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CASE STUDY: DATA CENTRE MANAGEMENT IT has transformed the legal sector, enabling an industry that has historically relied on paper-based processes to achieve new levels of productivity and competitiveness in a global marketplace. However, as volumes of emails and legal documents continue to grow at an exponential rate, so have the pressures on the data centre. These challenges have been magnified by a number of growing issues in the sector including compliance, technology advancements, increases in power consumption and the green IT agenda. Having to address all of these challenges while simultaneously managing the traditional cost, space and power capacity pressures within the data centre environment, has created complex management processes, with data centre managers struggling to provide a timely and accurate view of their data centre assets. Clifford Chance (www.cliffordchance.com) is a leading law firm, employing 3,800 legal advisors across 27 offices and 20 countries. The firm has unrivalled scale and depth of legal resources across the Americas, Asia and Europe and focuses on the core areas of commercial activity, capital markets, corporate and M&A, finance and banking, real estate, tax, pensions and employment, litigation and dispute resolution. As a result of the increasing challenges and industry issues facing the legal sector, Clifford Chance recognised the need for an intelligent data centre management service which could enhance the management of its two London-based data centres. With this in mind, the company chose to approach GDCM (www.gdcm.com) through a non-competitive pitch. GDCM (Global Data Centre Management) was founded to provide organisations with leading-edge solutions for the facilities management of data centres and all related IT assets. The company’s data centre management system, nlyte, delivers efficiency gains and benefits in the areas of data centre operations, capacity planning, environmental management and optimisation. It supports adoption of best practice standards across server rooms and data centres, with a claimed fast ROI. Business challenge: Clifford Chance hosts data centres across the globe, running up to 12,000 servers. In London alone, Clifford Chance has two data centre sites for disaster recovery and data storage. In November 2007, these sites were hosting over 1,000 servers. Although the firm had experienced no significant problems throughout each of these data centres, what Tim Bennett, Network Operations Manager at Clifford Chance felt could be improved, was gaining a consolidated view of both sites. Previously, for example, locating a server or cable and understanding the impact of changing this in any way, would involve going through numerous spreadsheets, taking a number of days and many man hours. This complexity was also increasing by the day, with up to 20 – 30 servers being deployed within each of the data centres every month. Preparing lengthy reports for auditing and management purposes was also proving a timely task, with employees spending up to three days every month preparing these documents. “Our data centres had become increasingly complex environments and spreadsheets were proving a less efficient and time consuming method of recording data. As a result, we were facing a growing number of challenges from making decisions based on this method, including increasing power consumption, and increased risk of equipment overheating,” said Bennett. “Ultimately, we were looking for a solution that could review and automate all of our data centre assets, while providing real-time knowledge on performance.” Results: Implementing the nlyte solution immediately addressed these requirements. Based on a web-enabled application, nlyte now provides Clifford Chance with a better understanding of what is happening across every element of its data centres – from the physical rooms and infrastructure to virtual environments. By tracking assets in this way, Clifford Chance can now easily search for equipment within the data centre and identify any inefficiencies and problems before they happen. The preparation of the monthly auditing and management reports has also been reduced. nlyte now provides Clifford Chance with automated data centre capacity reports, which include graphical details on primary resource utilisation factors such as heat, cooling, power and equipment space. The reports also track changes over time for historical analysis, provide forecasts calculated against limiting thresholds, and monitor overall capacity to calculate 'fill' dates. An additional benefit of the nlyte implementation at Clifford Chance has been in the area of scenario planning. Clifford Chance now has the capability to manage hardware, capacity, power, cooling, networking and space, while at the same time planning for future decisions and managing the deployment of new equipment. “This helps us to better judge the impact of our operational decisions,” said Bennett. “For example, if we want to identify which server is connected to which power and communications feed, and understand where it is backed up, we can understand the full impact on commissioning or decommissioning equipment from a power, reliability and cooling viewpoint.” The green data centre: Clifford Chance is committed to the continual improvement of its processes for environmental sakes. Through nlyte, Clifford Chance now feels comfortable it is meeting its company-wide green objectives. Understanding power consumption and utilising servers to full capacity has had a compound effect on the organisation’s overall energy consumption. “nlyte has improved our operations by providing consistent, managed and validated information on all of the materials, assets and equipment within each of our data centres,” said Bennett. “Among other benefits, this intelligent view allows us to better plan for any changes and helps us to avoid reinventing the wheel by reproducing processes or scenarios. In the future, I hope to make the nlyte solution an integral element of every Clifford Chance data centre.”
Have you also seen our other consultant articles? Too Much
Greenwash?
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