How To Ensure Effective Data Center Consolidation

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Demonstrating powerful economic characteristics, data center consolidation is a popular strategy. IT executives are under endless pressure to increase the value f deliverables in organizations. Data center consolidation technologies and services help minimize risk and control the costs of data center operations and facilities moves. It is an effective way to cut costs by eliminating obvious wastes, such as paring down the application portfolio, eliminating unused files, and retiring or putting to work under-utilized hardware. The biggest benefits come from using the consolidation initiative to rationalize the application portfolio, archive inactive data.

To ensure effective data center consolidation, it is critical that data centers both facilitate current operations and offer adequate flexibility for future business growth. A bungled move or a poorly managed one can force an organization to incur the many further expenses. Data center consolidation offers significant business benefits like less network complexity, lower operating costs and fewer staff needed to maintain the hardware. Cutting costs by way of consolidation ...
... requires more work than simply reducing the server and software. It requires extensive, up-front planning to ensure a smooth transition with little disruption to the business.

Planning a data center consolidation requires knowing exactly what you have, where it is and how it's configured and connected. It also requires the ability to model, report and communicate all future plans to the appropriate individuals for approval and implementation. All of this means having the right solutions to manage and report on the status of the project at every stage. To ensure successful migrations with minimal impact to customers, it is important to invest the time and effort into the accurate discovery and detailed planning of the closure projects pays great dividends when it comes to the execution phase.

Assembling the right team and tools is also highly important to successfully executing a data center migration project. While, no set of software tools can accurately plan all of the application interdependencies, with interviews of sub-agency subject matter experts and structured data collection from the people managing the applications adequate knowledge can be gained. Consolidating data centers doesn’t mean you need to move data to another data center. The value of moving data to an external service desk can offer significant cost, and accessibility, advantages.

With the right strategies you can achieve the biggest goals of data center consolidation reduced operating expenses, faster disaster recovery and more efficient storage and backup operations. The explosion of data centers that many organizations have experienced through mergers and acquisitions can be reversed with a suitable consolidation strategy. Most organizations can realize quantifiable returns by boosting productivity of IT assets and personnel and simplify their management.

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