If your business is like most that have deployed a virtualized infrastructure for your data center, you likely experienced immediate and dramatic operational improvements, cost savings and significant efficiency gains. But following this success, many enterprises find their virtualized data center environments over-provisioned and in desperate need of a tune-up.
Some of the signs that indicate if your data center requires a tune-up include low efficiency and productivity among your data center team. You may also find IT has trouble consistently meeting SLAs and spends too much time “keeping the lights on” instead of focusing on business priorities. Other warning signs include the need for multiple tools to manage the data center or management-tool incompatibility with your cloud environments.
Virtualization Optimization presents an opportunity to enhance the data center environment and regain the benefits that virtualization promised. Tools are available that collect data and then present a personalized report showing how you can increase your virtual environment efficiency, manage risk, and improve your environment’s overall health.
This visibility allows you to proactively ensure service levels, optimize resource usage, and ensure configuration compliance—not only in your virtual data center environment but also your cloud environments.
As you consider a tune-up for your virtualized data center, you might also want to take a look at the bigger picture. Here are four tips of other areas in your data center you can assess to obtain even more efficiency:
Tip #1: Servers
Start by evaluating your server strategy for the data center and check it against your business needs. The right server strategy takes advantage of cutting-edge server technologies with an integrated, strategic plan for their implementation, deployment and maintenance. Also review your server deployment models. On-premise, cloud and hybrid options can give you the flexibility your current strategy might be missing.
Tip #2: Storage
Don’t overlook the importance of storage in your data center. With the data explosion brought on by the digital movement, it’s critical to make sure your storage solutions are up to the task. The IT benefits are negated if users can’t access data—so start by ensuring business-critical data is readily-available and cost-efficient to access and back up.
Tip #3: The Network
Don’t miss the Wi-Fi wake up call. Over the next few years, demands on Wi-Fi infrastructure will increase as more Wi-Fi-enabled devices appear in organizations and as cellular offloading becomes more popular. New Wi-Fi standards and the performance needs of new applications present a great opportunity to examine the network.
Tip #4: Software
Managing your IT infrastructure on a large scale can be unwieldy. Getting things under control means employing the right management software to help make the job of your IT administrators more automated while also reducing overhead costs and boosting productivity.