IT Solutions Blog

Data Center Design Trends

There are three pressing questions that have, and likely always will, drive data center design decisions. Accordingly, design trends for data centers can be seen as an attempt to deal with those three decisions. They include:

• How reliable must the data center be?
• How big must the data center be?
• How can the data center meet those reliability and capacity needs at the lowest cost?

In years past, many companies treated their data center like their children’s clothes. Buy it big, and they’ll grow into it. When it’s a bit tight, replace it. This led, of course, to huge data centers with unnecessarily huge power demands wasting plenty of money.

Today, data center design takes a different approach. Here are some of the rising trends in data center design:

Energy costs now equal (or even surpass) capital costs

If you can use just 10 percent more energy than what your data center needs, the average data center will reproduce its own costs five times in 20 years. Accordingly, companies are building only what they need right now, and operate at or near 100 percent capacity. This will save you in both energy costs and capital costs.

Data centers should be modular, not comprehensive

Your data center should be designed in such a way that you can add capacity without having to replace the entire data center. You should be able to treat your data center as modular, able to switch out the pieces that aren’t needed and add new ones that are. The data center should not be a comprehensive unchangeable whole that needs to be replaced.

Cooling needs take priority

The type, configuration and deployment of cooling infrastructure is more important than ever. For example, a small data center might have the cooling systems positioned close to servers, where large data centers might utilize raised flooring and chiller or cooling systems on the perimeter. Choosing efficient systems is key, as well.

Virtualization is for more than servers

Servers are usually the first component to be virtualized in the data center, but they shouldn’t be the last. Storage and other data center functions should also be virtualized in order to maximize efficiency and control costs.

Data centers are becoming smarter

Today’s data centers implement technologies such as real-time environmental monitoring, as well as equipment pre-failure notifications. The more diagnostic and troubleshooting work your data center can do on its own, the better.

No one can be sure what’s coming in data centers, but with the current pace of innovation, it’s bound to be a wild ride over the next few years.

How Cloud Computing Reduces Data Center Spending

Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing trends in data center technology. Companies are able to offload much of their server and networking load to the cloud, thereby reducing their in-house technology infrastructure. This provides a higher degree of expertise, service and reliability than what most companies are able to create on their own. Cloud computing is a win-win for most businesses, at least in terms of the actual service that it provides to the business.

There's another way in which cloud computing is a boon, however. Cloud computing can actually save you significant amounts of money when it comes to your data center, both in terms of capital expenditures and in operations costs.

Less Hardware Means Less Capital Outlay

When you offload services and applications to the cloud, you reduce the amount of hardware you have on site at your data center. You cut down on the sheer number of servers present. This saves you, first of all, the significant amounts of capital involved in getting those servers on site and operational at your data center. You don't have to buy new hardware just to keep pace with business growth or application changes - the cloud paces itself with those needs.

Reduced Support Costs

Yes, you need to pay monthly service fees for cloud computing solutions. but you also reduce your ongoing maintenance costs and service contracts. In this way, your operating budget is reduced. While it’s not going to be reduced so much as to make the cloud computing solution a zero-sum game, the savings will nevertheless be significant.

We’ll lump training and personnel costs in here, as well. Because you don’t need to maintain servers and because you don’t have to worry about things like patching, a cloud computing solution is much less expensive than an in-house solution. You can let your in-house experts focus on what they’re really good at, and let your service provider worry about what’s going on in the cloud.

Don’t Underestimate Power Savings

Data centers – even the greenest of them – use a heck of a lot of power. They are huge buildings that have sometimes hundreds or even thousands of servers. They require not only power to operate the servers, but they require cooling and other environmental controls. For every server you place in a data center, you need that much more cooling capacity. Cloud computing offloads some of your energy costs by reducing the number of servers you need to have at your data center. Even installing solar panels, ultimately, won’t give you the kind of energy boost that you can get just by not having as much in the way of servers sucking juice out of the grid.

