Six ways to help customers optimise their data centres

David Eaton, HP New Zealand chief technology officer, Enterprise Services offers some tips to improve sales.

Too often, data centers become repositories for outdated or underused hardware that consumes extra floor space, electricity and manpower, while providing little business benefit.

Resellers can realise sales opportunities by demonstrating to customers the opportunities and potential efficiencies of optimising their data centers.

Improve the data center

First help customers identify technological redundancies in their data centers. With a thorough assessment, unnecessary hardware and applications can be identified, unplugged and eliminated.

You can then demonstrate that by employing energy-efficient technologies, and finding ways to streamline personnel without sacrificing quality, businesses can save money and improve IT infrastructures when they reduce electrical consumption.

Critical cool off

Electricity costs are second only to equipment purchases at most data centers.

Review customers’ power and cooling capabilities and suggest energy efficient hardware, because as much as 70% of energy consumed can be spent on cooling.

See the total savings

Look for opportunities to help customers consolidate their servers, achieving economies of scale by reducing floor space, cutting power and cooling expenses.

As a bonus, hardware and software licensing, maintenance and network connectivity costs go down by combining what were previously separate physical server environments.

Improve manageability

By increasing standardisation and automation, businesses typically require fewer IT administrators.

Instead they can then rely on integrated performance teams comprising internal stakeholders such as the CIO, and technologists who can monitor the automated management software.

It is easier to manage a smaller number of centralised systems than it is to control a larger number of distributed systems.

Resellers should highlight that the manageability of systems directly affects cost and environment availability.

Virtualise

Understand the increasing importance of virtualisation in data centers. The dynamic pooling of heterogeneous compute, storage and network resources can all be virtualised in different ways to accomplish business objectives.

Rather than running a set of dedicated discrete components for every application, resellers can advise and help customers run applications across a pool of shared computing/capacity, storage and network/bandwidth resources.

The resources are dynamically allocated, provisioned, and ultimately dismantled, based on changing business needs.

Move forward

There is a growing focus on managing data centers as a ‘system’ with the objective of understanding and controlling power, cooling, networks and systems from a holistic perspective.

The expense of data centers, and growing costs and complexity around power, cooling and managing legacy make conversations about ‘The Data Center as a System’ very compelling.

Reach into your own supplier networks to begin to have these thought leadership conversations with your clients.