IT teams live in a cauldron of business demands, shrinking resources, and vendor push. Clarity of thought and communication are the best tools to align resources, planning, and execution. Linking these to business and financial results further focuses the effort and simplifies the message for broad internal communication. Boiling everything down into three definable steps is a powerful tactic.
Recent Clearview engagements have uncovered a pattern for enterprise data centers that is working at firms across multiple industries. This pattern is driven by continuing improvements in the flexibility and speeed of virtualization software, by accelerated equity investment in the data center colocation industry, and by the strong cash savings provide by each as they are adopted by enterprise IT leadership. In only three words:
Virtualize
Source
Recover
1. VIRTUALIZE – Virtualization enables consolidation of infrastructure, increases server utilization, creates a “Cloud”, and reduces operating expenses. Administration, hardware, maintenance, power, space & cooling costs are all reduced. If you think you have seen this before, you have. Software virtualization is to servers what IP telephony was to telephone systems. Telephone systems have consolidated from many to few in most enterprises. Consolidate your infrastructure with virtualization tools. Savings impact = 30%.
2. SOURCE – Datacenters cost either $1000/sqft to build or $35/sqft/mo as a service from data center colocation providers. If you buy datacenter as a service, you benefit from cost avoidances such as maintenance, network access, auditing, staffing, and security; these are typically bundled with your space & power charges. Simple math reveals a payback advantage for colocation services exceeding five years. Computing will change significantly over the next five year and datacenter requirements will change even more. Externalize all or a portion of your datacenter footprint. Savings Impact = 20%.
3. RECOVER – Disaster Recovery is often a bridge too far. However, consolidation and sourcing can enable an IT disaster recovery plan as an affordable part of your new solution. Datacenter sourcing allows you to contract for two facilities where you could only build one. Most datacenter service providers will provide similar pricing for both single and multi-center deployment. Network connectivity, a key requirement for DR, is a highly competitive market with advantageous pricing trends. A DR solution, accelerated by services providers and virtualization software, is now within reach. Split your infrastructure into multiple locations and leverage duplicated systems, dev/test infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud for enhance disaster recovery. Cost = +15%
As an operational plan: Create cash flow and reduce footprint and power consumption with virtualization. Move this efficient architecture to an external datacenter provider split across two locations each with different risk profiles and a minimum separation of 50 miles. Then, re-invest a third of expense run rate reduction the into DR systems, software, and workspace. You are left with a 30% expense run rate reduction, an agile virtualization environment (with a cloud “check-off”) and good resiliency with the new DR deployment.
Data Centers 2012: Virtualize. Source. Recover.
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