6 Ways a Solutions Provider Can Boost your Business

One of the best ways to reduce capital IT expenditures, increase your service levels and increase the efficiency of your IT department and your company as a whole is by using an IT solutions provider. A solutions provider gives you all of the benefits of having your own dedicated IT infrastructure management team without all of the costs. Solutions providers get rid of the day-to-day burden of IT systems management in that they assume responsibility for everything from application deployment through updates and daily support. This frees you up to meet your core business needs and to do what your company does best.

Here are 6 key areas that a solutions provider boosts your business:

1. Cost. Using solutions providers reduces the cost of administering your IT functions. In many cases, outsourcing applications can reduce the cost of ownership for the application by as much as 50%. Applications costs become as reliable and simple as your monthly service provider bill.
2. Expertise. When you implement an in-house solution, you either need to hire an expert to administer the solution or train existing personnel to handle the solution. A solutions provider, on the other hand, has staff that do nothing but deal with your particular solution. They’re true experts, up to speed with what’s going on in the field. When you use a solution provider, you save significantly on personnel and training costs, as well.
3. Reduced capital expenditures. By using a solutions provider you eliminate the need for huge capital infrastructure investments. You also reduce the need for ongoing costs to upgrade  or maintain your solutions. You can have the latest and greatest best-in-class solutions, administered by an expert, without the expensive and extensive cost of application development or infrastructure equipment upgrade costs. This lets you take control of the total cost of owning the technology.
4. Rapid deployment. When you roll out a new implementation on your own, it can take months to finish. Your service provider, on the other hand, already has the implementations running. You simply need to plug in. Training end users on the solution becomes the most time intensive task in the implementation process.
5. Increased predictability and reliability. In most cases, a solutions provider can give you a higher level of performance than what you can get on your own. In addition, when you have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place, you can guarantee things like uptime and security.
6. Unlimited Scalability. Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to utilize a solutions provider is scalability. If you hit the limit for what your current infrastructure can handle, you’re looking at a time-consuming and often costly upgrade process. When you utilize a solutions provider, you don’t have to worry about all of that. You simply contact the solutions provider, increase the provisioning of your solutions and you’re good to go.
   

In most instances, it just makes good sense to utilize a solutions provider for at least some of your business IT functions.

Data Center Optimization: Three Key Strategies

Advances in server and storage technology, along with a growing number of tools and methodologies, have dramatically improved the pathway to data center optimization. The challenge for IT managers is to carefully plan where to start, how to move forward and how to measure results.

 Click here to download the white paper. 

Does Cloud Computing Make Good Business Sense?

Whether or not cloud computing makes good business sense isn’t really the question. The question should be more like, “In what ways does cloud computing make good business sense” in any given organization. While cloud computing isn’t always the best solution for every problem, it does address a number of significant issues facing IT today.

There are several areas you can make a business case for cloud computing, and there are also some challenges that face an IT department who attempts to implement cloud computing solutions.

Deployment

Take, for example, the issue of deployment. A recent article in InfoWeek noted that a company like Eli Lilly can, using the cloud, deploy a new application server in a matter of minutes. Under older models, this kind of deployment would typically take more than 50 days, and require many hours of work from IT and other specialists. They can also put up a 64-note Linux cluster in about five minutes, where it used to take more than 100 days. The ability to rapidly deploy necessary computing solutions via the cloud is one of the most compelling reasons to implement cloud computing, and one of the ways that cloud computing makes good business sense.

Capital Expenditures

There are other business benefits to cloud computing, as well. Using service providers in a cloud computing model reduces, from day one, many capital expenditures. Rather than having to budget large chunks of money on servers and infrastructure, not to mention specialized personnel to handle those servers and infrastructure, a company can bring a solution with very little upfront investment. This increases ROI from the start.

