Top 10 Ways Of Reducing Your Data Center Infrastructure Operating Costs

1. Top 10 Ways Of Reducing Your Data Center Infrastructure Operating Costs

2. Value of A Collocation Data Center Today many companies are in data centers already or going to data centers because they need a Robust IT Infrastructure, High Availability, High Processing Power, High Bandwidth and Consistency of Service.

3. 10 Ways Of Reducing Your Data Center Infrastructure Operations Costs • Start The Process Of Reducing Costs With The Right Hardware • Eliminate Un-Needed Hardware • Performance Maximization • Ensure You Are Not Over Licensed • Over-provisioning for High Availability • Virtualization Consolidation • Secrets of Ultra Low Voltage • Bandwidth & Connectivity Cost Optimization • Think of Manageability and Colo Cost at Development Stage • General Negotiation with Providers You can see a significant return on investment while building a highly scalable IT foundation for your business.

4. #1 Start With The Right Hardware Everybody needs to start at the hardware level while working within given power resources, space constraints and budget.

5. #1 Ideal Hardware Selection There are countless hardware options to choose from – and they are different for a reason, Hardware Components are Specifically designed for a specific job or task – it is virtually impossible for IT employees in a typical company to be thought leaders in the area of hardware selection as there are such a diverse number of areas they are responsible for – where data centers may host 20 or more companies Mission Critical Systems and they play a key role in developing IT strategies for these companies, so it is much easier and necessary for Co-Location IT Strategists to maintain an awareness and understanding of the types of hardware and configurations that are Ideal for each Task.

6. #2 Eliminate Un-Needed Hardware With newer technologies, you can consolidate and virtualize older less efficient hardware with more powerful and more efficient hardware. This will provide a greener, more stable environment with greater reliability, less management efforts, and lowering the points of failure.

7. #2 Eliminate Un-Needed Hardware Hardware that has reached end of life status by the manufacture also means that key component failure is not only eminent, but more difficult to locate replacement parts. Sometimes it sounds that buying new hardware is an un-nessessary investment but on the long run it does save money and should be considered as budget reduction measure.

8. #3 Performance Maximization There are ways to help you to achieve greater levels of energy efficiency that would lead to up to 25% greater performance per watt over originally configured systems.

9. #3 Performance Maximization Ensure that Your Systems are Running Efficiently, at their Maximum Performance, that they don’t have any Technological Fat or Technological Waste. The Ultimate Goal is “To Do More …With Less, and this Goal Results in a Significant Reduction in IT Costs.

10. #4 Ensure You’re Not Over Licensed There are a lot of licenses that cover many features that you pay for but don’t use, such as purchasing Enterprise Database Licensing Where you Don’t Use Enterprise Features.

11. #4 Ensure You’re Not Over Licensed Sometimes using a single feature from an Enterprise level licensing would bring the cost to a much higher level, however this feature might be covered with a small administrative or programming effort or third party provider.

12. #5 Over-Provisioning for High Availability With virtualization technology it is possible to have less hardware to provision High Availability without jeopardizing the level of service. Before you had to double everything you had to maintain high availability but today with virtualization you can allocate much less hardware to provide the same level of service.

13. #5 Over-Provisioning for High Availability During failover architecture design we know that all the infrastructure components will not fail at the same time. . This allows to consolidate multiple failover roles on the same physical piece of hardware without jeopardizing performance or availability.

14. #6 Virtualization Consolidation There are certain applications that need a stand alone server as they should not be installed on a server with any other applications or systems. . With today’s virtualization technology it is possible to build virtual instances of those stand alone servers and to be put on a single piece of hardware. . Providing an additional opportunity to reduce your hardware costs.

15. #7 – Secrets of Ultra Low Voltage In any infrastructure there are High Processing Capacity Systems and Low Processing Capacity Systems. Low Processing Capacity Systems do not have to be running on powerful servers. There are new technologies that provide low end systems with much less power consumption than regular servers.

16. Ultra Low Voltage Systems Even though those Ultra Low Voltage Systems sound like the perfect solution - they can not be used for everything as they will lack performance in certain areas. For example, they could not be used as database servers, but they could be very suitable and powerful as a single use appliance.

17. #8 Bandwidth & Connectivity Cost Optimization Bandwidth providers are constantly changing their rules and cost, if you know the industry trends of how BW prices are decreasing you can negotiate lower rates without waiting for your contract to expire. There are different price structures for different types of bandwidth and different types of calculations that have to be considered as well. Most companies won’t automatically reduce your costs, but if you proactively approach them and inquire about current rates you can reduce costs in this area as well.

18. #9 Think of Manageability and Colo Cost at Development Stage During custom system design and implementation it is crucial to provision methods and facilities for production operation. As normal practices, developers worry about business flow and business rules and don’t pay much attention to production operation.. They build systems based on assumption that everything runs smoothly. Any production failures take enormous effort of supporting organizations to recover processes and maintain SLAs.

19. #9 Think of Manageability and Colo Cost at Development Stage Oftentimes, provisioning for operational support at the development stage can save a lot of effort, time and money. This will eliminate a need for third party management systems, will make it easy to monitor business processes, and will require less licensing and overall hours spent on the system support and maintenance..

20. #9 Think of Manageability and Colo Cost at Development Stage Simple provisioning for failover or high availability on the software level during development can save you money avoiding the need to build clustering or N+1 type redundancy.

21. #10 General Negotiation With Providers In IT prices change rapidly a lot of IT providers wont tell you about price change but they would renegotiate before the end of the contract – the same as with a credit card – company – today a lot of competitors provide incentives to win new business – and the argument that it is very costly to move from dc to dc doesn’t keep customers any more.

22. #10 General Negotiation With Providers So as overall industry prices go down, most DC providers will negotiate the price – DC providers give a lot of incentives to move clients to their data centers – they provision for a move without disruption of services, provide temporary hardware rentals, and free disassembling and assembling.

23. MikeP@DigitalEdge.NET 718-370-3353 ext 115