Over the last decade, data centers have become the strategic focus for companies—lowering costs, improving productivity, enhancing business processes, and accelerating change. The ultimate goal is an agile infrastructure that can incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking and application technologies. This empowers IT to quickly support changing business applications/processes and deliver quality IT services with a low total cost of ownership.
According to industry estimates, more than 70 percent of IT budgets are dedicated to sustaining existing application environments. Therefore, IT organizations must improve operational efficiency, optimize utilization of data center resources and release funds for innovative new IT projects that generate revenue.
The evolving consolidation and virtualization of data center resources requires a highly scalable, resilient, and secure data center compute foundation. A properly planned data center protects application and data integrity, optimizes application availability and performance, and enables responsiveness to ever-changing market conditions, business priorities, and technology advances.
Today’s Challenges
As an IT operations manager, you may struggle with balancing business priorities and looming technology shifts against the day-to-day challenges of operating your data center. IT goals that attempt to address both sides often include the following:
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Delivery of quality IT compute resources at a competitive total cost of ownership
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Developing an agile infrastructure that can quickly incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking and application technologies.
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Consolidation of remote-office IT equipment and multiple data centers to streamline security, management, and operations
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Better support for mobile and home-based workers
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Protection of data centers from disruption and reduced downtime with reliable services for data replication, security, failover, and recovery