Key to solving complex IT is simplicity

If you’re the CIO of a group of companies that comprise a large enterprise - regardless of which industry vertical you come from – your IT team has to deal with huge amounts of data that resides on virtual storage clusters in your data center.

The key challenge today is getting complex data to move across data centers seamlessly. Data need to be rapidly moved, easily accessed, and transparently mirrored between data centers, allowing both storage and applications
to work without physical boundaries.

How does a modern, global and strategic organization manage all its mission-critical data, processes and systems? The key is simplicity.

“A typical IT leader these days needs to be a psychologist, technically savvy, a trouble-shooter and a finance manager,” says Charles Koh, CEO of Trusted Source Pte Ltd. “The secret is to give the user what he or she wants and all the tools they need to do their job better. The ultimate goal is for users to have access to their data anywhere, anytime, in a secure manner via any Internet-enabled device.”

That’s easier said than done, he admits. “However, we partnered early on with industry leaders,” Mr Koh says. “They in turn brought new capabilities and a tech eco-system to the table on short notice. With joint planning, we
went about understanding the businesses requirements from an IT infrastructure and together we assembled the pieces of technologies that were needed.”

Mr Koh says that the company continued to relentlessly simplify the customers’ IT operating environment. “As an example, we recently acquired EMC’s VMAX solution which allows us to treat our data centers without constraints
of geographic boundaries,” he says. “We can use VMAX to instantly remap storage location or re-route data load. In the past, this could only be achieved by ‘brute-force’ & lots of sweat.”

Trusted Source is the single source that Temasek Holdings trusts for all of its IT requirements. Set up in 1974, Temasek Holdings is an investment company with 12 affiliates and offices in Asia and Latin America. Temasek owns a diversified S$186 billion portfolio (as at March 31, 2010).

Research house International Data Corp (IDC) says EMC's solution provides relief to the issue of distance and could be a necessary solution in distributed cache coherency.

“Our focus has been to simplify IT for our customers, to kind of Googlize the way IT is consumed,” Mr Koh says. “Most technology consumers don’t have the time to learn how to navigate a piece of software. They would rather use the search function to find the most relevant tool for their needs.

That’s the goal – make search the new navigation and enable it securely on Internet-enabled devices. They then get what they want without worrying about where the information really resides.”

Where the information resides and how it is delivered is important, but that’s something an internal IT department has to worry about. “Call it virtualization, or cloud computing, or software as a service, or whatever you wish, but the user doesn’t care,” Mr Koh says. “The application may be sitting somewhere, and bits of data may be scattered in data centers across the world. How it comes to the user, with minimum delay, without being corrupted, and in a
highly secure pipe is key. To give users the ability to do his job in a very efficient manner, the technology should be invisible.”

In tech terms, the time is now right for private clouds (data networks, storage, memory & CPU all in one) to be linked (with proper privacy) and for private computing resources to be pooled on demand.

According to Gartner Inc, in the next 3-5 years, more MNCs will seek to support such a blended approach to enterprise architecture (EA), with up to 95% of companies adopting multiple approaches to EA by 2015.

The federated approach may be ideal for MNCs that need to manage complex, missioncritical data. In such organizations, decision making is often decentralized, with business units having considerable autonomy over the
EA that is required to support the needs of their particular business unit. Apart from cutting costs, Private clouds also help companies achieve energy efficiencies and go green.

Research shows that most servers in physical infrastructures in organizations of all sizes are less than 10% utilized (including their own). But in a virtual environment, utilization rises to 75%.

This has been the case in EMC itself. “Watching our IT groups worldwide take 1,250 servers down to 50 in the first wave, and another 1,600 servers down to 40 or 50 in the second wave has been amazing for me,” says EMC’s President for South East Asia, Ron Goh. “I like thinking about all that power and cooling we’re avoiding.”

The bottomline: IT management needs to look at data management not just in terms of physical storage, but in totality, including issues related to bandwidth, latency, and distributed cache coherency.