14 March 2010
Sunday
Improving efficiencies and cost savings for your data center
By Edward Joe, Regional Manager, Brocade Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau | Jan 29, 2010
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PrintIn the current economic climate, any organization would be looking for ways to reduce overhead cost in running a data center and making it efficient to run. Here are some tips and strategies on how you can save dollars and improve efficiencies:
Adopt SAN, discard DAS
If you’re still using direct-attached Storage (DAS), it is time to upgrade to storage area network (SAN) to ensure efficiency in your data centre. DAS does not allow the sharing of total storage you have presently, as the technology does not allocate storage space smartly. If one server is out of space, you will need to buy a new one even if your other servers have 90% free space. Faced with this problem, many organisations tend to choose less expensive, slower, and less reliable ones – which further deteriorates the performance of the data center.
In contrast, SAN infrastructure enables any-to-any connectivity between heterogeneous server and storage systems. This allows much more efficient use of storage and server resources by consolidating widely distributed or underutilized resource into centrally managed environment. This means a decrease in storage capital expenditures by enabling the purchase of storage on an "as-needed" basis. Additionally, you get an increase in administrative staff productivity and will be able to manage more storage with fewer personnel.
Virtually cheaper
Server virtualization enables you to optimize IT resources by giving you the ability to run more servers and applications on fewer physical hosts. By consolidating your infrastructure, you can have multiple virtual machines running a separate application, thus reducing the number of physical systems.
The right virtualization strategy is to build on the existing investments you have made. Choose an evolutionary virtualization strategy that will protect capital investments by building on purchasing decisions you have already made, instead of ripping out and replacing existing assets. The solution should also be forward-looking to minimize future risk.
Still, reducing the physical hardware in the data center is only one part of the equation. Basic administrative tasks should be streamlined by automating the task and therefore time spent configuring and monitoring connections is significantly reduced. This means there are fewer resources to monitor and maintain for your data center.
