Converged Infrastructure: Putting Public Sector IT Ahead of the Curve

Converged Infrastructure: Putting Public Sector IT Ahead of the Curve Industry Perspective

Converged Infrastructure: Putting Public Sector IT Ahead of the Curve

1

Many government information officers are still creating or adding to their networks using traditional design and infrastructure. Purchasing and implementing a network in a piecemeal fashion can mean increased costs and worker hours. A converged infrastructure (CI) solution allows network administrators to have more flexibility in how their system is maintained and can enable admins to be more proactive in solving day-today issues, allowing them more time for long-term tasks.

To learn more about these issues and challenges and how the public sector can use CI to solve them, GovLoop partnered with NetApp, a network storage and data management leader that works with government, to create this Industry Perspective on the benefits of a converged infrastructure.

Industry Perspective

2

Traditional IT Architecture An IT environment built piecemeal can lead to inefficiency and waste. And the larger a system grows, the more difficult it becomes to properly manage without an army of administrators constantly monitoring the behemoth’s every move.

At some point, efficient operation simply becomes dauntingly difficult.

Even within one location, different departments in a government organization might have their own servers or security appliances with their own special needs.

In a worst-case scenario, this disparate

architecture can extend all the way down to software. With different hardware and software trying to run and share information, incompatibilities and problems can become an everyday occurrence for government IT teams.

Product support also gets increasingly tricky the more components from different vendors and eras there are. Getting a hold of the right person to fix the problem becomes nearly impossible under those circumstances.

The situation becomes more complicated as these systems grow over time. When one group needs to improve capacity or performance, administrators may simply add new devices to existing systems, often without regard to what is already in place.

Older equipment may not be phased out, adding yet another layer to manage.

This becomes a larger concern for any organization that follows an annual schedule for its budget, as component replacement may be difficult at certain times of the year.

The Adoption of CI To keep IT resources under control, more and more of government is turning away from a hodgepodge of enterprise expansion to the more manageable strategy of converged infrastructure, or CI. With this approach, numerous IT components are combined into a single, optimized solution. Network infrastructure and capacity are shared among all lines of an agency, with a single vendor providing a point of contact for all IT-related issues.

The IT infrastructure grows organically and seamlessly as needed.

Once a CI infrastructure is in place, growth can happen efficiently from that core.

Devices can serve more than one group or location within an organization, which allows capacity to more closely match needs, without money being spent on unused capabilities. Older equipment can also be phased out in favor of newer resources.

CI More Widely Accepted In a recent survey of over 400 IT professionals, an astounding 92 percent of organizations with over 5,000 employees had already implemented some form of

CI, or were considering implementing it. This is a significant rise from just 18 months before. Clearly, more and more organizations are becoming serious about more dynamic control of their IT. According to the survey, the most common projects driving the need for CI are those for big data, infrastructure as a service, unified communications and custom application development. These are heavy-hitting tasks that a network administrator could not hope to implement with a traditional IT setup, not without prohibitive use of resources like worker hours.

CI Still Not Well-Managed The same survey noted that, of the organizations that have CI implementations, a full 63 percent say they manage their deployments by repurposing the tools they were using to manage their traditional infrastructure. And one quarter of them are dealing with seven or more tools to keep it working.

Using outdated tools to manage a stateof-the-art CI system is kind of like using standard “fraction of an inch” wrenches

on a metric nut and bolt. It isn’t quite right for the job, and unless you are on top of things all the time, the tool may slip. This is most evident in the increased challenges in provisioning the infrastructure using outdated tools.

With traditional tools you may need to perform any number of extra steps, such as making sure drivers are updated, configuring the BIOS or even setting up credentials so the different components can even talk to one another. Tools that are designed for the infrastructure would automatically take care of these minutia.

In order to effectively and efficiently manage a CI system, the appropriate tools need to be utilized in that area as well. Whereas a more traditional network monitoring suites would send an alert if a certain static threshold were exceeded, it may not be enough to keep up. The more proactive the monitoring application is, the more it uses analytics to help head off problems before they start and the fewer alerts there will be that staff needs to actively pursue.

Clearly, having the right tools is a necessity for managing any CI implementation.

Converged Infrastructure: Putting Public Sector IT Ahead of the Curve

3

The FlexPod Advantage When Cisco and NetApp came together to make the FlexPod family of CI solutions, “flexibility” was their watchword.

