Today’s data center is the most dynamic and vital to the operations of any organization though it is changing rapidly. Intricacy and indispensability have only multiplied as of late as data centers go through stable growth in size and magnitude, draining an organization’s resources and multiplying the effects of inferior implementation. Best practices on data center operations call for a tactical approach to balancing IT service delivery, cost efficiency, and operational effectiveness.
Many organizations are incorporating the
latest technology solutions in modernizing and advancing their organizations.
Others pursue a route to ensure suitable levels of IT service delivery and cost
efficiency and alignment of their business goals. These suggest that
organizations need to further improve their practices and capitalize on
technology, services, or resources
to lessen or act on outages.
Since the price tag of disruption is so high, the availability of IT capacity
is ordinarily the best significant metric on which data centers are gauged. For
some data centers, this means providing state-of-the-art levels of
accessibility, expediency, and scalability, still, for others, the objective
may be to provide “enough level of services whilst having capital expenditures
to a minimum.
Data centers must also be able to
operate efficiently, both in administration and energy resources, and flexible
enough to swiftly adapt to changes in the organization’s computing demand and
strategy. IBM and IDC have both developed a data center model for operational
efficiency in measuring up the capability levels of today’s data center and
detailing the methods IT organizations can advance down to the path of data
center transformation. Along this line of transformation, four key stages
describe the archetypal evolution of a data center as it relates to efficiency,
availability, and flexibility.
According to IBM Global Data Centre Study,
the survey replies were four typical stages that distinguish data centers from
one another as IT establishments move forward toward business alignment. These
are the following;
●
Basic: The environment is relatively stable and is maintained based on
short-term objectives, with standalone infrastructure as the standard.
Organizations have the benefits of server consolidation but did not implement
the tools to advance availability levels, which diverge broadly from
application to application and site to site.
●
Availability: IT infrastructure should be handled as a general source pool that
can be apportioned and scaled easily to meet the varying needs of workloads and
to ensure uptime and performance while affording high rates of utilization. The
focus is on measuring and improving service levels while building out
governance procedures that capture business requirements.
●
Consolidated: Server virtualization
and site consolidation are
expended to take out large quantities of systems and facilities, hence cutting
capital costs. Thus, server and storage tools are ably utilized and the
prospects for upgrading availability via VM (virtual machine) mobility are set
in motion to be realized.
●
Strategic: Widespread adoption of policy-based automation tools lowers the
manual complexity of the data center and ensures availability requirements and
dynamic movement of applications and data. Instrumentation and metrics are
consistently used to validate compliance with governance policies.”
Upgrading
data center efficiency can
produce concrete benefits for organizations. A study found that Strategic data
centers were able to deliver “greater investment on strategic initiatives,
greater efficiency, and greater flexibility.” Employees spend more than 50% of
their time on the latest developments against maintaining the in-place
infrastructure, compared to 35% for Basic data centers. It was found out
further that 39% are conceiving revolutionary projects to re-engineer IT
service deliveries as compared to 23%. Had more than 2.5 times the staffing
efficacy, averaging more or less 27 servers per administrator compared to just
10 for Basic data centers. Also, more than 50% of the organizations support a
high degree of organizational change in contrast to just 6% for Basic data
centers.
In actuality, there are two noteworthy
schools of thought to keep in mind when assessing the state of data center
configuration and efficiency that is consistent with the needs of an
organization. First, a data center configuration is an assemblage of network
systems, mechanical/electrical systems, applications and appliances, governance
processes, storage/servers, and workforces. There is not a single “magic
bullet” that gage changes from one efficiency point to the next. The sole
effective method to quantify the efficiency of data center operations is to
undertake a holistic methodology that takes into consideration various measures
across its entirety. Second, the data center’s evolution is a journey, in which
one destination may change as the organization’s needs changes. This is a
journey that should not be considered and followed blindly, rather, a framework
that should be flexible enough to be employed based on a particular need of the
organization.
To become more efficient and to ensure
that the demand for new services can be met by the capacity and the
infrastructure, many efficacious IT establishments have spent a good deal of
their time crafting the best set of practices encompassing an organization’s
tools, technologies, and processes. These consist of not only application
availability and performance but, more importantly, its ability to swiftly
respond to business transformations where the real aim is on affording business
benefits. This business focus could ensue in a huge payout for any organization
where cutthroat advantage, revenue generation, or innovation is the real purpose.
Many organizations, however, have already
taken out a sizeable portion of the hard cost via consolidation through
virtualization as data centers move up the efficiency ladder. This is where
many IT organizations will at first initiate consolidation to the data center
at the server level to cut back on costs by easing idleness in a physical
server. Most often, this is followed by storage virtualization and networking
system settings, typically propelled by a similar objective of consolidation
towards streamlining and reducing costs on physical infrastructure.
Consolidation through
virtualization is an
indispensable first step in the direction of achieving the best practices for
data center operational efficiency.
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