Efficiencies and Emergencies
I couldn't help but chuckle at a colleague's description of data center life lately.
In his words, "It's all about efficiencies and emergencies - finding efficiencies, and avoiding emergencies."
While the comment was said partially in jest, I think he's spot on.
No matter how hard we all work in IT, the truth is that at the end of the day, brilliant architecture and vision doesn't influence perceptions of your success as much as does cost savings (in people, power, machines - numerically measured efficiencies) and email staying up 24x7 (perceptually measured reliability - avoided emergencies).
So how do we obtain the desired FE&AE (finding efficiencies and avoiding emergencies)?
The first challenge, efficiencies, seems straightforward - it's about IT Consolidation. Reduce your hardware, reduce your HVAC and power needs, reduce your base staff so that you have less overhead, and try to automate to make up for the differences.
The second challenge, emergencies, unfortunately tends to work against the first challenge. Reduce your hardware - but what about backup servers? Consolidate operations - but what about failover, reliability, and the need for staff on call?
If your IT center is critical to your business, this seems like a paradox - until you can automate and virtualize sufficiently to mask hardware differences and make your data centers sufficiently flexible and autonomous to meet both challenges.
At Scalent, we believe we've achieved this goal. We've built software that enables rapid server infrastructure repurposing - so that you can in fact achieve FE&AE at the same time. In the spirit of the season and the feasts that accompany it, I'd say we can let you have your cake and eat it too. Happy Thanksgiving, and come talk to us when you're ready to make your data center more efficient (and take a real holiday vacation).
-- Kevin Epstein, VP Marketing, November 2006
In his words, "It's all about efficiencies and emergencies - finding efficiencies, and avoiding emergencies."
While the comment was said partially in jest, I think he's spot on.
No matter how hard we all work in IT, the truth is that at the end of the day, brilliant architecture and vision doesn't influence perceptions of your success as much as does cost savings (in people, power, machines - numerically measured efficiencies) and email staying up 24x7 (perceptually measured reliability - avoided emergencies).
So how do we obtain the desired FE&AE (finding efficiencies and avoiding emergencies)?
The first challenge, efficiencies, seems straightforward - it's about IT Consolidation. Reduce your hardware, reduce your HVAC and power needs, reduce your base staff so that you have less overhead, and try to automate to make up for the differences.
The second challenge, emergencies, unfortunately tends to work against the first challenge. Reduce your hardware - but what about backup servers? Consolidate operations - but what about failover, reliability, and the need for staff on call?
If your IT center is critical to your business, this seems like a paradox - until you can automate and virtualize sufficiently to mask hardware differences and make your data centers sufficiently flexible and autonomous to meet both challenges.
At Scalent, we believe we've achieved this goal. We've built software that enables rapid server infrastructure repurposing - so that you can in fact achieve FE&AE at the same time. In the spirit of the season and the feasts that accompany it, I'd say we can let you have your cake and eat it too. Happy Thanksgiving, and come talk to us when you're ready to make your data center more efficient (and take a real holiday vacation).
-- Kevin Epstein, VP Marketing, November 2006
posted by Scalent Systems at 2:50 PM
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