CIOIN

Tarun Sareen

Sr. Director, EMC IT Center of Excellence

"A private cloud helps beat shadow IT and the practice of over-provisioning."

Executive summary

The story, complete with its twists and turns, its multiple phases, its successes and challenges, of EMC's journey to a private cloud.

Way back in 2004, when EMC embarked on its journey to the cloud, little did its executives know that they were toying with a technology that would define a new era in IT. At that time, they were just looking for a better way to deliver IT for their 24,000-odd users across the globe.
Starting in about 2003, EMC put itself on an aggressive growth path. In the last eight years, the company has invested $ 14 billion (about Rs 63,000 crore) in mergers and acquisitions and another $ 10.5 billion (about Rs 47,250 crore) in innovation. It was also around that time that EMC completed it’s acquisition of the virtualization superpower VMware and built its largest centre of excellence outside the United States, in Bangalore.

Those were exciting times for the business, and challenging times for IT. EMC executives estimated that if IT were to scale up its datacenters in the traditional manner (read: buy hardware) to meet the demands of the growing business, it would require an additional investment of $ 26 million (about Rs 117 crore). And creating a new-age, green datacenter, the other option on the table, would cost nothing lower than $ 120 million (about Rs 540 crore).
“Find a way to avoid the cost,” EMC’s management told IT, remembers Tarun Sareen, Sr. director, EMC IT Center of Excellence. And, without a clear idea of how exactly they would do that, IT agreed.

Virtualization Overdrive
“In the first phase, we attacked the IT-owned environment and virtualized the heck out of it,” says Sareen, who leads the Global Delivery Program of EMC’s IT organization and is responsible for building its’ IT globalization strategy and the processes required for global expansion. EMC's IT strategy was two-fold: First virtualize servers and then optimize the datacenter.
“We started with baby steps and moved up the ladder with server virtualization,” he says.
The first phase was also characterized by extensive redesigning of EMC’s datacenters. “When you virtualize your servers, you retire some of them and re-design or modify others,” says Sareen. All that redesigning paid off. The company estimates that it has saved $ 86 million (about Rs 387 crore) in opex and capex costs through these measures.  By adopting virtual machines, they were able to reduce physical servers from 1,250 to 150, with a physical-to-virtual ratio of upto 1:40.
By the end of the first phase, which ended in 2008, EMC had virtualized 35 percent of its IT environment.

Time For Phase-II
The motto for phase-II was to standardize on an x86 architecture. Continuing its hyper virtualization push, EMC began an initiative it called ‘sweep the floor’ which basically meant virtualizing all
mission critical applications using VMware, vSsphere data center operating system.  
Any CIO who’s tried his hand at virtualization knows what a pain virtualizing critical applications can be. EMC addressed this by virtualizing the infrastructure itself. “We used VCE Vblock Reference Architecture to virtualize the infrastructure which hosts legacy applications,” Sareen says.
That led to some wonderful results. Performance shot up multiple times over, and to IT’s glee it received glowing e-mails from business users citing 20x gains in performance. “For the IT team, nothing is more delightful than a positive response from your users,” says Sareen.
This was the phase during which EMC accelerated its cloud journey. For instance, they moved from 35 percent to 75 percent virtualization. This was also the phase when Sareen and EMC's IT team decided to move some of EMC’s mission critical applications to a private cloud.
They started with MS Exchange and soon they had moved EMC’s sales application and even its Oracle E-Business Suite business suite to a private cloud.
This second phase was also characterized by extensive storage re-organization and de-duplication. “After all, we are a storage company,” chuckles Sareen.  They embarked on a serious storage crunching exercise deploying high-end storage arrays, increasing the number of tiers progressively to suit the application stack.
At this point the company was able to accrue savings in the neighborhood of $ 17 million (about Rs 76 crore). “Thanks to virtualization, we’ve been able to reduce infrastructure spend despite growing IT demand. That was really a great achievement,” says Sareen.

Home Stretch
“Phase three has been the real game-changer for IT,” says Sareen. Today, EMC has virtualized 80 percent of its IT environment and opened its first fully-virtualized datacenter. The Cloud Data Center in Durham datacenter is a state-of-the-art, and completely-virtualized datacenter and it accelerated and concretized EMC’s private cloud aspirations.
The company uses VPLEX data & applications mobility technology to federate between its datacenters across the globe, for load balancing and ensuring the rapid and elastic delivery of IT services.
This phase, Sareen believes, was about fully transforming IT. “The goal of the cloud computing business model is to offer everything as a service. Today, users want to get IT services and pay for what they consume,” says Sareen.
The basic goal behind EMC’s private cloud was to be able to offer business users a service that could be measured, consumed on demand, and be made available through any device. “It’s like the electricity you have at home. You have a meter that measures your consumption and you pay for what you use,”
says Sareen.

Sareen believes offering IT-as-a-service brings a radical shift to the way EMC’s IT organization operates. “In the past, IT was run like a monopoly. Business users would come to IT with a requirement but it was days before the necessary approvals and provisioning were done. Often, by the time a project was approved, the user didn’t need the application anymore!” says Sareen.
Sareen also believes that this new revolution will help eliminate shadow users of IT. “I've heard instances of business users bypassing IT and running servers under the table. Whenever IT has been bureaucratic, business users have gone outside. It’s time to make our services competitive with others in the market. Our private cloud allows us to do that.”
It’s not just the high degree of virtualization that sets EMC’s private cloud apart. It is the extent of success they’ve had in cataloguing their IT services and their ability to offer these to users through a self-service portal. “The conversation with IT is changing. Today, everything IT does can be offered as a service. We aim to catalogue 90 percent of these services and offer them to our users. Think of it like a restaurant menu that lists out services along with the SLAS and prices.”
An example is ‘Cloud 9’, which is used to provision infrastructure for testing and development projects. “In a traditional IRT setup, it takes weeks, maybe even a month to provision infrastructure for something as massive as an ERP. Through our private cloud we’ve been able to achieve this in a matter of minutes,” says Sareen.

However, EMC’s cloud strategy is not to have just a private cloud; it is open to building partnerships outside with public cloud vendors. One such initiative is its partnership with Salesforce.com, says Sareen.
“Like our customers, we were grappling with unrelenting information growth; increasingly complex application environments; and congested, energy-exhausting datacenters.  However, our early commitment to virtualization, standardization and cloud computing and the use of cutting-edge EMC, VMware and VCE solutions paved the way for pervasive virtualization and cloud computing,” says Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO and COO, Global Centers of Excellence, EMC.

Ready for Chargebacks
Currently, EMC is not charging its users for IT services—but it plans to start soon, says Sareen. He says they have a price matrix in place and that users are aware of how much their services will cost them. “What we charge users per month depends on usage and what I pay at the back-end to deliver that service. Since everything is metered and measurable, the math is not difficult to do. However, we aim to keep our pricing competitive with the external market,” says Sareen.
Sareen believes that introducing chargebacks depends on internal culture and the mindset of an organization. “We need to be cognizant of user expectations. Whether you choose to use chargebacks or not doesn’t depend on the size of the organization, rather internal culture.”
But he agrees that chargebacks are a great strategy to counter super users, or over-provisioning.  “We said you pay for what you use. So if people use more than they need, they're just going to have to pay for it. The advantage is that each BU head has a dashboard that helps them understand where their resources are being spent. Based on this they can better decide how to allocate their resources,” says Sareen.
The company plans to achieve 86 percent virtualization by end of this year and 100 percent virtualization by the end of 2012.