New IPD Guide (Beta) – The Dynamic Data Center

For those of you not familiar with the IPD Guides, they aim to provide a couple of key benefits:

• Help to define the technical decision flow through the planning process.
• List the decisions to be made and the commonly available options to be considered.
• Relate the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
• Frame decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape

The IPD Guides are growing fast, and as always, you can find all the IPD Guides here.

This particular IPD guide is focused on helping to plan for a Dynamic Data Center.

If you’re a bit unsure about what a DDC actually is, it’s a combination of automation, control, and resource management software with a well-defined topology of virtualization, servers, storage, and networking hardware. The flexibility that this model provides is changing the business landscape by presenting new ways to develop, deliver, deploy, and manage applications and IT infrastructures. The resulting benefits are many, such as the ability to scale as needed, be more responsive to changing market conditions, and provide an opportunity for IT to align deliverables with the organization’s business requirements.

The principles guiding the development of a DDC include:

• Adopt a service centric approach. A platform exists to host services and should have service management principles applied. With this approach, business units can directly request a certain service, either new or from a catalog, without having to worry about such low-level considerations as networking, storage, and servers that are provided by the platform.
• Enable agility. A Dynamic Data Center allows the organization to rapidly deploy new services and scale existing services up or down based on demand.
• Provide utility. A Dynamic Data Center provides dial-tone class reliability. As more services are deployed into the infrastructure, its reliability becomes critical. In a Dynamic Data Center, business units can expect their services to be resilient, standard, and predictable, without needing to understand the underlying data center components.
• Maximize efficiency. Most day-to-day activities in the Dynamic Data Center are automated in order to provide a high-degree of platform self-management—for example, deployment and provisioning of services and increasing/reducing capacity based on demand.
• Cost transparency. Each service delivered by the Dynamic Data Center can have consumption-based pricing applied to its cost model. This enables business units to obtain a clear and predictable cost associated with the service. The business and IT are then empowered to make trade-off decisions (for example, comparing the cost and quality of internal service versus external).

Using this guide, IT professionals can plan and design an on-premises Dynamic Data Center infrastructure that is designed for ease of manageability, being confident that critical phases are not omitted from the plan, that the components work together efficiently, and that a solid foundation is established for future expansion.

Grab the guide, in it’s current beta state, from here.