How to Spring Clean Tech Profiles for Better Organization Management

IT infrastructures are growing increasingly complex; this idea is nothing new. There are well-known reasons behind this, including more end users, expanding data volume across more devices, and a multitude of customer-facing applications and systems. Businesses are trying to leverage a combination of virtualization and cloud environments to gain the right level of flexibility, efficiency and speed, but the roadmap is also creating IT management headaches.

As organizations attempt to strike the proper balance between new and developing technologies, they come across fresh obstacles at every turn. Which application workloads belong in which environments? What kind of experience will this change result in for my customers? How can I ensure my IT performance teams are reaching maximum productivity with minimum troubleshooting? These are questions that only become more difficult to answer as heterogeneous application infrastructures take shape. John Gentry, vice president of marketing and alliances, Virtual Instruments, has identified five challenges and tips that are crucial for organizations to consider as they work to guarantee optimal output.

Optimizing IT and the Business

Click through for five challenges and tips organizations should consider as they work to guarantee optimal output, as identified by John Gentry, vice president of marketing and alliances, Virtual Instruments.

Reduce Vendor Noise

The volume of vendor noise inherent in the modern data center is deafening. IT leadership doesn’t have the time or money required to work with all the vendors whose components create these infrastructures – they need systemic solutions. IT leaders should apply systemwide solutions to cut down on the meet-and-greets.

Do a Critical Infrastructure Audit

With more time on their hands and free of vendor meetings for case-by-case problem solving, IT leaders can quickly and accurately assess what is going on with their systems. Through no fault of their own, they may have forgotten about hidden legacy components in the IT environment. A comprehensive audit requires taking a step away from the rigors of daily monitoring and assessing the entirety of your systems to benchmark end-to-end performance and plan upgrades and improvements. To do this successfully, the critical audit must be easy to implement and not impact system performance.

Address Performance Challenges

Performance issues have existed since hard drives were first introduced, and only grew worse as data moved from megabytes to terabytes and beyond. For a long time, performance management was limited to snapshots of device-level activity and assorted infrastructure outputs. The team then did an averaging of results, which couldn’t capture the highs and lows of the snapshot period. This hid intermittent issues and “ghosts in the machine” that weren’t easy to see in these snapshot intervals. Software-defined strategies have the potential to put the snapshot model in the closet for good.  Modern infrastructure performance management (IPM) is a combination of workload, network, compute and storage monitoring tools.

Rely on Pervasive and Seamless Analytics — Get the Answers

IT should be able to talk the language of the organization. As such, analytics are gaining steam across the business. In order to set the stage for better analysis and reporting, complex IT infrastructures should have built-in automated and accessible web-based reporting functionality that address systemwide resource health, utilization and performance. According to Gartner, on analytics, the value is in the answers, not the data.

Tweak Accordingly

With time-savings realized, audits performed, performance challenges addressed and analytics in place, you might think the job of an IT leader is complete. However, that is far from the truth. Ongoing assessment of new technologies — such as flash storage, hyperconverged infrastructures and software-defined data centers — will become more important as the IT executive and his team are freed from daily fire drills.