Personnel Resources

It’s in the area of personnel and training issues that cloud computing really shines, however. Cloud computing solutions let you have access to true experts. These aren’t your own staff who went to a two-day training seminar on how to use a new solution. These are dedicated personnel who know the solution backwards and forwards, in and out, because it’s what they do all day every day. No matter how competent your own staff may (and should) be, there’s no replacement for a dedicated support infrastructure.

Provisioning

Provisioning is another area in which cloud computing makes good business sense. When you use a cloud computing model with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) from your service provider, you don’t have to worry about reconfiguring your infrastructure on the fly to meet immediate demands. Instead, the service provider deals with allocation and provisioning so that you don’t have to.

Cloud Computing Challenges

The biggest downside to cloud computing is its barrier to entry. This barrier to entry isn’t financial, however, it’s often social.  You need to be able to not only convince your company that cloud computing is a worthwhile, reliable and even beneficial solution, you also have to deal with implementation. Still, if you can overcome the cultural hurdles, you can begin to present your business case and increase your IT’s overall productivity and effectiveness.

Cloud Computing Guide: Download Today!

In our complimentary guide, "Cloud Computing Infrastructure and Architecture," you'll learn how cloud computing transforms the way we design, build, and deliver applications. Covered in this guide are:

     1. Cloud computing infrastructure models and benefits
     2. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architectural approaches
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     . . . plus more. Click here to download.

Why Data Center Consolidation Makes Sense

Now more than every there is pressure on IT to offer higher levels of service and a greater degree of availability all while cutting back on costs. As such, making sure your technology environment is efficient and effectively managed is absolutely essential. The data center, by its very nature, is the one place where IT resources are most concentrated, and the one place where potential strategic gains are most likely to occur. If you want to improve your computing environment and cut costs at the same time, you need to start with the data center.

The Benefits of Data Center Consolidation

One of the best ways to do just that is through consolidation. By simplifying your data center environment, you achieve several goals:
•    Increased manageability
•    Reduced costs in areas of human resources, facilities, complexity and capital expenditures
•    Improved service levels
•    Higher availability
•    Minimization of impact from outside factors

In short, if you get your data center humming along the way it should, your business will ultimately do the same.

Factors in Data Center Consolidation

Data center consolidation is about more than just combining servers. While that’s certainly part of the process, there are a number of areas that go into data center consolidation. Each of these factors is an opportunity for reduced cost and greater manageability.

One factor to start with is the issue of physical locations. A business that has multiple physical data centers has multiple cost redundancies, all of which are ripe for cutting. By combining physical locations, you greatly reduce overhead. While multiple data center locations can be one way to address disaster recovery and business continuity, there are much more effective (and cost-effective) ways to address those concerns.

Another important issue is server consolidation. This doesn’t just include combining like servers, however. It also includes looking at issues like application consolidation. If two departments are handling the same data from two different applications, you have another opportunity for improved efficiency. The obvious concern here, of course, is making sure that you can provide the same features to both departments that they had pre-consolidation.

Infrastructure is another area of data center consolidation. This includes creating more efficient networks, as well as more efficient storage management. It also includes utilizing shared services to whatever degree is possible.

The final area of data center consolidation is the most difficult, and it relates to people and processes. While you can switch out a server in a matter of hours or even minutes, bringing personnel up to speed on those changes can take much longer. Still, for your company to be at the top of its game, it’s sometimes necessary. The key to dealing with these kinds of issues is to have buy-in from someone in upper management, as well as department heads, who understand the business case for consolidation and can really get behind your consolidation efforts.

The Modern Virtualized Data Center: Download the whitepaper

Data center resources have traditionally been underutilized while drawing enormous amounts of power and taking up valuable floorspace. Storage virtualization has been a positive evolutionary step in the data center, driving consolidation of these resources to maximize utilization and power savings, as well as to simplify management and maintenance. Read more by downloading the white paper from Pillar Data Systems. 

