For many this means difficult challenges to try and balance the two. Organizations can make savings in their operating costs by making relatively inexpensive changes to and how their data centers are run.

Gartner has identified seven important ways to cut data center costs:

1. Rationalize the Hardware

Hardware rationalization will result in savings in several areas. First, it will help with asset and inventory management and provide a clear picture of the boxes that are being used effectively and those that are not. Second, server rationalization should lower maintenance and support charges. Third, server rationalization will lower energy costs, typically more than $400 per server, per year. Finally, hardware rationalization projects usually yield savings of 5 percent to 10 percent of the overall hardware costs, when measured post project.

2. Consolidate Data Center Sites

Most organizations still have multiple data centers for their IT operations, ranging from large complex installations to small machine rooms. Consolidating these multiple sites into a smaller number of larger sites will often result in financial savings. Such economies go beyond real estate savings and include getting rid of redundant IT assets, software, maintenance and support, and disaster recovery contracts.

While these projects often result in reducing the number of data center operational staff needed, Gartner advises users not just to get rid of people but to retrain them to fill skill gaps in other parts of the data center or wider IT organization. Site consolation can typically result in savings of between 5 percent and 15 percent of the overall data center budget.

3. Manage Energy and Facilities Costs

Energy costs are rising for most data centers because the energy consumption of the underlying hardware continues to increase as new technologies, such as blade servers, are more widely used. As floor space runs out, more hardware is crammed into the space, thus requiring higher levels of cooling.

Gartner recommends employing the following tools and techniques to manage the energy cost curve: raise the temperature of the data center to 24 degrees Celsius to reduce the level of cooling required; use outside/free air as an alternative to expensive air conditioning; use hot aisle/cold aisle configurations, blanking panels and economizers; and use server-based energy management software to run workloads in the most energy efficient way, such as taking advantage of lower energy tariffs.

3. Renegotiate Contracts

Data center managers must work with finance and procurement teams to revisit all hardware, lease, software, maintenance and support contracts. In some cases, it may be appropriate to terminate a contract because it’s too expensive, while in others, new terms and conditions may secure a lower payment schedule. Vendors are used to reviewing contracts during downturns.

4. Manage the People Costs

People costs still form the largest single cost element for most data centers, sometimes running as high as 40 percent of the overall costs. Gartner advises users to review staffing levels and the types of skills needed for the next 24 months and to make maximum use of labor arbitrage benefits by using skills in regions with cheaper labor rates, such as India, Brazil, Poland and Romania.

5. Sweat the Assets

Delaying the procurement of new assets should be considered a necessary step for all data center managers. Upgrading based purely on the book value could incur unnecessary costs earlier in the life cycle. This may result in a performance disadvantage and possibly an energy use increase but will defer the capital expense of a new acquisition. Users should negotiate on maintenance and support costs in such instances, as well as ensuring that software is still supported on servers whose working life is being extended.

6. Virtualization

Virtualization of hardware should be encouraged to improve operational efficiency, as well as to support consolidation, decommissioning and cost management programs. For most users, the net benefits will include a smaller hardware estate, which, in turn, will mean lower operating depreciation costs and less-expensive maintenance and support.

Virtualization is also a good way to control energy costs. Although virtualization requires license and project costs, users can expect to see net savings within 24 months, and the effective use of virtualization can reduce server energy consumption by as much as 82 percent and floor space by as much as 86 percent.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “How to Cut Your Data Center Costs.” The report is available on Gartner’s Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=968812&subref=simplesearch.

Related posts:

1. New HP Data Center Design Methodology Saves Customers Millions in Capital, Operating Costs
2. New Dell Data Center Products Reduce IT Complexity and Improves Energy Efficiency
3. Evergreen Systems Offers Guaranteed ROI For Data Center Automation

Organizations have increasingly more platforms, applications, servers, virtual machines and databases to protect than ever before. Out-tasking discrete IT functions such as backup and recovery, ensures 24×7 availability and enables IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives, fulfill compliance requirements and mitigate their overall IT risk.

Not only are organizations dealing with rising user expectations and service levels, they continue to deal with staffing challenges. Three quarters of the companies surveyed in Symantec’s State of the Data Center survey said user expectations were rising gradually or rapidly.

Furthermore, 60 percent of the respondents said meeting the service levels demanded by the organization are more or much more difficult to meet. Additionally, 43 percent of respondents said finding qualified applicants is a big or huge problem.