“The advantage of a FlexPod solution is that it offers flexibility,” said Peter Friedman, Manager of the FlexPod team for the Americas Data Center Sales at NetApp. “For example, whereas many of our competitors require customers to acquire the entire block (storage, networking and compute), FlexPod allows customers to leverage existing infrastructure if it makes sense. What we have found is that many customers have infrastructure that still has a long life and instead of abandoning it or being forced to purchase additional hardware, we allow customers to redeploy, thus continuing to gain returns on those investments.”

This aspect can be especially useful to government organizations, as many can be rife with legacy systems. A more flexible CI solution would allow these to be kept intact.

Anatomy of FlexPod

Three Flavors of FlexPod

Cooperative Support Model

The collaboration between Cisco and NetApp to develop the FlexPod system meant bringing in the components that they have been proven best at making.

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers allow you to completely abstract the server’s characteristics from its hardware, making duplication and replacement a very quick task.

Though all of the FlexPod solutions have the components that make them a FlexPod, Cisco and NetApp developed three main configuration families that would best serve the needs of variously sized architectures.

It can be said that any IT solution is only as good as its customer support. In a multi-company partnership, unified support is even more important. This is why, in addition to developing the FlexPod, Cisco and NetApp also came up with the Cooperative Support Model.

The Cisco Nexus Switches and NetApp storage also function similarly to the UCS. Their unified architectures allow a user to run the hardware with practically any type of protocol. All three components working together produce a solution with maximum usability and flexibility in mind.

When the need arises, expansion may be as simple as plugging in a new UCS chassis, or NetApp FAS, providing greater capability without significantly increasing maintenance time.

“We have what’s called the FlexPod Datacenter, which is our most popular flavor, if you will,” Friedman said. “That sits primarily in the customer’s data center, and it’s for enterprise applications.”

For remote offices, branch offices or smaller applications, there is the FlexPod Express. This is a scaled-down version of the data center and is therefore very easy to implement in a smaller IT environment.

And lastly, there is the FlexPod Select, which is designed for various big data and analytics applications. This version is especially adept at working around and integrating larger services like Hadoop or Oracle RAC, allowing the user a seamless experience.

Industry Perspective

4

“It streamlines the process for a customer who has a problem, to go directly to the experts,” Friedman said. “For example, if a customer is experiencing what they consider a backup issue, which they feel is somewhere in the storage array, they call NetApp and tell them what the problem is, and identify themselves as a FlexPod customer. If in fact it turns out, through our troubleshooting, not to be a storage issue but a networking issue, we seamlessly transfer the issue over to Cisco. So from a customer perspective, they get direct access to the experts in a timely fashion.”

The Future of FlexPod for the Public Sector Resting on one’s laurels is not something a successful government organization can do for long and stay successful. Cisco and NetApp know this, and have recently invested in applying newer technologies to make FlexPod better for public-sector users.

All-Flash FAS

FlexPod and the Cloud

As flash drives have increased in capacity and performance, they have gone from being a small part of a storage solution to, in some cases, comprising the whole thing. NetApp has been offering all-flash FAS for some time with drastically increased popularity year after year. Now it is offering them in FlexPod solutions.

Cloud-based technology has begun to show up in nearly every type of IT solution, and CI is no exception. However, even though there have been mandates to exercise “Cloud First” for years, many agencies’ CIOs have concerns.

“Some of the inherent benefits of all-flash FAS are around application performance, return on investment and time to deployment,” said Friedman. “And the same benefits that the customers enjoy with the FlexPod, they will further enjoy with flash.

The economics of it just make sense.”

“No matter what cloud strategy you have, NetApp has done an incredible job of reducing risk & giving customers options.”

PETER FRIEDMAN Manager of the FlexPod team for the Americas Data Center Sales at NetApp

“Nearly all of our customers are looking at ways to leverage the cloud,” Friedman said. “The real question is, how do they deploy a cloud strategy that will allow them flexibility and how do they comply with compliance, regulations and data sovereignty?

“NetApp’s Data Fabric technology give customers the ability to choose a cloudbased strategy that suits their needs.