Reducing Capital Expenditures in IT

One of the biggest challenges facing IT managers today is reducing capital expenditures in IT. It’s not the 1990s anymore; there is more and more pressure on IT management to justify their costs to a sometimes-apathetic senior management. Add to this the increasing familiarity that senior management have with IT issues in general, and you can find yourself being constantly pressured to get costs down, both in terms of lowering ongoing costs and reducing capital expenditures.

Fortunately, there are some ways you can help contain costs and reduce capital expenditures in IT:

Review Your Portfolio
Take a look at all of the applications used in your organization. Identify the ones that are underutilized, ones that are duplicative and ones that may be absent altogether. Create an extensive list of applications, users and owners across the entire organization. This portfolio review will help you to be able to prioritize capital expenditures going forward, and it will also identify places where the organization has multiple apps that perform essentially identical tasks.

Review and Renegotiate Contracts
For many organizations, contracts are a large portion of your IT budget. Maintenance and support services are necessary and important, but you need to get a handle on them. Figure out where they exist – even outside of the IT department – and identify places where you can leverage savings or save on licensing.

Once you know where your contracts are, you can begin to renegotiate. Create a situation where vendors can compete to lower costs while getting rid of overlapping applications at the same time. Consider lengthening contracts to give you cost savings.

Analyze and Prioritize Projects
Take a strategic look at projects. Use a consistent prioritization approach. Break down projects into strategic points that can benefit the organization in the immediate future, rather than the entire project implementation which can take years.

Part of this process involves determining where benefits can occur and how fast. The quicker you deliver benefits to the company, the lower the overall cost and the more justified the expenditures.

Manage Lifecycle
Older IT systems have higher costs in terms of maintenance and retaining inefficient hardware and software. Take a look at older systems, and analyze the true cost of keeping legacy equipment. In many cases, systems beyond their lifecycle serve only as something of a security blanket for a department. In many cases, the data in those systems can be retained offline through ERM or imaging. In other cases, the data can be converted to an SQL database with query tools. Getting rid of legacy equipment will get rid of operating costs, maintenance costs and may even save money on the electricity bill.

Analyze Return
As more and more IT projects come under closer scrutiny, linking those projects to specific organizational objectives and/or financial returns is important. Look at project goals, and define measurable outcomes. Find ways that new projects can actually save the company money, free up organization resources or promote a company’s overall strategies. If a project can’t do these things, it should be reconsidered.

IDC White Paper: Lowering Operational Costs through Automation. Click here to download. 

Data Center Costs are Exploding: Time to Wake Up!

Recently we have been able to take advantage of many innovative technologies to reduce IT Capital Expenditures (CAPEX).  Server Virtualization, blade and shared storage architectures have dramatically cut costs. Staffs have been busy migrating the “distributed computing model” embraced in the 1980s (and implemented in the 1990s) to the newest cost saving virtualization and interconnect architectures mentioned above.  

So why are IT budgets destined to continue their increase almost unfettered?

Most IT executives know the answer; their future budget growth is based on two operating expenses (OPEX) items: energy costs and administration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If your vendors are not providing you solutions for these two paramount issues, but instead they base their relationship with you on commodity hardware sales, they are adding little value in your quest to achieve your business objectives.  An important point to remember here is that you must heavily discount the business impact of a hardware price concession, since acquisition costs are a small portion of your total IT budget and then this CAPEX must be depreciated over multiple years.  In other words you cannot buy enough discounted hardware to right the ship.  

So IT budgets will continue to rise until we wake up!

Your administrative and energy costs are OPEX and make up over 50% of a typical IT budget. Over the next few weeks we will explore some strategic solutions to these looming problems.

Transform your Data Center with Unitiv, HP, and Intel

Join Unitiv, HP, and Intel for a half-day seminar on Data Center Automation. "Transforming your Data Center" will take place in the following cities:
September 30, 2009 - Atlanta, GA
October 13, 2009 - Philadelphia, PA
October 14 - Florham Park, NJ
October 15 - New York City, NY
More details are available at www.unitiv.com/executive-seminar-series