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Is Your
Infrastructure Leaking Money?
reprinted with
permission from HP
 Whoever said "don't sweat
the small stuff" never managed an IT infrastructure—and
certainly never during turbulent economic times.
According to
independent analyst Forrester Research, global IT purchases in
2008 will grow by only 6 percent, versus 12 percent growth in
2007. So, although you're already doing more with less, it's
time to do even more with even less.
Investing in
management solutions to control infrastructure costs is one
way to meet that challenge. Effective infrastructure
management tools can lead to significant savings over time and
help position your business to take full advantage of the
upside when the economic tide turns.
Here are five ways
effective infrastructure management can help keep you fighting
lean: 1. Curb Power
Use
The costs of cooling your data center can be as
much as (or more than) the cost of powering its IT equipment.
In fact, a study by HP and the Uptime Institute suggests that,
in a majority of the world's data centers, 60 to 70 percent of
power use is associated with cooling IT equipment.
Management
solutions that monitor, measure, regulate, cap and otherwise
optimize power usage on an ongoing basis can keep power
savings flowing long term. By moving compute power where it's
needed, when it's needed, you can cut operating expenses in
your data center and help keep the data center energy crisis
at bay. And, sometimes, plans for costly data center
expansions or new construction can be postponed or even
abandoned.
2. Prevent
Problems—or Resolve Them Faster
With remote management,
IT administrators can discover, diagnose and fix a problem on
a server halfway around the world, saving travel costs, wear
and tear, and time.
Some solutions help
IT employees collaborate and train more efficiently, too. For
example, a database expert in Taiwan might collaborate with a
storage guru in Singapore to work on a Hong Kong-based
server–with both controlling the server in real time. And,
with recording and playback, other IT employees can see how
the problem was fixed, click by click.
3. Continuously
Analyze & Optimize Server Workloads, Virtual &
Physical
Capacity planning can be a complex,
time-consuming and resource-consuming exercise if you're using
a patched-together spreadsheet to get the job done.
Today's
sophisticated capacity-planning software can monitor a mixed
physical and virtual environment with fluid workloads, real
time. Look for a solution that can handle complexity: a
combination of large and small servers, blades, virtual
machines, hard partitions, variable workloads and global
demand. You also want a solution that works continuously
behind the scenes, analyzing each server's utilization,
performance and power consumption. And it should incorporate
significant quantities of historical data to help you make
on-the-fly decisions.
4. Automate
Deployment & Provisioning
Hardware investments
might be slowing, but that doesn't mean they'll stop.
Deploying and provisioning new systems is a big time drain
that can keep people away from more value-added tasks.
Look for management
solutions that automate deployment and provisioning with a
simple drag-and-drop interface; instant, out-of-the-box
functionality; and integrated storage and server management.
Features such as auto-discovery, on-the-fly server
configuration and scheduling can allow your team to deploy
dozens of servers in minutes.
5. Increase
Productivity with Unified Infrastructure
Management
Unified infrastructure management software
often results in all of the benefits cited above, plus the
natural result of increasing server-to-administrator ratios.
In fact, an IDC study of 12 enterprises using HP Systems
Insight Manager, a management software solution, found that
the companies were able to nearly double the number of servers
managed per administrator, increasing the
sever-to-administrator ratio by an average of 98 percent.
With the right
infrastructure management solution, your IT staff can
accomplish numerous tasks–decreasing deployment times,
speeding time to problem resolution and balancing workloads,
just to name a few—using a single console across multiple
servers, both physical and virtual.
Smart Investment
Can Be an Umbrella in Stormy Times
Investing in
management software to control infrastructure costs is always
important, never more so than during an economic crunch.
A recent IDC study
found that HP Insight Control, which offers core management
functionality for the full server lifecycle, provides positive
financial benefits across the board, with three-year projected
return on investment starting at more than 400 percent and
payback periods of less than 10 months.
Not only can smart
management tool investments help you pull through an economic
downturn, but they can put you in lean, fighting shape for the
inevitable recovery. | 