EXECUTIVE BRIEF
Identifying the Biggest IT Resource Drains
The spotlight has been on data center efficiency for more than
midsize data center, a realistic goal with current technologies,
five years now. Yet, inefficient technologies dominate most
can save millions annually.
facilities, utilization rates remain surprisingly low, and it often
But the bigger cost may be in the area of agility. An inefficient
takes three weeks and six people to make the simplest
IT infrastructure is less able to respond to the demands of the
decision or change.
business it serves, and that can be crippling. The first step in
The business impact of those inefficiencies goes well beyond
rectifying that situation is identifying the systems and processes
the cost of electricity, although that is becoming increasingly
that are draining the energy, both electrical and human, out of
significant. Reducing energy and operational costs by half in a
your data center.
Map Your Minutes
Optimizing a mid-size data center using technologies
If you are one of the more than 70 percent of organizations still working
toward the highest tier of data center performance efficiency, ask why. Are you
spending more time and resources on day-to-day operations and less on new
projects than you’d like? Most organizations aren’t in that position because of
management direction, but because they’re constantly fighting fires. When
there are constant operational issues to address, carving out planning time
requires extraordinary measures. Without planning, you’ll never get to a better
balance of “keeping the lights on” vs. innovating.
widely available today and no heroic measures could
Planning starts with knowing what you have. Assess your people and your
environment. Where are non-value added activities? Maybe network problems
are requiring constant urgent fixes. Fixes maintain value but they don’t add
value. Bring in an expert, correct the issue once and for all. Maybe it’s outside
your network expert’s skill set. Outsourcing facilities management might fix
that problem. Maybe your people are chronically getting pulled into
extraneous meetings. You can fix that.
shave $1.5 million annually. (Source: Energy Logic 2.0)
In a study of an enterprise data center by Intel, older
servers consumed 60 percent of the energy but
delivered only 4 percent of performance. (Source:
Energy Logic 2.0)
Emerson Network Power Customer
Insight Studies show:
On average, data center managers use atleast four
different software platforms to manage their physical
infrastructure.
Fifty-six percent of data center managers produce more
than three operational reports each month, with 19
percent producing more than six. These reports take
about three hours a month, with some managers
Assess Your Assets
Few companies truly have a handle on their assets. If you had to support the
divestiture of a business tomorrow, would you know what IT assets go with it,
physically, virtually and from the cloud? If a company courted yours for
potential acquisition, would you know how to present your IT assets?
What do you have in place today – how old are servers, what applications are
they running, how often are they used? What power and cooling assets
support what servers? Do you have an up-to-date map of your physical layout,
virtual layout, and know who owns the assets? Could you confidently discuss
your workload efficiency?
spending more than five hours.
The average data center uses 62 percent of available
rack space.
On average, data centers purchase critical
infrastructure equipment from five different vendors.
This exercise extends to people as well. What are the skill
sets of your staff? What training and certifications do they
have? Are they collaborating or working heads-down? The more
communication among staff managing servers, networks,
storage, power and cooling, etc., the more likely you are to
arrive at innovative ideas.
While you are scanning your people, processes and critical
infrastructure, keep an eye out for the most common
efficiency drains:
Drain No. 1: “Buffer” Capacity
If you are going by nameplate capacity estimations, you are
likely operating with a 20 percent buffer, and many organizations
won’t encroach on the “buffer” for fear of causing downtime.
Harnessing that buffer could defer a major addition or even
a new data center build. The right data center infrastructure
management solution will give you capacity information in real
time and let you confidently tap into that capacity.
Drain No. 2: Ghost Servers
Having some way to measure energy use will let you make
informed decisions regarding capacity, availability and
optimization as well as energy use. DCIM is one way to get
there. Knowing what you have can tell you what to turn off.
Companies have achieved dramatic savings just by virtualizing
and turning off what they aren’t using. An idle server wastes
nearly double the amount of energy it draws when you consider
the resources that support it. Getting a handle on this wasted
energy saves money and capacity. Do you have a good handle
on servers that aren’t serving a purpose? You may also have
ghost virtual machines, and that means an unnecessary use
of storage. VMs are easy to create and very difficult to track
down. They’re often not well documented.
Drain No. 3: Inefficient Servers
Most organizations have embraced virtualization but overlooked
other opportunities to cut energy costs. Energy-efficient
processors and power supplies have been shown to reduce
data center energy costs by 18 percent. Using the server power
management software that’s likely already a part of your
servers can shave off another 9 percent.
Drain No. 4: Heterogeneous Environments
If one person is managing five servers when another is managing
50, you may need to look at standardization. Standardization of
equipment, tools and processes make people more productive.
If you are running Dell servers, HP blades and IBM mainframes,
your staff is likely using different operating systems and
platforms, maybe different virtualization methods and tools
for diagnosis. Your physical environment should have a high
degree of standardization: one staff member managing one
brand of servers using one set of tools and procedures.
If you aren’t in a standardized environment now, use your
server-refresh cycle to standardize. Put together a plan to get
to a mostly homogenous environment in three years. Processes
should be standardized as much as possible as well. This can
be done in many ways, but you may want to consider the Lean
processes that have benefitted manufacturing companies.
Drain No. 5: Needlessly High SLAs
If your IT organization is like most, you answer business needs
as they arise. Every business client wants the best available
network bandwidth, responsiveness, disaster recovery, and
storage-level available – until you give them the cost. Then they
see the value of matching service level with need. Companies
that do charge backs will see less demand and less expenditures
overall. Mailbox size limitation is an example. By requiring
employees to manage their own email boxes to a set limit,
you can reduce costs, IT complexity and time spent.
Drain No. 6: Limited Visibility
Make sure you have the right tools to enable your staff to be as
efficient as possible. For instance, do they get alerts when an
issue emerges? Do they need to walk the floor to determine
where there may be space for a server, or can they look at a
dashboard that maps available capacity and “what if” scenarios?
Most importantly, if you move toward a consolidated, highly
utilized, highly available infrastructure and displace old
applications with new applications as you evolve, you’ll increase
operational and electrical efficiency without impacting your
current applications. More importantly, you’ll position your IT
organization to support dynamic business demands in real time.
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