How To Ensure Successful Datacenter Transformation

By Author: Martin lobo
Total Articles: 355
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IT organizations are pressurized between improved performances expectations, growing data and network bandwidth, cost reduction targets, converged architectures and technology innovations. With data center transformation, you can reduce costs and maximize your ROI without disrupting business as usual. Transforming datacenters is more than virtualization and automation and more than building a solid foundation for your data, content and cloud requirements. Data Center transformation can be achieved through next-gen energy efficient hardware platforms, consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing services, green initiatives, modular designs and best measurement practices, to enable organizations to quickly and cost effectively respond to market demands and new revenue opportunities.

To prepare the data center for the future, you must first align people, processes and technology and develop a strategy for transformation.The first thing is to understand that storage virtualization separates the application and server view of data ...
... from the physical storage infrastructure. Data center transformation beings with identifying the most crucial business applications and largest-consuming applications in terms of IT resources in the datacenter. Ideally, the rule of thumb is that 30 percent of applications typically consume or create need for 70 percent or greater of the datacenter infrastructure. This approach of demand and supply creates a data-driven, objective view to affect change. It is important to establish a discipline immediately that measures and monitors consumption, performance, and understands the IT supply chain dependencies of every application. Only by comprehending what an end to end application view and dependency looks like, will it be possible to optimize.

For a successful data center transformation, it is necessary to regulate the management policy of the IT supply chain across the datacenter and include building blocks of runtime management and service desk orchestration. Organizations that execute infrastructure virtualization without workload and information datacenter virtualization will work against the optimization they are trying to accomplish as they will generate new obstacles for the delivery of IT from the datacenter. A unified footprint of network, compute, storage, appliances, and software runtime that matches the types of workloads the enterprise supports creates a simpler, leaner platform engineering model.

With the automation of life cycle management, businesses have the ability to flex the infrastructure to meet the fluctuating demands and matching dynamic workload management needs of the business behavior. Lastly, IT must ascertain from business intelligence and continuously extract, evaluate, and leverage behavior data to proactively predict, adjust, and modify the infrastructure.

Optimizing a data center with regard to business outcomes, key domains, people, process, and technology can rapidly become a complex exercise. Hence, a critical success factor in transforming the data center is to have an integrated and structured approach.

Also read on - Managed security services, Green datacenter