Symantec Managed Backup Services help customers manage their Symantec NetBackup environments on an ongoing basis – optimizing their current technology investment. The service is designed for customers who want to take a proactive approach to their backup and recovery strategy by having Symantec experts manage their day-to-day backup operations, while leveraging existing Symantec NetBackup infrastructure.

“The current economic climate is driving many organizations to consider which functions can be out-tasked,” said Adam Couture, principal analyst for Gartner. “With caps on capital spending and hiring freezes becoming commonplace, IT organizations will have to decide which functions are business critical and which can be more effectively managed by an external service provider.”

Based on the ITIL processes and deep product knowledge, Symantec Managed Backup Services combine local management—on-site or off-site—with remote round-the-clock monitoring, incident management, restore requests, planning and optimization assistance, and reporting capabilities.

The services are managed by a local Service Delivery Manager, who supervises day-to-day operations and provides customers with comprehensive monthly account reviews.

Symantec’s Managed Backup Services deliver the following:

• Managed Problem Escalation: Working closely with the Managed Services Operation Center, the Service Delivery Manager provides proactive problem management and escalation, ensuring that issues are resolved swiftly.
• Improved Backup and Recovery Performance: Symantec’s deep expertise on architecture and operations provides proactive guidance on engineering, deployment and ongoing management of backup and recovery operations in order to meet strict SLAs.
• Improved Audit and Regulatory Compliance: Out-tasking backup and recovery operations ensures that critical business data is under strict service control and customers maintain audit and regulatory compliance.
• Strategic Use of IT Resources: As organizations experience difficulty with hiring, training and retaining data protection professionals, out-tasking backup and recovery operations enables valuable staff to focus on important strategic initiatives.
• Cost Control: Out-tasking backup and recovery operations helps customers optimize existing and future hardware and facilities expenditures. Furthermore, out-tasking ensures transparent and predictable costs for backup and recovery operations.

“Many organizations are currently upgrading and modernizing their backup infrastructures to keep pace with data growth and heightened requirements for recovery,” said Anil Chakravarthy, senior vice president, Symantec Enterprise Services. “At the same time, they are also evaluating out-tasking to experts as a way to reduce costs and gain higher reliability. Symantec’s Managed Backup Services can deliver up to 20 percent savings in operational costs, while also ensuring a backup success rate of 97 percent.”

For more information visit the Symantec Managed Backup Services web site.

Related posts:

1. Symantec Releases Security Threat Report
2. IBM Internet Security Systems Expands Services
3. HP Unveils New Mission Critical Services with Flexibility for Changing Economic Climate

History shows that companies that invest in innovation during recessionary times can emerge healthier and better-positioned for long-term success. As well, IT organizations that invest in the right technology today can help their organizations operate more efficiently, create competitive advantages and ultimately prosper in the long run.

Cloud computing – the delivery of applications, server operating systems and other software as an online service – is one such technology that holds great promise. Bridging in-house software with online services creates new opportunities for strategic IT without breaking the bank or abandoning existing investments.

Cloud-based services allow companies to quickly and easily scale up as needed because they can provide a virtually unlimited pool of storage and computing resources. Cloud-based services also offer a “utility computing” model through which customers pay only for the resources they actually use, similar to buying electricity by the kilowatt-hour from a local utility.

Industry analysts have predicted a sharp rise in the adoption of cloud computing. According to IDC, worldwide IT spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold in the next three years, reaching US$42 billion by 2012.

“We expect the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the current financial crisis,” says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “IT managers are facing many challenges today such as budgetary pressures, regulatory compliance demands, and securing and managing sprawling datacenters, so it’s critical that they identify the right transformational technologies to invest in for the future and understand their IT options.”

But cloud computing is not an all-or-nothing proposition.“Very few companies will rely either 100 percent on public cloud providers or 100 percent on in-house infrastructure,” says Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Infrastructure Server Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is working toward an integrated approach that bridges on-premises datacenters and the external cloud, which offers our customers the benefits of both approaches.”

At the 10th annual Microsoft Management Summit this week in Las Vegas, Kelly outlined an infrastructure strategy to help IT customers understand their options as they incorporate “the cloud” into their future plans:

Private Clouds

Applications are traditionally run by on-site servers. By employing techniques such as virtualization, automated management and utility-billing models, IT managers can evolve the internal datacenter into a “private cloud” that offers many of the performance, scalability and cost-saving benefits associated with public clouds. Microsoft provides the foundation for private clouds with infrastructure solutions to match a range of customer sizes, needs and geographic regions.

