IDC's research into the deployment and use of scalable datacenter architectures such as private cloud and hyperconverged solutions that share commonalities with the OCP approach demonstrates that they can support the generation of strong business value in the ways described above. As shown in Figure 1, IDC puts the value achieved by organizations using solutions that are similar in nature to the OCP architecture at $293,500 per 100 physical servers per year. These financial calculations and the KPIs presented in Table 1 are based on IDC's research into the benefits and costs for organizations of investing in solutions such as private cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure that share common characteristics with the OCP approach. Organizations considered for this analysis were based in North America and EMEA, and have substantial datacenter operations: an average of 5,900 physical servers supporting 55,000 employees. The value of these approaches that IDC has quantified and presented in Figure 1 falls into three categories and has been normalized on a per 100 server basis: IT infrastructure cost reductions. Organizations benefit from consolidation of their datacenter environments with new, more powerful, and more efficient servers. On average, IDC calculates that they achieve cost savings of $71,900 per 100 servers per year in lower costs related to server hardware, power costs, and datacenter space requirements. IT staff productivity benefits. Organizations that leverage new software and tools, greater use of policy, and more efficient servers require less staff time to support their server environments. On average, IDC puts the value of IT staff time savings at $104,400 per 100 servers per year. Risk mitigation/user productivity benefits. Organizations reduce the cost to their operations in terms of lost employee productivity by having a more robust foundation for their datacenter operations. On average, IDC calculates that they save productive employee time worth $117,200 per year per 100 servers. FIGURE 1 Average Annual Benefits per 100 Servers IT infrastructure cost reductions $71,900 IT staff productivity benefits $104,400 Risk mitigation/user productivity benefits $117, ,000 60,000 90, ,000 ($ per 100 servers) Source: IDC, IDC #EMEA

7 NOKIA AIRFRAME OCP PORTFOLIO Nokia is a global provider of network and IT solutions, generating revenue of 17.2 billion between January and September Over the past few years, the vendor has expanded its support for industry-standard technologies, and is becoming one of the major providers for next-generation telecommunication infrastructure, according to IDC. After cooperating with the community for some time, Nokia officially joined the Open Compute Project in November 2015, launching its AirFrame Data Center Solution based on OCP principles. It has contributed several technical innovations to the community, including telco-grade reliability and networking advancements, and these are now available as specs for the entire ecosystem. Importantly, Nokia's OCP efforts are part of a broader strategy of engagement in several open source communities such as OpenStack, OPNFV, and ONOS. Nokia's approach to the OCP is twofold: OCP-based hardware portfolio. Nokia's AirFrame datacenter offering includes OCP OpenRack v2 compliant computing, network, and storage modules taking into account the specific needs of the telco domain such as regulatory requirements, direct current (DC) power feeding, and electromagnetic shielding. Support services. Nokia is one of eight certified solution providers for OCP hardware, providing all-around service, ranging from datacenter design to logistics to spare part support. IDC believes the former is the key differentiator for Nokia, which can leverage decades of expertise in software and hardware design and support in the telecommunication space. Having a strong support partner that can take care of the supply chain is a key requirement for the enterprises and service providers that IDC talked to, and can help sidestep pitfalls. In particular, Nokia's exposure to OpenStack and the related ecosystem around network virtualization software is seen as a plus the OCP works best when combined with cloud software orchestrating the resources and enabling the delivery of front-end services. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IT decision makers should be aware of the challenges that can arise when operating OCP implementations. IDC believes the primary obstacle is around the market awareness and evolving maturity of the solution set. Significant steps have been taken here, with things like support for standard size 19in. rack cabinets or hot-swappable fans and hard disks now "digested" in the latest designs and virtually all of the hardware stumbling blocks, particularly in power supply and distribution, removed. Bottlenecks remain in the link between hardware and software ecosystems, and in the logistics and support chain. Having a fully functioning aisle or datacenter of server nodes is in many ways only half the solution the other half being a well-functioning operating system, hypervisors, and cloud management software stack. This is why OCP members like Nokia are working much more closely with OpenStack, CloudStack, and other software communities to provide and guarantee support for specific hardware and software combinations. The other obstacle is around the fact that while some benefits, especially on the upfront cost, can be achieved by dedicating a part of the datacenter facility to OCP, the real value is unlocked when most if not all of the infrastructure, including IT equipment, cooling, and data halls, is built around 2016 IDC #EMEA

8 end-to-end OCP principles. As a consequence, a certain type of scale (think at least 200 nodes) is needed to make the OCP investment really deliver. Regardless of these hurdles, IDC believes that any IT organization with its own datacenter capacity must think and plan now so that its IT infrastructure is competitive with the maturing cloud architectures. Planning multiyear cycle strategies around OCP architectures can take IT organizations a long way in achieving those goals. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE The push to drive efficiency and the need to support storage-heavy, 3rd Platform workloads will remain as primary objectives for datacenter administrators over the next decade. To get there, a rethink of the datacenter blueprint with industrial scalability, automation, and energy efficiency in mind is becoming unavoidable. IDC recommends that enterprises and small to midsize service providers assess the OCP as a proven and tested methodology to achieve this in a more integrated and predictable manner, with the caveat that some adjustment in the purchasing cycle is needed. IDC advises IT buyers assessing the OCP to spend the time to look up certified OCP solution providers and get their input on how to structure a solid stack including the automation and orchestration elements. Sourcing directly from pure hardware manufacturers might allow for lower capex, but requires the buyer to manage, direct, and control not only the support line but also the entire supply chain in a way that only hyperscale datacenters can. Warranty, software integration expertise, and local presence should all be weighed carefully when selecting a supplier. Finally, IDC believes the OCP yields the strongest benefits when harmonized with large infrastructure upgrades or buildout of greenfield sites. Once a preferred OCP solution provider has been selected, industrialized rollouts should be the way forward. This means supporting a maximum of two to three OCP product types and setting up the logistics in such a way that the racking, cabling, and stacking happen at the supplier site, and not on the customer's datacenter. APPENDIX: METHODOLOGY IDC compiled the data used in this IDC Solution Brief from interviews it conducts every year with organizations adopting initiatives such as private cloud and using technologies such as hyperconverged infrastructure that are designed to ensure the scalability and efficiency of their datacenter operations. Business value results were normalized by expressing them in terms of dollar benefits per 100 servers in these environments. To quantify benefits related to IT staff operations, IDC multiplied time savings and efficiencies by an average annual loaded salary of $100,000 while using an average annual loaded salary of $70,000 to quantify time savings and productivity benefits for other non-it-staff employees IDC #EMEA

9 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. IDC U.K. IDC UK 5th Floor, Ealing Cross, 85 Uxbridge Road London W5 5TH, United Kingdom idc-community.com Copyright and Restrictions Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests contact the Custom Solutions information line at or permissions@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document require an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC visit For more information on IDC Custom Solutions, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F