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Not very long ago, the DC consolidation strategy was primarily uni-dimensional. ITDMs and CIOs were looking to virtualise their IT workloads and reduce the footprint, to achieve considerable cost reduction and operational benefits.
Enterprises across industries have realised that data centre consolidation reaps loads of benefits—be it effective communication internally or better manageability. The most critical step in a data centre consolidation plan is to find out what IT equipments IT teams have and the ways to simplify the infrastructure.
But the challenge is very different now. With emerging trends like Mobility, Cloud, Virtualisation and Software Defined Data Centres (SDDC), IT decision makers are looking at these trends to bring about revolutionary changes by providing flexibility to data centre storage, switching, security and other infrastructure components.
The top three IT spending market verticals--Telecom, BFSI & Manufacturing are looking at extracting more from existing investments and delaying fresh procurements of infrastructure in anticipation of better economic conditions in the near future.
The average life span of infrastructure is around five years today and is expected to increase to six years--as a result, investments are focused on increased utilisation.
Data centre consolidation is being driven with objectives of cost containment, better utilisation and doing more with less.
A S Raj Gopal, CEO, NxtGen Data Centre and Cloud Solutions, says, “While consolidating, one of the big questions for the enterprise is how many data centres does it really need? The answer is based on risk/reward, capital budgets, geography, service levels and recovery objectives. It’s important to note that it is possible to build two data centres at a cost lower than one. The decision on data centre consolidation should not be based on IT objectives; it should be based on business objectives.”
The goal of any ITDM who goes in for a data centre consolidation is savings--in space, energy use and, ultimately, money--as a primary goal.
It’s critical now to observe the new technological trends such as SDDC, covergence and cloud architectures, Mobility and virtualisation and how they are impacting the data centre consolidation process.
Virtualisation Fuels DC Consolidation
Virtualisation is a major driver for data centre consolidation. It goes without saying that an enterprise can save a lot in equipment costs over two years from virtualising its servers, which in turn results in huge cost savings and lower electricity bills.
SDDC is Throwing up Challenges
Complexity goes up with the rise in consolidation need. Managing different equipment with complex configuration, and with the additional necessity of security, can be achieved with a plan leading to a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). Few believe that, today, SDDC is an aspiration, not yet a reality, in most enterprises. Care should be taken to ensure such initiatives do not lead to vendor lock-in.
Ezhil Arasan, Senior ITDM, Arvind Exports says, “Reduced capital and operating costs, reduced deployment time for enterprise applications, increased business agility and increased business resilience in SDDC help ITDMs better the data consolidation process.”
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