Public Clouds

Cloud computing is expanding the traditional Web-hosting model to a point where enterprises are able to offload commodity applications to third-party service providers (hosters) and, in the near future, the Azure Services Platform. Using Microsoft infrastructure software and Web-based applications, the public cloud allows companies to move applications between private and public clouds. In addition, the Azure development platform extends the capabilities of enterprise IT by facilitating development of a new breed of highly scalable and distributed applications that both augment and complement on-premises solutions. An open and interoperable platform, Azure supports Web standards and multiple programming languages.

“Our goal is to give businesses the choice of running applications on-site, in the cloud or using a combination of the two,” says Kelly. “This hybrid model gives customers the best of both worlds — the scale and convenience of a public cloud and the control and reliability of on-premises software — and lets them move fluidly between the two based on their needs. It provides customers an on-ramp from their current IT environment to the cloud.”

IT Service Solutions Announcements

Building on its cloud computing strategy, Microsoft made several announcements today and over the past few weeks on a broad range of hosted IT service solutions that complement its on-premises software, including these:

• The Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises, a new service offering to help customers create private clouds, and a Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters, which provides the ability to deploy on-demand managed services and virtualized servers powered by System Center and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
• System Center Online Desktop Manager, an integrated security and management tool that will provide desktop management capabilities in the form of an online service. Designed to help businesses keep their IT environments secure and up-to-date using a Web-based subscription service to monitor, troubleshoot, update, configure and secure desktops, this new service will be available in beta by the end of this year.
• Microsoft Forefront Online Security for Exchange, an online service that helps protect an organization’s messaging infrastructure from spam, malware and e-mail policy violations.
• The availability in coming weeks of a second beta of a new set of technologies, code-named “Geneva,” that makes it dramatically easier for customers to build more secure access and multi-company collaboration into software and hosted services.
• The availability of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which delivers enterprise-class communications and collaboration software as subscription services to businesses of all sizes, for purchase in 19 countries worldwide.
• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which delivers end-to-end service management across Windows and non-Windows environments. A final release within 60 days is planned.
• Partner support, including the HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center, which delivers a comprehensive set of infrastructure management capabilities for managing HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, as well as support for the PRO feature from Dell and others.

“The IT industry is in the midst of a major transformation as more applications are being delivered over the Web as a service,” adds Kelly. “As customers weather the current economic volatility, Microsoft and its partners will help customers build and adapt solutions for a broad range of scenarios. Microsoft’s infrastructure strategy and cloud services offerings are the most comprehensive in the industry, helping customers navigate these challenges and make the most out of their existing IT investments, whether on-premises, in the cloud or in between.”
Bob Muglia discusses the customer benefits of cloud computing

Related posts:

1. Persona-based BPM Can Reduce Deployment Time and Costs, and Increase Individual Productivity by 40%
2. Microsoft Unveils Exchange 2010 With Public Beta
3. Reduce Energy Costs With Updated Desktop Central

Multi-tiered hybrid design from HP aligns facility design with business priorities. This delivers improved operations and energy efficiency with millions of dollars in potential cost savings. The design approach accelerates the adoption of next-generation data center technologies and services.

When designing a data center, most businesses today operate under the assumption that more availability is always better. As a result, they build entire data centers based on the highest availability required by their most business-critical applications. Consequently, they invest in expensive, unnecessary redundant infrastructure along with specialized mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.

An industry-standard classification system defines tiers I – IV for data center facilities. Tier IV facilities meet the highest availability requirements. (2) Under HP’s breakthrough approach to facility design, customers can significantly reduce capital and operating costs by designing data centers with multiple tiers. Each tier matches the availability requirements for a range of business applications. Multi-tiered facilities reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary technology along with redundant power and cooling systems. In addition, the design enables organizations to easily adapt data centers tiers for changing technology needs throughout the life of a facility.

“A monolithic approach to data center design drives up construction and operating costs,” said David J. Cappuccio, vice president and chief of research, Gartner. “Adopting a multi-tiered approach scales back capital investments and operating expenses because it right-sizes facility infrastructures.”

