Pretoria, 29 Mar 2010
IT sprawl is the main result of a business' technology spend being focused on maintenance instead of innovation. Most companies today are merely adding servers, storage and networking devices to keep pace with business demands, spending upwards of 70% of their IT budgets on operations, rather than looking at inventive ways to get the most out of their IT infrastructures.
So says Tony de Sousa, Enterprise Business Unit Manager at Datacentrix, who explains that businesses can rebalance their IT spend by realigning traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by applications, optimised and managed as a service, thereby creating a converged technology infrastructure that can rapidly adjust to meet an organisation's changing needs.
"This is best achieved by creating an environment in which resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically," he states. "By transitioning away from the traditional product-centric approach to a shared-service management model, companies can accelerate standardisation, reduce operational costs and enhance business results. This will enable IT management to utilise resources on demand in an optimised way, which, in turn, will improve the productivity of administrators and systems, ensure continuity of service and more rapidly show business value from IT investments."
According to De Sousa, to achieve the benefits of a converged infrastructure, the following core attributes are required:
* A virtualised pools of servers, storage, networking;
* In-built resiliency in the hardware, software and operating environment;
* Orchestration through highly automated resources to deliver an application aligned to policies;
* Optimisation to support widely changing workloads and different applications and usage models; and
* Modular components built on open standards to more easily upgrade systems and scale capacity.
"In order to optimise IT spend, it is important to match the supply of IT resources with the business demand and this type of approach will help businesses accelerate the delivery of application environments in a predictable, repeatable way that makes the most efficient use of IT, facility and staff resources to drive business innovation."
De Sousa recommends HP's recently announced HP Converged Infrastructure architecture, which is delivered through a next-generation IT architecture based on standards that converge virtualised compute, storage and networks with facilities into a single shared-services environment optimised for any workload. The HP Converged Infrastructure enables:
* The ability to more easily deploy application environments through orchestrated, shared service management;
* Lower network costs and reduced complexity through a flexible network fabric;
* Optimised use through virtual resource pools; and
* Improved energy integration and effectiveness across the data centre through data centre smart grid technology.
"A properly built converged infrastructure based on a modular system design and open standards will allow businesses to take their current investments into the future at their own pace," De Sousa adds.
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