Raghunandan K S, Director, Integrated Technology Services, Global Technology Services, IBM, India/South Asia, writes that it’s time for employing analytics in the data center to slash OPEX
Managing data center environments can prove to be an expensive affair with the current budget constraints. However, partnering with a client who can drive results through a broad range of analytics-based services could possibly help in the enhanced performance of the data center infrastructure.
Today, technological factors are a top priority for CEOs in honing business operations in a world which is increasingly becoming volatile, uncertain and complex. Adopting analytics-based services can transform insights into action by increasing the operational efficiency with the data center while cutting down on operational expenses. In fact, analytics can potentially reduce data center operational costs by up to 50%.
Analytics-based IT services can provide insights to identify which workloads should be migrated to cloud to be able to deliver up to 90% faster, virtualize complex workloads up to 80% faster, create self service environments to manage the explosion of and lower the cost of the most expensive storage by 10 to 20%. Many other analytics-based services can be used to improve IT performance across the entire data center landscape.
With expectations about the India data center services market reaching almost Rs 10,000 crores at the beginning of 2012, based on a recent analyst report, industry leaders and decision-makers need to make the right choice while rationalizing and planning for the future of their data centers so that IT performance can be improved.
CEOs and business leaders have been applying analytics to plan better to effectively manage and deploy IT infrastructure and budget – helping save up to 40% of technology infrastructure expenses by balancing IT capacity with business growth.
Analytics has enabled businesses to optimize returns resulting in:
90% faster Cloud workload analysis
80% faster virtualization implementation for complex workloads
100% protection against security threats handled
As organizations build a vision about their future growth and prospects, it is important for CIOs to proactively engage their management teams in aligning the IT strategy with the overall business objective. This is critical in reinvesting and directing resources to drive greater returns while managing operations to improve services and reduce risks.
Consequently, applying analytics-based services can optimize investments though relevant intelligence on making the best use of available resources. Using analytics can provide strategic benefits and help in making more informed decisions about finances, providing IT managers’ real-time insight and intelligence into their data centers and the overall IT infrastructure. In fact, analytics can reduce IT infrastructure costs by potentially 15 to 40% through workload patterns that utilizes the right IT strategy and design services. Likewise, infusing innovative mathematical modeling into the IT strategy can reduce the operational costs of a data center by up to 50%.
With the use of mobile devices such as video becoming widespread, network infrastructure can play a huge role in affecting the performance of a data center. Using analytics can help optimize and prioritize network enhancements in addressing the demands placed on communications today. A thorough analysis of the network against key attributes such as spending and process management can help CIOs in making better decisions and potentially reduce network costs by 15 to 30% and of course achieve the desired competitive advantage.
Security threats are inevitable. Analytics-based security and intelligence infrastructure can manage up to 13 billion alerts a day, leaving only a handful of events requiring proactive risk mitigation decisions. This reduces the total cost of ownership by 57%.
It is important for IT managers to leverage their existing infrastructure and identify ways of altering their investments by taking a comprehensive approach in applying the right measures for a smart data center. Partnering with a proven industry leader in achieving the best results can help in having data centers that are more efficient, flexible and cost-effective. This can help enterprises achieve the desired business value by protecting their data centers from technology obsolescence while improving their total cost of ownership and return on investment.