Multi-tiered hybrid design begins with a business impact analysis to evaluate and prioritize applications. The analysis also identifies where redundant technology and infrastructure are required to support business-critical applications. Applications with similar requirements are then grouped into data center zones – or tiers – designed with appropriate levels of redundancy and scalability.

Building a combined tier II and tier IV facility instead of a facility with a single level IV tier saves an organization millions of dollars. The HP multi-tiered hybrid design cost analysis tool demonstrates how adjustments in facility design can impact capital costs.

For example, designing a 50,000-square-foot data center with multiple tiers can cut construction costs by approximately 24 percent, compared to building a tier IV-only facility. In addition, designing a data center with zones for multiple tiers reduces energy and space requirements, significantly reducing operating costs.

“Customers can save millions of dollars by building multi-tiered data centers that are scalable, efficient and predictable,” said Peter Gross, vice president, Critical Facilities Services, HP. “HP helps facilities and technology staffs align objectives to improve operations and reduce cost.”

Multi-tiered hybrid design is offered as part of HP’s Critical Facilities Services delivered by EYP MCF. More information about the multi-tiered hybrid design from HP is available at www.hp.com/go/eypmcf.

About HP

HP, the world’s largest technology company, simplifies the technology experience for consumers and businesses with a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.

(1) Based on the HP multi-tiered hybrid design cost analysis tool www.hp.com/go/eypmcf
(2) http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/data_center_tiers.html

Related posts:

1. Dell Helps Customers Design Data Centers for Energy Efficiency and Peak Performance
2. Gartner Gives Seven Ways to Save Costs in the Data Center
3. Virtualization Saves Microsoft Customers Nearly a Half-Million Dollars Per Year

Dell’s data center consulting practice combines innovative tools and software with professional expertise to help improve data center performance, reduce energy consumption and to help companies avoid additional capital expenditures.

Dell will utilize the state-of-the-art simulation capabilities of Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDC as part of its data center consulting practice.

The main output of 6SigmaDC is the Virtual Facility, a full and mathematically precise 3-D representation of the data center which facilitates a holistic approach to the design and ongoing thermal and asset management of data center space. The Virtual Facility enables the owner or operator to take a proactive approach to the placement and replacement of equipment within facilities, modeling impacts before any physical deployments are undertaken.

“Every data center has its own DNA– no two are alike,” said Hassan Moezzi, CEO of Future Facilities. “Together, Dell and Future Facilities are taking the guesswork out of designing them for efficiency and better energy consumption using computational modeling to layout, test and validate performance and to maximize that performance over time.”

Dell and Future Facilities are the first companies to use the Virtual Facility concept for provisioning computing requirements and ensuring the optimal configuration and placement of equipment. By taking a proactive approach to design, Dell and Future Facilities can alleviate the need to trouble-shoot layout issues after facilities are built or changes have been made.

Dell and Future Facilities expect to save companies capital and operational expenditures through optimal data center designs that help companies improve energy efficiency and avoid the wasteful over-provisioning of space, power and cooling.

Dell today introduced next-generation data center infrastructure products designed to help customers simplify and manage their data center environment while improving energy efficiency. The Dell PowerEdge 4220 and PowerEdge 2420 rack enclosures support Dell’s broad portfolio of servers and storage systems and can be used in virtually any environment, including data centers, remote offices, wiring closets or even factory floors.

Future Facilities 6SimgaDC and the Virtual Facility:

Virtual Facility (VF) is a full 3-dimensional mathematical representation of the physical data center at any point in time. At the design stage it can simulate and validate engineering assumptions such as optimal floor void depths, rack layouts, power distribution, air handler positioning and redundancy assessments.

Once in operation, VF provides a full, 3-D inventory of all data center equipment with visualization of temperature distribution and airflow at room and cabinet level. IT departments can then preview future equipment deployment and evaluate the thermal/environmental impact of various deployment scenarios, enabling power, cooling and space constraints to be managed to maximize ROI and minimize risk.

• 6SigmaRoom evaluates data center design during the early and detailed design stages via experimentation with different equipment layouts and configurations.
• 6SigmaRack analyzes and optimizes rack layouts beyond installation.
• 6SigmaManager maintains and manages facilities throughout their lifetime.
• 6SigmaPower assesses the data center power network at any point in time.
• 6SigmaViewer lets designers share the facility they have created with others such as facilities executives.

