2. Optimise vendors
Most organisations use the products and services of multiple vendors over time. This can often lead to legacy and interoperability issues. For example, the storage environments of many organisations include products from a variety of vendors which are unable to interact with each other and require different management tools for each. Unfortunately, this complexity can even exist across product lines within the same vendor’s offering.
Not only does this introduce complexity into the environment, it can also be the source of wasted budget. Staff needs to be trained to manage multiple protocols and multiple-vendor environments. Technologies purchased to improve storage efficiency may only work across a portion of one vendor’s equipment and not that of another vendor.
CIOs need to look at ways to optimise multi-vendor assets, or increase their Return On Assets (ROA, not ROI). Where storage is concerned, management products such as NetApp’s V-series, provide advanced storage efficiency, data protection and data management features across legacy storage equipment from multiple vendors. This eliminates the need to purchase new storage assets and reduces complexity within the data centre.
3. Assess your IT environment for efficiency
In order to improve efficiency, enable consolidation and increase productivity, it is first necessary to assess your current IT environment to determine areas of redundancy. Processes can be improved to limit complexity. Tasks currently undertaken manually may be automated and staff members redeployed to more strategic roles. Existing technology may be better utilised and new technologies can be adopted to improve efficiency and cut costs.
For example, in the majority of organisations, storage is highly underutilised. On average, most organisations are only using between 25 and 40 per cent of their storage assets. This means that between 60 to 75 per cent of storage space is wasted. If this is the case, not only will the business be purchasing more storage when it is not really necessary; the unused storage is also draining resources such as power and staff management time, without adding any value.
It is possible to reduce the amount of storage required and provide higher utilisation rates for existing assets by deploying storage efficiency technologies such as data deduplication, virtualisation, thin provisioning and thin cloning, caching technologies and SATA drives. These technologies can provide immediate hard costs savings in the form of reduced power and cooling requirements, negating the need to purchase more storage or build additional data centres.
Storage efficiency technologies can also provide soft cost savings such as increased staff productivity, faster time–to-market and improved business agility.
For example, efficiencies may be gained by rethinking an organisation’s application development and testing environments. Application development teams require storage resources, but we need to challenge the underlying assumptions about the size and provisioning of these resources. Rather than saving multiple physical copies during development and testing, new cloning technology allows developers to use virtual copies of data sets. This means the production environment can be duplicated and modified without adding any physical storage, resulting in fewer disks that need to be purchased, provisioned, powered and managed.
Asking the right questions can help discover other hidden costs that can result in big savings and cost avoidance. The last example of application development and test environments has some of these hidden cost opportunities. One suggestion is to review your assigned infrastructure to see whether servers and storage are running on dual power supplies. If so, they are consuming nearly double the power necessary to provide redundancy that may be unnecessary for this function. By simply unplugging the second power supply you can achieve power cost savings, avoid adding to your UPS system load, and keep your data centre footprint from increasing.
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