ICT Strategies For Our Economic Downturn
With the outlook getting worse week after week, we have to start thinking about areas of our ICT infrastructure where there may be wastage, and how we can generate greater efficiencies to help the business produce savings.
Here are a few quick tips suggested by Par Botes, CTO, EMC Asia Pacific and Japan.
Eliminate the sprawl of small non-mission critical servers and storage through virtualisation
Technologies like VMWare, the server virtualisation market leader, have reported dramatic results, including:
- 70-80% increase in storage utilisation with unified storage
- 60-80% utilisation rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualised PCs)
- Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualised
- Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
- 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime
Power and cooling
Recent headlines in the newspapers about rising electricity costs have made every business expedite their efforts to reduce power consumption.
With energy costs representing the second largest line item associated with datacenter operations, consuming more than 10% of a typical enterprise’s ICT operational costs attributed to computers, cooling systems and storage systems, the ICT department’s operations is the first to be reviewed in spite of its strategic importance.
Implementing an information life cycle management (ILM) strategy for information
ILM is a comprehensive approach to managing the flow of an information system’s data and associated metadata from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted.
An ILM strategy requires classifying data into separate tiers according to specified policies, and automating data migration from one tier to another based on that criteria. As a rule, newer data, and data that must be accessed more frequently, is stored on faster, but more expensive storage media, while less critical data is stored on cheaper, but slower media.
However, the ILM approach recognises that the importance of any data does not rely solely on its age or how often it’s accessed. Users can specify different policies for data that declines in value at different rates or that retains its value throughout its life span. Just implementing tiered storage and consolidating can save an organisation tens of thousands of dollars.
Contact Us
If you would like to consider strategies that could improve your business please don’t hesitate to mention it to your Computer Merchants representative as we may have other ideas for your particular business that could help save you valuable funding in the current climate. Freecall us on 1800 777 111.