They could choose to deploy entirely using an on-premise cloud solution leveraging FlexPod in-house. Or they could leverage one of the hyperscale cloud providers such as AWS combining NetApp Private Storage (NPS) and maintain control and sovereignty of their data yet still reap the benefits of the on-demand compute capacity of AWS,” Friedman said.

“Or, they might prefer a hybrid solution that is a combination of the two. So no matter what cloud strategy you have, NetApp has done an incredible job of reducing risk and giving customers options.”

Converged Infrastructure: Putting Public Sector IT Ahead of the Curve

5

Case Study:

King County, Washington King County covers 2,134 square miles, and contains more than 1.9 million people, making it the 14th most populous county in the nation.

The Existing Challenge

Implementing the Solution

Like many government organizations, its long-standing decentralized approach to IT has resulted in dozens of departments each with their own networks. Even where policies weren’t totally mismatched, there was still massive duplication of effort and resources. This, of course, meant using taxpayer dollars more inefficiently with each passing year.

King County began by installing a Windows server for its server virtualization platform.

It integrated that with some NetApp FASs for storage and backup. The FlexPod solution further integrated Cisco Unified Computing System blade servers, Nexus series switches and Cisco Fabric interconnects. The system currently supports 65 virtual machines, and there are plans to expand to 800 within the next four years.

Any conversion to a shared architecture would be more cost-effective, but couldn’t be done without certain requirements being met. For starters, it couldn’t just instantly convert the whole system; it needed to start small and scale up as different areas became ready. Since the county’s old infrastructure was highly Microsoft-centric, it needed to make sure its replacement was compatible. Several mission-critical applications needed to be migrated off of both servers and an older mainframe.

Already the FlexPod implementation has allowed King County to consolidate from 48 data centers down to two. This alone has meant a savings of $700,000 annually.

The adoption of CI has had some additional benefits. The county was able to migrate to a pure service-oriented organization with a defined catalog and end-user services. It also altered the budget

Industry Perspective

6

structure and the way IT interfaces with customers around services. It also allows departments to compare their current technology to what it would cost to use the centralized private cloud on FlexPod. Adopting FlexPod allows King County to extend services to taxpayers in a more reliable, secure and scalable way.

The Proof is in the Pudding “What makes FlexPod different, is really how it’s configured, deployed and supported. And if you think about it, the underlying hardware is just the mechanism for the organization to do their business on. They put applications that sit on top of this hardware, and that’s what runs the business.”

This is what makes CI solutions such a vast improvement over their traditional counterparts. And a FlexPod deployment can serve government IT teams with special needs by providing an architecture that is uniquely designed for their operations, as well as scaling with those needs over time.

“What Cisco and NetApp have done with FlexPod is enabled customers to address the ever-changing needs of the business and not locked them in to a single solution,” Friedman said. “In addition to the business benefits around agility, time-to-market and ROI, FlexPod ensures peace of mind in supporting the entire stack. FlexPod reduces risk by allowing customers to focus on the needs of the business and not worry about how and what to configure to maximize performance.”

Setting up and maintaining a network to meet an organization’s needs have traditionally been Herculean tasks. The FlexPod solution lowers the time and effort of implementation, and will keep meeting those needs even as they change. And their support will seamlessly get government organizations to the expert they need to help them with their problems.

All in all, it will give a network admin more flexibility.

About NetApp

About GovLoop

Government agencies of all levels count on NetApp for software, systems, and services to manage and store their most important asset, their data. With solutions ranging from data protection and recovery to cloud computing, data analytics, and flash solutions,

GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.”

We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government.

GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.

NetApp has become government customers’ top choice for key technologies that drive data center transformation.

Top counties, cities, and states count on NetApp and value our teamwork, expertise, and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future.

Learn more about NetApp’s FlexPod solution: http://www.netapp.com/us/ solutions/flexpod/

“Cisco and NetApp have taken the risk away from the customer and said, ‘We got it.’ We tell them how to piece together the puzzle to have resiliency, scalability, agility, all the things you need to do to run your organization. And if there is a problem, we’ve got your back.”

PETER FRIEDMAN Manager of the FlexPod team for the Americas Data Center Sales at NetApp

For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com.

Converged Infrastructure: Putting Public Sector IT Ahead of the Curve

7

1152 15th St NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20005 Phone: (202) 407-7421 Fax: (202) 407-7501 www.govloop.com | @GovLoop

Industry Perspective

8