In today’s business climate, most Fortune 1000 companies face pressure to reduce or maintain flat IT costs, while delivering new business applications and services at an ever increasing pace. Though data centers are bursting at the seams, there is little appetite to build out more facilities (it can cost around $100M per data cen­ter for a large enterprise). Yet IT is at a steep disadvantage: how can they quickly identify opportunities for cost savings, without an accurate view of their applications and infrastructure and or a sense of how that infrastruc­ture relates to the delivery of business services.

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This lack of visibility into the existing infrastructure, and how it is being used to support the business, results in inefficient data center resource planning. Too often, more infrastructure than is necessary is deployed to meet business objectives. The result is massive inefficiency. In the average large data center:

• 10% of servers perform no current usable function
• 5%-5% of servers are marked as decommissioned in the fixed asset register – yet are still operational
• Most servers run at 10-15% utilization

Each of these servers has associated administration, software licence, facilities, power and cooling costs that all contribute to the rising IT costs of just ‘keeping the lights on’. The deteriorating economy, the pressure to be ‘green’, increasingly high expectations for business service delivery all converge to underscore the need to optimize data center infrastructure. The ultimate goal? Ensure IT can continue to support business-as-usual services – as well as provide room to innovate – without growing in size and cost-base.

The good news is that there is a significant and immediate opportunity for cost saving by taking out the inef­ficiencies that exist – starting with an understanding of how each server is used, which business applications it supports, and therefore what the value to the business actually is. In this way unused, unnecessary and inef­ficient hardware can be weeded out or refreshed, and software licenses reclaimed while ensuring compliance in the year-end “true-up” exercise.

Download The Drive to Greater Data Center Efficiency and learn how you can get an accurate picture of whats in your data center to cut cost and waste by 5% in 30 days.