Given the current economic climate, IT departments, like everyone else, are under pressure to reduce costs. However, can they do this without compromising on data security or quality of service?

I believe that they can, provided that they focus on three key areas. As a matter of urgency, they should be addressing hardware consolidation and centralization, rationalizing operating systems and applications, and virtualizing as much as possible of their IT infrastructure.

All of these take capital investment to achieve, but in all cases, and particularly when combined, the operational cost savings and business benefits will easily mitigate the outlay.

Our return on investment studies show organisations achieving 25 percent plus annual cost savings against their current IT infrastructure costs over three to four years, even after the capital cost of the changes. If done correctly, they can also significantly improve data security and the quality of service IT departments can offer their organization.

Infrastructure consolidation i.e., using resources more effectively, means using fewer, higher-performance hardware devices rather than standalone, distributed servers. The average server in most corporate IT environments is less than 10 percent utilized and has at least 80 percent spare disk capacity. Savings arise from better utilization of the central resources and reduced systems management and administration.

Infrastructure consolidation reduces the amount of physical servers and other devices required, typically replacing them with a smaller number of larger or more modern units. These should be able to run at considerably higher utilisation, particularly where virtualisation or partitioning is used to allow multiple workloads on one piece of hardware.

The typical corporate Wintel server runs at less than 10 percent utilization, consuming around 500 watts. Running that server at 60 percent utilization, which is easily possible using virtualization, draws 550 watts, does not decrease the server’s useful life and means five or six times fewer servers are needed. These are real, realizable savings.

We enabled a local authority client to consolidate the workload of 84 standalone servers onto four new servers and obtain better performance and availability, saving over £150,000 ($250,000) in server replacement costs alone. Another client is saving over £80,000 ($136,000) per year in reduced electricity costs alone, before factoring in savings in lower costs for data center space, reduced cabling and other infrastructure.

Operating system and application rationalization reduces the number of software elements to be supported, hence the complexity of the infrastructure and the number of devices required to deliver it to users. Fewer software elements also means reduced user training and support and fewer interfaces between applications to manage and maintain.

We have seen several organizations who maintain three or more separate e-mail systems and multiple ERP, financial and reporting systems, each requiring a bespoke interface to the other systems to be monitored, managed and maintained. Clearly this provides significant opportunities for improvement.

Virtualization separates the application or service from the physical hardware, increasing flexibility, allowing multiple applications and services to run on the same physical hardware and greatly increasing utilisation. It enables common pools of hardware to be shared and resources to be dynamically assigned as required, whilst providing considerably faster recovery times in the event of a disaster.

Addressing ‘green IT’ can also provide genuine business benefits. I believe the concepts behind green IT are actually just sensible business practices which every organisation should be supporting and adopting – consolidation, reducing consumption and sustainability.

I have already discussed the benefits of consolidation. Reducing consumption comes from better design, both of the IT hardware itself and the data centers housing it. One of the measurements we use is the Power Usage Effectiveness rating system from Green Grid IT industry consortium, which measures power consumption against the computing output of a given facility and gives excellent guidelines to reducing consumption, many of which can be retrofitted to existing data centers.

Another key issue is rapid hardware turnover of the hardware. We advise clients to install modular and upgradeable systems, so that when replacements are needed they simply replace a small number of components inside the unit rather than the complete unit.

Thus by focusing on three strategic issues, and the need to become more ‘green’ by reducing consumption, IT departments can reduce operational costs and generate significant business benefits without compromising the quality of service.