Successful Data Center Transformation in Four Steps
Data centers have become more important than ever in today’s connected global marketplace. New regulations require organizations to store larger quantities of data for longer periods of time. With the environmental concerns, the data centers are under tremendous pressure to decrease their carbon footprint and dispose of old equipment in a safe and eco-friendly manner. Data center transformation has helped meet the evolving demands by achieving near continuous availability, increasing capacity and efficiency.
With data center transformation, there are a number of benefits that include easier and more cost-effective data center management, better resource utilization, better application performance , increased availability, decreased downtime (both planned and unplanned) and a service desk-oriented and automated data center with adaptive sourcing. Keeping green datacenters running at peak efficiency requires a keen understanding of more than just technology, and successful data center transformation can be achieved keeping the following steps in mind.
* Identify the significant applications
The most critical business applications in terms of IT resources in the datacenter become the primary targets for a demand-driven optimization approach that transforms the datacenter. Measure and map the workload across the IT supply chain in terms of performance, consumption, and attributes of how the work execution is managed and what infrastructure it actually uses. This association of demand and supply creates a data-driven, objective view to affect change. By changing how the application is managed, firms can consistently find they can do twice the work on half the infrastructure.
* Introduce a regulation
Instituting a discipline helps measure and monitor the consumption, performance, and understands the IT supply chain dependencies of every application. When ambiguous, it becomes impossible understand what an end to end application view and dependency looks like, thereby making it difficult to virtualize or optimize.
* Regulate the management strategy
Standardize the management strategy of the IT outsouring supply chain across the datacenter from a top-down perspective. It is necessary to bring demand to supply as it happens, and not force demand into a predefined supply. Firms that do not implement dynamic runtime management of workloads will not exploit the elasticity of their virtualization efforts.
* Implement supportive processes
Processes need to sustain immediate modifications of IT delivery to accommodate business behavior. Approval processes and standard operating procedures must essentially accommodate this model. Firms can make huge quality and quantity impacts with targeted efforts.
Optimizing a data center with respect to business outcomes, key domains, people, process, and technology can become a intricate task. Having an integrated and structured approach is a critical success factor in transforming the data center.