Top 5 Ways to Reduce Data Center Costs
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Mar 10, 2010 @ 06:40 AM
Data center costs are higher than ever, despite the best efforts of data center managers and IT executives to make changes to the contrary. From greening the data center to offloading certain applications and services to a cloud environment, data center administrators are doing what they can to control costs. While not every effort meets with success, to ignore these steps means even more severely increased costs for the data
Here are 5 of the top ways to reduce your data center costs:
1. Energy reduction. Greening the data center is the first step in reducing your data center costs. The thing is that you need to be smart about the kind of greening you do. Depending on the location of the data center, for example, installing solar panels might not do much good. You may be better off, especially in Northern climates, to install more advanced cooling technology that makes use of the outside air, rather than something like solar panels. The key here is to get the most bang for your greening buck.
2. Virtualization. Virtualization is a great way to free up floor space at your data center. You reduce your power consumption (see #1 above) and you also reduce your ongoing operational costs of keeping some of your servers in production. Virtualization just makes sense in the data center. The key is to make sure that you’re really getting a benefit from virtualization, and that you can maintain the same kinds of performance levels with virtualization that you had prior to the virtualization process.
3. Cloud computing. Like virtualization, utilizing the cloud will reduce the footprint of your data center as well as power consumption. You’ll get similar benefits from cloud computing that you’ll get from virtualization, but you also incur the ongoing service costs as well. Here again, you need to do a cost analysis to make sure you’re really saving money.
4. Rationalize your hardware. Take out systems that are old and underutilized and move their workload to more efficient systems. You can reduce your server count by anywhere from five to 20 percent just by doing this.
5. Consolidate sites. If you have multiple data center sites, you can consolidate them into a smaller number of larger sites. This will, in the long term, provide you with significant savings both in terms of facilities and in terms of increased opportunity for things like virtualization.
Lowering Operational Costs Through Automation
Click here to download the IDC white paper.