IT resources are crucial to a company's success, yet running a data centre can be costly. A combination of business service management (BSM) and virtualisation can greatly reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), deliver faster and more comprehensive services and reduce overall environmental damage.
This is according to Reza Malekzadeh, director of product marketing and alliances for VMware EMEA, whose company today formed an alliance with BMC Software to bring virtualisation solutions to the market.
"BMC solves common data centre life cycle management problems by enabling businesses to discover and analyse their current environment, enabling them to predict future needs," he says. "It also supplies the framework for continuous control of business services."
He explains VMware technology works with the current infrastructure solutions and allows businesses to eliminate hardware dependencies, giving them the flexibility to choose the right operating system for the right application.
Virtualisation also allows server consolidation, rapid provisioning, availability and resource management, creating an efficient and available infrastructure.
TCO grows
Malekzadeh says, for the majority of businesses, TCO is increasing, which can be attributed in part to businesses having more computing resources than necessary, all of which costs money to maintain. "Costs incurred include routine maintenance, space requirements, cooling expenses, security patches, and other factors."
IT centres everywhere are under pressure to cut costs and optimise their data centres. He says the data centre is the most expensive real estate in any business, and as a result, quickly comes under scrutiny.
Although initial costs to purchase a server are no longer exorbitant, the cost of maintaining and housing them in the specialised environments they require increases as more servers are acquired and utilised at typically only 15% of their capacity, adds Malekzadeh.
He says by using BMC solutions, in concert with VMware, customers can plan and manage business resources, in a life cycle fashion, to better react to change. "The key to doing this lies in the ability of BMC solutions to tie together crucial data centre management disciplines that have traditionally existed in separate IT silos."
Virtualisation can potentially lower the TCO by 30% to 70%, he notes. "Our partnership with BMC aims to provide the solutions to key business problems by accelerating the adoption of virtualisation technologies and implementing a virtual infrastructure that increases business agility, performance and return on investment."
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