Newsletters

The life force of your organization is the data center; as it goes, so does your company. You need to ensure your data center is efficiently optimized to keep your company running efficiently.

While the data center's main purpose is to run the applications that handle the core business and operational data of the organization, it's easy to address capacity issues by purchasing more servers.

In many organizations, IT systems account for nearly half of all capital expenditures. The return on these investments tends to be low, however, with system utilization typically hovering around 20 percent.

Market intelligence firm IDC estimates you spend 80 percent of your IT budget managing day-to-day operations. This means you don’t have the budget to focus on strategic items that will help your company move forward.

To remove the stigma of IT being viewed as a cost center, you have to fully utilize the existing infrastructure, reduce hardware/software expenditures, free up facility space and increase staff productivity.

Implement a Consolidation Strategy
One area that offers the potential for significant benefits to your organization is through a consolidation strategy.

Server consolidation is seen as a strategic response to issues such as security concerns, changing business practices and economic demands. It encompasses a range of activities, from physical consolidation and centralization of a company’s IT servers to integration of data and applications.

To effectively implement this strategy, partner with a company that will help you build a roadmap that provides desired performance levels, efficiency gains and cost savings.

Work with experts that can guide you through the consolidation process, helping you leverage the modeled data to make informed decisions about consolidation candidates, track ongoing performance against your objectives, and sustain your consolidation efforts over time to maintain your desired return on investment.

Be Proactive through Capacity Planning
One need that's usually unmet in many data centers is proactively modeling and planning ahead for potential capacity issues.

According to Contingency Planning Research, the cost per minute of downtime:

• $108,000 in lost brokerage operations
• $43,000 in lost credit card operations
• $1,500 in lost airline reservation operations
• $1,200 in lost telephone ticket sales operations

Your organization's reputation is put on the line every day. A stoppage or slowdown can result in disappointed users, reduced revenues and damage to your company’s reputation and brand.

In addition to availability issues, effective capacity planning can help you better utilize your existing resources, right-size your hardware/software expenditures to avoid under - or over - provisioning, increase staff productivity and gain greater control over your budget.

Look for a partner that has a suite of tools to cover both spectrums - capacity planning and performance management. There are several companies that claim to do both, but only truly offer performance management tools.

Without the ability to forecast - view "what if" scenarios - you may find yourself being reactive instead of proactive. Be proactive by using analytical modeling software to gather data so you can assess failover capacity and ensure you have allocated the right resources to maintain service levels in case of an actual problem.

Don't Overlook Disaster Recovery Capacity
A Gartner poll revealed that respondents' companies have adopted different data center and replication strategies, meaning that there is more than one "right" plan.

Gartner also notes that a company's recovery strategy depends on a number of issues:

• The maturity of your company's business continuity management and disaster recovery programs
• The number of mission-critical business processes and applications the company has
• The amount of investment the company is willing to make
• Whether the company is in an industry that is required to recover their services, such as financial services
• The number of facilities the company has as part of its business model

If you ensure that your strategy meets your business needs, develop a successful disaster recovery plan.

Bringing your strategy in front of other leaders throughout the company will help you attain buy-in and make your data center operate at its most efficient level – allowing the core business to be most effective.