The ongoing demand for IT is directly proportionate to a company’s need to improve its services and set higher standards with an aim to appeal to clients at a faster pace. This desire to expand and become competitive has led to an influx of new data centre tools and services in the marketplace – an opportunity that offers IT managers and CIOs more options to evaluate themselves better than ever before.

In fact, this is further reiterated through a recent Global CIO Study conducted by IBM which indicates that 50 percent of CIOs are re-engineering their companies, which of course sheds light on the mounting challenges that IT professionals are facing. Furthermore, another analyst study predicts the India data centre services market to reach almost Rs 10,000 crore by the end of 2011.

While today’s capabilities and technologies allow businesses to outdo and even out-spend their competition in the evolving data centre market, it would eventually narrow down to a company’s knowledge on how to out-smart their competitors. This is particularly relevant because some organizations are not quite aware and do not have a sound comprehension about choosing the best data centre solution that pertains to their needs. Simply put, among a sea of options and opportunities, it is easy for businesses to lose sight of what is really required in improving IT efficiency. Since no two clients, IT environments or engagements are similar, these moves can come at the expense of business. Moreover, companies may get into an engagement with one goal, but may in time learn that their needs differ greatly from the initial data centre wish list.

In an effort to avoid having to choose from a variety of products and services and to have a focused plan with the future IT capabilities in mind, CIOs and IT managers will need to centre their data centre management along the following six key areas while making the requisite improvements maintain a smarter infrastructure.

Less Infrastructure is Better

The rapid business, financial and technological changes of the past few years has pushed CEOs to simplify their business processes and improve their response time. CIOs are also reducing the number of assets they manage to simplify infrastructure. With 75 percent of CIOs planning a more centralized infrastructure in the next five years, continued rationalization of IT and data centre infrastructure can help reduce costs. However, rationalization is also crucial to improve productivity, while laying the foundation for strategic growth. Optimization can improve operational efficiencies while reducing operational expenses by 50 percent when implemented across data centres that are being managed.

Don’t Be an Energy Hog

Data centres continue to consume 30 to 80 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building. Global markets have been more judicious while consuming energy by utilizing virtualization, storage and server consolidation.

However, more improvements could be made to reduce operational costs. Businesses that deploy various green initiatives have been seeing a 15 to 50% reduction in their operating expenses - The improvement depends on the area targeted (Server consolidation, infrastructure efficiency improvement, etc.).

Pay as you grow

With concerns such as operational cost and energy efficiency looming large, it has become imperative for organizations to invest in modular data centres that deliver the necessary quality in terms of power, cooling, security and monitoring capabilities. Over 80 percent of CIOs are moving away from large data centres towards more compact and modular data centres. This will allow clients to expand in smaller increments. Modular data centres will be able to provide the flexibility to support larger capacity and respond to the unpredictable changes and advancements. Using a pay-as-you-grow data centre model, the imperatives of CIO and CFO can be met using modular, energy-efficient data centres which are created to fit businesses ranging from large global enterprises to small organizations located in remote areas, thereby reducing the energy consumed by as much as 50 percent.

Many vendors today are yet to expand their modular data centre options, often relying on the ‘one-size-fits-all’ mentality. Now is the time for CIOs to plan for data centre support of global enterprises as energy costs rise to all-time high. This will give organizations the flexibility to meet specific needs while only paying for the resources they need to get the job done.

Move into the Cloud

Many CIOs have answered the question of how they will shift from a traditional computing environment to cloud-based models to obtain its various benefits, including a more seamless, accessible and cost-efficient environment. If you plan to move some workloads to cloud, have you forecasted your company’s potential over a longer period of time and the impact to your data centre infrastructure?

Estimates from industry analysts shows that the cloud computing opportunity is expected to reach USD148.8 billion by 2014 from USD 68.3 billion in 2010. Studies also report that 1/3rd of server decisions are impacted by the clients’ inability to support their current data centre infrastructure. The cloud environment will enable customers reduce up to 60-70% of their current workloads while offering a better price performance as well as lower capital and operational costs. Establishing a strategy over the long term can help you to implement the right level of capacity to save up to 50 percent off data centre projects.

Manage for Operational Excellence

Today, businesses have increasing user demands and little tolerance for downtime. In any IT infrastructure, pinpointing and resolving potential problems and risks can be detrimental in averting any downtime for the business. Analytical tools that can quickly spot important events and incidents and automatically rectify issues provide faster response to critical business issues. This can have a huge impact on the service, enabling the rapid resolution of the system and providing better management of data centres.

Improving IT performance with Analytics

Over the past few years, analytics have been widely used by CEOs and CFOs around the world to focus on their businesses and to improve business performance. What if analytics-based services could be applied to improving the IT performance as well? Since most IT budgets leave little room for manoeuvring, it is critical that funds spent on new initiatives deliver adequate returns. Partnering with an organization that has a broad set of analytics-based services helps to improve the performance of the data centre infrastructure.

Analytics-based IT services can provide insights to identify which workloads should be migrated to cloud to be able to deliver up to 90 percent faster, virtualise complex workloads up to 80 percent faster, create self service environments to manage the explosion of and lower the cost of the most expensive storage by 10 to 20 percent. Many other analytics-based services can be used to improve IT performance across the entire data centre landscape.

Gain outcomes faster – Use the Six Leadership Actions

Reiterating on the above, today’s CIOs have a variety of data centre choices, especially as it relates to services and solutions that will definitely help them scale up their data centre operations. With an ample variety of options to choose from, it is often a challenge for businesses to take a call on which are the most suitable choices that will match their IT infrastructure needs and what partners can help them achieve their desired outcomes quickly. Taking into account analytics, cloud computing, energy efficiency, management and automation, modular data centre options and virtualisation, these methods can surely enable companies in making an informed decision about data centre investments.

(The author is General Manager, Global Technology Services, IBM, India/South Asia)

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