As the global economy and our own moves into a recession, all eyes are on rising oil prices and shrinking budgets. Reducing costs and driving the overall cost of ownership associated with the IT environment are of key concern to CIOs, yet this needs to be done without compromising on efficiency, service levels, flexibility or security.
If servers are reaching their lifespan or companies need to provision more and more servers due to business demand, here are seven ways to reduce costs in the data centre and spend budgets wisely during this uncertain period in the economy:
1. Look for ways to avoid upfront capital expenditure
With virtualisation, companies are able to significantly lower the upfront investment in physical server hardware, cabling and networking costs.
Virtualisation technology makes it possible to package a complete x86 server - hardware, operating system, applications and configurations - into a portable virtual machine. Putting more workloads on a server means there are fewer physical servers required. The savings are a no-brainer when users do the calculation. At a ratio of 10 virtual servers on one physical server, the costs savings are more than 80%. Some environments get a ratio of 25:1 and see even more significant upfront and ongoing cost savings. Also, with virtualisation infrastructure, fewer racks for equipment are required as well as host bus adapters; and with virtual networking, fewer fabric switches and IP switches are needed.
2. Consider offsite cloud
Alternatives abound in the world of cloud computing and software as a service that moves infrastructure and data outside of the firewalls.
Today, these services include more security, redundancy, bandwidth, and expert staff than most small to medium sized businesses can afford on their own. Whether a company moves its existing applications to remote locations, or adopts remote applications entirely, they're likely to reduce equipment, software licensing, energy, and IT support costs.
3. Reduce operating expenses significantly
Seek out technology platforms, such as virtualisation, that can reduce operational costs significantly. Slowing down the need for data centre expansion or a huge disaster recovery site, which incurs significant rental costs, is a compelling reason for CIOs to consider technologies that lower operating expenses. Also, servers must be powered and cooled, and with rising energy costs, there is going to come a time when these costs represent more to the total cost of ownership for a server than the original purchase price.
4. Introduce automation in the data centre
With virtualisation, companies are able to significantly lower the upfront investment in physical server hardware, cabling and networking costs.
Chris Norton is regional manager of VMware Southern Africa.
By introducing automation in the data centre for activities related to hardware and software maintenance, companies will simplify the entire process, which brings indirect cost savings. Some of these activities include patch management, deployment of servers from predefined templates, the roll out of new software versions or brand new applications. Simplifying this process means there are fewer administrators required to manage the actual environment, and by freeing up these IT resources they can be redirected to focus on appropriate projects that are business aligned.
5. Don't compromise on business continuity or disaster recovery to reduce costs
Businesses can incur significant financial damage as a result of systems failure. In some cases, companies have lost their data centre for 10 days or more, and have filed for bankruptcy. An example of this in South Africa is the demise of Siltek, due to system outages. While in the past, setting up a disaster recovery site was complex and expensive, virtualisation solutions allow for automatic restarting of virtual machines on another available physical host, which reduces time to recovery for the business. In addition, because the hardware is independent of the virtual machines, any system can serve as a recovery target. This means companies could avoid costs associated with purchasing new DR servers or housing huge data centres.
6. Carefully monitor the operational costs associated with managing an enterprise desktop environment
CIOs need to streamline their desktop environment, as 70% of costs associated with the desktop are spent on operational activities associated with managing the PC. There are significant costs in managing users, hardware maintenance and repair, provisioning and upgrading of PCs as well as software installations. Seek out technologies that will assist the company to reduce or manage these costs better.
* Chris Norton is regional manager of VMware Southern Africa.
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