Dell Data Center Optimization Services:

By applying best practices in data center design, layout and configuration, Dell helps customers exploit unused capacity in existing data centers to avoid the significant capital expenditure of building a new data center.

Assessment : Dell’s Energy Smart Data Center Assessment uses Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling to analyze existing power and cooling infrastructure, find inefficiencies, and provide actionable recommendations that help companies meet computing requirements without exceeding existing power and cooling limitations.

Design : Data Center Conceptual Design is a three-to 12-week engagement to optimize an existing facility or design a new data center to meet a company’s growing needs. The hands-on work sessions present options for solutions based on priorities, constraints and budget. Deliverables include basis of design, bill of materials, budget estimates and a project schedule.

Consolidation : Dell helps customers consolidate facilities and migrate hundreds or thousands of servers and applications to reduce the numbers of data centers they need to run their business.
Platform Optimization and Virtualization : Dell designs, plans and implements end-to-end virtualization solutions and automates the physical to virtual migration process so that customers can run fewer servers to save space and power and cooling in their data centers. In addition, Dell also migrates proprietary Unix platforms to open solutions on x86 hardware that allow customers to simplify and save.
Storage Consolidation : Dell helps customers right-size and tier their storage infrastructures to reduce cost and complexity.

“Our consultants will use Future Facilities’ tools to design data centers from the ‘inside out’ and use the power and thermal efficiency of Dell systems to create reliable, energy-efficient, green data centers that enable our customers to compute more and consume less,” said Tim Webb, director of Dell’s Infrastructure Consulting Practice.

About Future Facilities Limited

Future Facilities (http://www.futurefacilities.com) is a leading provider of powerful design, optimization and management software for mission critical facilities and data centers. The company’s solutions are applied to ensure all capacity, efficiency and reliability criteria are met throughout all phases of the facility lifecycle.

Related posts:

1. New Dell Data Center Products Reduce IT Complexity and Improves Energy Efficiency
2. New HP Data Center Design Methodology Saves Customers Millions in Capital, Operating Costs
3. TrendPoint’s Four-Point Plan For Green Data Centers

Rack design plays a key role in building an efficient and manageable data center. Data center racks now incorporate technologies designed to efficiently store, power, cool, manage and secure hardware. These features enable each rack to function as its own small data center.

Dell’s new rack enclosures are designed to help customers enhance hardware utilization, create effective power and cooling, and reduce the server footprint in their data center.
The PowerEdge 4220 and PowerEdge 2420 rack enclosures incorporate several new innovative features including:

• Efficient Power and Cooling : 80 percent front-and-rear-door perforation lowers the cold air restraint to the server to enhance efficiency.  The new racks are deeper than previous Dell racks (1071mm vs. 1000mm), so there’s more space for hot air to move out of the rack. The new Dell racks also feature air dams at the front mounting posts to prevent hot air at the back of the servers from leaking back to the front of the servers, which can increase server inlet air temperatures.
• Effective Power Distribution : Flexible rear and side-rack power distribution unit (PDU) options gives IT staff easy access to power outlets within the rack and doesn’t take up valuable rack space designated for IT equipment.
• Simplified Cable Management : Cable management options such as adjustable cable rings and removable “tail-bars” at the top and bottom of the rack back frame simplify power and cable routing.
• Strong and Secure : The PowerEdge 4220 rack has a static load rating of 2,500 pounds and the PowerEdge 2420 has a static load rating of 1,500 pounds. Stabilizer bars to secure the rack to the floor, or ‘ganging kits’ to bolt adjacent racks to each other are also available.

Reveal Your Hidden Data Center

These new products enable customers to improve the energy efficiency of their data center infrastructure. Businesses can achieve optimal data center performance by also focusing on IT productivity or the amount of useful work they are getting out of the data center.
Dell’s Reveal Your Hidden Data Center strategy focuses on server virtualization and consolidation, decommissioning out-of-use equipment, refreshing legacy systems, finding the optimal data center temperature, utilizing containment and moving cooling closer to IT to help businesses improve productivity and energy efficiency in their existing data centers.
Dell’s goal is to first help customers find a way to prolong the use of their current data centers instead of building new ones. This ties into our larger goal of helping customers simplify and save.

