Four Keys to Greater Performance and ROI in the Data Center

Data centers today are not as efficient as they could be. In fact, studies have shown that the average utilization of a Windows server alone during normal business hours is under 10 percent and the average utilization during peak hours is under 15 percent. But, according to Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, it is possible to get more than 70 percent utilization from servers and storage today with smart technologies that automatically adapt to a company’s unique needs and usage requirements. To help CIOs navigate the sea of emerging “smart” product families, Logicalis has identified four key ways to increase performance and ROI in the data center.

Click through for four ways to improve data center performance and ROI, as identified by Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider.

A savvy IT strategy is not about the individual pieces in a technology environment anymore; it’s about the infrastructure as a whole. Automated provisioning can offer better utilization across all computing resources, and an efficient application environment means the data center is easier to manage. The bottom line is that a consolidated system reduces the data center’s overall IT footprint, energy usage and costs while improving security and managing compliance.

Centralized management, flexibility and scalability are not just buzz words anymore; they are critical functions that will help optimize performance in the data center going forward, ensuring the IT environment is functioning at peak efficiency 24×7. CIOs planning a change in their data center should insist on the flexibility to deploy a wide variety of operating environments and hypervisor technologies, consider how many applications they can run per square foot of data center space, and determine how to create an environment that will scale with demand, managing SLAs during peak hours.

Now that IT has come out of the back room and has become an integral part of businesses’ competitive strategy, CIOs have to concentrate on technological innovation, the kinds of IT advancements that will help their companies bring new products and services to market faster than their competitors. Today, it’s possible to deploy even mission-critical applications in hours, versus the days or weeks it once took, and with predictive failure analysis and built-in high availability, IT pros can create environments that are truly 24×7 with maximum uptime. The key to being innovative with technology today lies in creating an IT environment that will run seamlessly, is easy to manage, and requires less oversight than traditional data centers have required.

The mantra in today’s computing world seems to be a continual cry for bigger, better and faster IT systems. But with advancements available today, better and faster may be all that’s needed. New systems entering the market offer rapid deployment of software; the ability to run hundreds of applications and Web services in a single environment; integrated systems that are optimized for shared resources through implementation of various cloud solutions; and simplified cloud provisioning across servers, storage networking and middleware.