DATA CENTRE TRANSFORMATION 

The cost of IT operations continues to be the single biggest line item in most IT budgets today- upwards of 70 percent. In addition, operational spending is growing at three times the cost of other system expenditures such as servers and storage according to analyst reports.

Companies will therefore need to reduce the total amount of labour, redirect people to focus more on creative, innovative tasks, automate IT processes to be truly efficient, and reduce management and operational costs - all while balancing the need to be compliant with national and international regulations.

The trend we see to drive down these costs is a 24x7 lights-out data centre: based on industry standard building blocks, and automated using modular software delivered through comprehensive services. Its end state is the ability to virtualise a heterogeneous computing environment with all applications in a pooled set of resources so that business load and demand drive utilisation - not systems requirements.

Delivering an Adaptive Infrastructure

Adaptive Infrastructure offerings help customers toward the industry trend to build this next generation data centre. It enables flexible vs. monolithic computing, low-cost asset pools which will replace high-cost IT islands, modular technology delivery for IT cost and efficiency improvements, automated and virtualised data centres, and advanced technologies that can be deployed faster and easier. Delivering an adaptive infrastructure involves the ability to integrate the following capabilities together:

IT Systems & Services: Scalability based on industry standards and IT services and solutions that help customers reduce costs while simplifying change. These include HP BladeSystem, Technology Services, Consulting & Integration Services, Agility Assessment Services, and Factory Express.

Power & Cooling: Holistic approach that delivers an energy efficient infrastructure to help customers maximise density while achieving optimal power utilisation. Solutions include Modular Cooling System and Data Centre Design Services.

Management: Unified monitoring and controlling of multi-OS, heterogeneous environments that help customers streamline processes, reduce cost and complexity, and improve operational efficiencies.

Security: Proactive best practices, management and full lifecycle services with built-in protection to help customers maintain business reliability and availability, and meet regulatory compliance.

Virtualisation: Pooling and sharing of IT resources that optimise utilisation and help customers reduce costs and increase agility so that supply meets demand.

Automation: Dynamic IT deployment with advanced automation and management tools that help customers reduce risk by shifting IT investment from maintenance to innovation.

Together, these enablers help drive down operational infrastructure costs to free up investment in innovation. They also provide the foundation for a business to become an adaptive enterprise, where business and IT are synchronised to capitalise on change. - The result helps companies become more agile and ultimately more competitive.