As computing systems increase in scale, inevitably they also increase in complexity, which in turn means the expenses related to deployment and ongoing management also increase. It has been noted before that currently, the largest percentage of an enterprise's IT budget is spent purely on the maintenance and management of existing infrastructure.
What this means is an organisation's IT department must continually increase resources to maintain a growing, complex and inflexible infrastructure, instead of being able to utilise these resources to assist with rapidly and effectively responding to business needs.
According to Shana Mare, senior enterprise account manager at Stortech, this is why many IT organisations are today working closely with their business counterparts to identify ways to substantially decrease the cost of ownership, while also increasing IT business value and improving infrastructure flexibility.
"The trouble is that when purchasing infrastructure such as servers, many large organisations focus only on the cost of acquisition. Operating in this manner means they fail to take into account the fact that the initial cost is only one of several components of the total cost of ownership (TCO) equation," she says.
"Things like architectural, operational, management, reliability, supportability and performance savings are often ignored, even though effective savings in these areas can quickly add up to significantly greater ones than those obtained simply from the initial purchase price of the chosen server."
In order to obtain these additional benefits, she explains, what is needed is a system that helps address the traditional cost versus benefit challenge. A solution that streamlines data centre resources, scales service delivery and radically reduces the number of devices requiring set-up, management, power, cooling and cabling. In effect, something that unites computing, networking, storage access and virtualisation into a cohesive system.
"Implementing a unified computing system (UCS) means you have an entire system built around virtualisation and ease of use. It also means that many of the standard administration tasks are automated within the system, which not only saves time, but also helps to eliminate human error.
"Furthermore, such a system will reduce the amount of hardware required by up to two-thirds, which reduces the complexity of the system significantly. With all traffic and applications sitting on a single set of switches and a single pane of glass managing the entire system, your time to market is decreased and staff are freed up to focus on more important work as well," she adds.
Best of all, continues Mare, the right system will be able to scale across multiple servers, both physical and virtual machines, in a single, highly available management domain. This approach separates scale from complexity, as, regardless of whether the system has one server or thousands of them, all resources participate in a unified management environment.
This environment is designed to reduce TCO at the platform, site and organisational levels, as well as increasing IT staff productivity and business agility through just-in-time provisioning and mobility support.
"Moreover, a good UCS is also well suited for DevOps, meaning that it provides a platform for businesses to launch a DevOps play that will help to speed up the pace of application development. This, of course, talks directly to the current industry trend of digital transformation."
"And when it comes to implementing a digital transformation strategy, having a UCS in place provides a strong foundation onto which the enterprise can easily add the relevant modules or products required to allow the business to enable a complete digital transformation strategy," concludes Mare.
Share