Although the modern enterprise is largely obsessed with cutting back on costs to create a leaner and more efficient organisation, when it comes to their IT infrastructure and the servers around which this architecture is constructed higher efficiency is not always a function of "sweating the existing investment", according to Ben McDonald, enterprise product manager at Dell SA.
"By extending the duty cycle of the existing hardware, organisations find themselves having to compromise their strategies to fit in to the older, less efficient systems still deployed. One of the major drivers of IT deployments today is to gain competitive advantage, and to delay the hardware refresh cycle is to deny your enterprise these modern benefits," he begins.
"Sweating assets usually comes down to not having the capital to expend right now in an upgrade, but the potential costs of this strategy can be frightening," continues McDonald. "Your ability to more effectively manage the environment, therefore reducing operating costs, could well be compromised on the outdated platform. And if you bring total cost of ownership (TCO) into the argument, things like the lack of hardware warranties on what should now become legacy systems, and how much future growth the existing architecture is capable of supporting swing even the cost argument in favour of new servers."
To help customers gain the advantage they seek from a new IT investment while optimising their architecture, Dell today focuses on driving optimum operational efficiency into enterprise arenas. A number of technologies and strategies play a role in this aim, and it all begins with focusing on simplifying operations.
At Dell, this aim addresses the operations of the server from deployment and through any required hardware or software changes, with detailed monitoring tools at all times providing an accurate report on the status of the environment.
In addition to building an architecture which allows for more effective maintenance and management of the physical servers themselves, this vendor also pays close attention to the utilisation of the resources available in these systems. Traditionally many enterprises followed the one application, one box approach. Although on the surface this deployment model makes for a seemingly clean and efficient environment, in practice it has resulted in an average resource utilisation of between 20% and 30%, with islands of servers being geographically remote from each other.
In these cases Dell will employ a consolidation strategy, based on its years of experience in the enterprise IT game, with the end result being that the customer may need fewer, more powerful systems at a centralised location running all the services this distributed architecture previously delivered. This provides business benefit to the consolidating organisation by improving the utilisation of hardware to be more cost-effective, while eliminating the need for skilled staff at multiple sites thereby further reducing operating costs.
Modern servers can also be consolidated from a workload perspective thanks to the granular nature of today`s virtualisation engines. A single server is now quite capable of running multiple operating environments, each with their own OS and applications running under this platform, while dedicating just the right amount of CPU power to each process so that utilisation remains at 80% or more.
States McDonald: "Data centres today are all looking at ways of making their investments work better for the business being served. Higher utilisation of hardware is a core focus area here; they want as little IT resources as possible sitting around idle. Consolidation and virtualisation practices also, however, provide the ancillary benefits of centralising the environment, making it easier to manage and maintain with a smaller pool of skills on hand.
Of course the downside to these higher utilisation percentages is a relative lack of scalability. Therefore Dell is similarly focused on delivering its enterprise solutions with full scale-out functionality, allowing the customer to adopt a pay as you grow strategy to their enterprise IT environments. That this vendor bases its entire basket of offerings on industry standards assists tremendously in this particular endeavour, as it is far simpler to add components to a standards-based architecture as they are required, than to a proprietary solution.
McDonald elaborates: "Of course the fact that Dell is based on industry standards, from our high-end enterprise servers to our mobile solutions, also brings with it the advantages of lower initial purchase prices. Our customers appreciate not being locked into a single-vendor model, and we will therefore continue along this mutually-beneficial path. The next step we see ourselves taking as Dell is to drive standardisation of software platforms. We`re already seeing technologies like IPMI driving the industry in this direction and we will continue to create and support such developments for the good of the customer."
The next technological hot topic which will be available in the Dell enterprise product line in the very near future, are SMP-enabled multi-core processors, with the imminent announcement of these solutions from the chip giant Intel. Dell expects to have its solutions based on this powerful new architecture to be made available to customers within days of this highly anticipated release.
Concludes McDonald: "In the enterprise server environment, the path to cost optimisation and higher levels of enterprise efficiency is not all about sweating existing assets. It is about forming a relationship with a vendor or solution provider that can structure your enterprise architecture so that the business benefits derived from this investment are at their most substantial. At Dell we pride ourselves on being able to provide the right solution in any customer environment, large and small, cutting-edge and traditional industries."
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