Get in Front of Growing Data

You’re storing more data than you need to. Cut the excess in your infrastructure, and you can benefit from efficiency gains, cost savings and budget that can be redeployed to high impact IT initiatives. All it takes is a little data deduplication. Lower the amount of data you store without sacrificing what you need, and maintaining the status quo becomes less expensive and more efficient.

Your organization generates a lot of data, yet not all of it needs to be stored. There are redundancies in systems throughout your data center, and by identifying them and getting rid of the duplicates, you can cut your storage footprint, invest less in equipment and streamline your datacenter operations. Ultimately, the cost savings can be redeployed to other IT initiatives, particularly if they come with a compelling ROI proposition.

Using a data deduplication solution, you can reduce the amount of data you store by up to 60X. This translates to backup times that are 90 percent faster and a drop in bandwidth consumption of up to 98 percent. Quite simply, the implications of data deduplication involve a clearly defined storage management advantage. These are results you can see … and measure.

As your company continues to generate data (which needs to be stored), the use of data deduplication solutions enables you to make room in your storage infrastructure, rather than purchase new storage equipment. Imminent budgetary commitments, consequently, can be deferred.

Few IT investments deliver the sort of ROI that you can realize with data deduplication as part of a virtualized storage infrastructure. The implications are salient and rapidly realized. Get rid of the extra data that you’re paying to store, and the cost to operate your IT environment – and power the business – drops substantially. At the same time, you’re extending the value of your existing storage environment well into the future.

Data deduplication isn’t just a technology decision – it’s a financial one. Implement a deduplication solution, and you’ll succeed from both perspectives.

Prioritize Your Data for Compliance

Not all tiers of storage are equal, especially when it comes to compliance. Optimize your storage architecture for regulatory obligations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and PCI, and you can recoup your compliance spend, make audits less painful and redeploy the savings to projects that have ROI potential. As with every aspect of your compliance efforts, it pays to have a plan.

When the auditors come knocking, of course, you need to have all your data in order. But, it doesn’t all have to be immediately available. Instead of investing heavily in a storage architecture that treats seven-year-old data like that generated only a few weeks ago, you should prioritize based on frequency of need. As long as you can reach the information you need, you’ll be able to satisfy the requirements dictated by the regulations with which your company has to comply.

Newer data should be stored for easy and rapid retrieval. In addition to its use for compliance tasks, there are other business needs which make the ability to access it quickly a priority (e.g., customer care activity, order processing). Older data, on the other hand, can be stored on less expensive equipment designed for archiving, as the frequency of use is low, and the likelihood that fast access is necessary is low.

So, how does this turn into an ROI opportunity?

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How to Handle License Audits in a Virtualized Data Center

The old rules no longer apply. In the past, you knew how many processors would be committed to a particular application, and you made your software deals accordingly. Now, you face an ambiguous standard. What happens if you are undergoing a license audit during a period of peak demand?

Every IT innovation brings with it a necessary change in perspective …which tends to lag the innovation itself. In the case of server virtualization, enterprise application licensing has become the subject of disruption. Traditional licensing models don’t lend themselves to the flexibility of the dynamic data center. While there are no best practices on this in the market yet, you can be aware of the issue and work through remedies with your software providers.

In a physical infrastructure, per-processor licensing makes sense. The number is fixed, which makes the transaction relatively straightforward. This convenience is not available in a virtualized environment. Utilization may be fairly contained and predictable most of the time, but an unexpected spike in access – or even periods of anticipated peak demand – turn the model on its head. Going though a licensing audit when utilization is at its highest can result in an inaccurate view of general usage (and additional licenses). [Read more...]

Streamline Server Provisioning, Contain Costs

Seasoned IT professionals remember dreaming of the potential of a dynamic datacenter. Constrained by platforms that allowed little flexibility, IT managers were forced to forecast, provision and spend on a per-system basis, which inevitably meant that some systems would be taxed while others sat dark. Dynamic datacenter architectures were the stuff of reverie. Well, not any more.

Server and storage virtualization have made storage and computing power portable, eliminating platform constraints and increasing the speed and flexibility with which an infrastructure can be administered. Storage and computing power have become portable, making IT operational and financial efficiency the new norm.

It’s not hard to see how costs can escalate quickly in a static datacenter. You have to provision for peak utilization … and then some. It ultimately becomes necessary to conceive the inconceivable (in terms of surprise usage), not to mention spend for it. “Just in case” scenarios result in over-investment in IT equipment, pushing TCO higher and setting even harder to clear ROI hurdles.

A virtual infrastructure makes this over-commitment of capital unnecessary. Datacenter computing and storage resources can effectively be pooled, as virtualization makes cross-platform sharing possible. Instead of provisioning for an unanticipated spike in utilization for a particular system, you can take a holistic view of the datacenter and dynamically “borrow” resources from platforms with extra capacity. Every system, essentially, is available to help the others.

Take the guesswork – and unnecessary expense – out of your infrastructure. Virtualization puts you in control of your technology and your budget.