Data Center Optimization Services

Dell offers Data Center Optimization Services through its data center consulting practice including virtualization and storage consulting, data center consolidation and migration and data center design, layout and configuration. These new services help customers further improve productivity, energy efficiency and capacity in existing facilities and avoid the significant costs associated with building a new data center.

“Data center racks are no longer just cabinets that house servers and storage – they are an integral part of building a powerful and flexible data center infrastructure to maximize IT productivity,” said Dr. Albert Esser, vice president of Data Center Infrastructure at Dell. “With the launch of our new rack enclosures, businesses of all sizes can best manage their data centers in a cost effective and energy efficient way.”

Dell today announced that its data center consulting practice will utilize Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDC software suite to design and simulate data centers that maximize space utilization and energy efficiency through the optimal configuration and placement of IT hardware, racks, cabinets and power and cooling equipment.

Related posts:

1. Dell Helps Customers Design Data Centers for Energy Efficiency and Peak Performance
2. Gartner Gives Seven Ways to Save Costs in the Data Center
3. New HP Data Center Design Methodology Saves Customers Millions in Capital, Operating Costs

Cost Savings with Microsoft Virtualization

The cost of running IT systems has increased as electrical power, cooling and physical space has become constrained. In his 2008 refereed journal article, “Worldwide electricity used in data centers,” Jonathan Koomey, Ph.D., of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University concluded that total datacenter power was about 1.5 percent of all U.S. electricity use in 2005, with 80 percent of that amount going toward powering and cooling servers.

A separate report, by Gartner Inc., stated that “the effective use of virtualization can reduce server energy consumption by up to 82 percent and floor space by 85 percent” (Gartner: “Energy Savings via Virtualization: Green IT on a Budget”; Nov. 12, 2008).

Cost Savings with Microsoft Virtualization

“Businesses are looking to reduce and manage computing costs in datacenters and across server and client computing devices,” said David Greschler, director of integrated virtualization at Microsoft. “Virtualization software allows businesses to pool computing resources to drive down IT costs, increase IT efficiency and be more responsive to business needs. Customers are getting a better bang for their buck with the Microsoft platform and virtualization solutions because virtualization is in both the operating system and in the holistic management tools. Customers can manage IT services and a broad set of applications across the datacenter and desktops. There is less of a learning curve for customers, and it eases interoperability with existing systems.”

Savings Through Available Built-In Virtualization and Management Automation

Microsoft’s approach to virtualization, which incorporates server and presentation virtualization into Windows Server 2008 and unlimited virtual machine management with Microsoft System Center suite license, is helping break down barriers to broad virtualization adoption.

“The VMware ESX solution would have cost $30,000 (U.S.) for four servers. With Microsoft, we have a service provider agreement that allows for monthly payments with no capital costs — costing us less than $1,000 over the life of the contract,” said David Straede, president and chief operating officer for Santa Barbara Web Hosting. “Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V has the core features businesses need. It’s the Windows people know, is installed just like other Windows-based applications, and works in a management console that IT staff are already using. The ESX feature set simply doesn’t justify its additional expense.”

If making it easy for customers to implement virtualization is important, making it easy to manage the environment is just as critical for saving time and money. With Microsoft System Center, customers have a single solution for managing the entire IT life cycle, from deployment and provisioning to monitoring and backup. Equally important, customers can manage both server and desktop resources, both virtual and physical assets, and both Microsoft and VMware hypervisors, all with the same platform.

These capabilities helped Banverket ICT choose Microsoft for its virtualization strategy. “We knew we wanted to build a compatible virtualization platform that would encompass server consolidation, Terminal Services and application virtualization that we could manage with a single set of tools,” said Pontus Blomkvist, service design manager, Banverket ICT. “With Microsoft Application Virtualization for Terminal Services, we have been able to reduce the number of terminal servers because we can run many applications on any server at any time, without worrying about conflicts. With Hyper-V, we are now running 50 virtual machines in production, with a utilization rate of 80 percent for some of the servers as opposed to 15 percent before we deployed Hyper-V.”

Savings Through Consolidation, Reductions in Power

By running multiple virtual machines on fewer physical servers, Microsoft customers are drastically cutting hardware requirements and easing server management. For example, Indiana University’s Auxiliary IT Department went from 152 to just 32 servers, which it expects will save $85,000 (U.S.) annually. Saxo Bank had an average physical server utilization of just 20 percent and was deploying nearly 200 new servers per year before using server virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V allowed the bank to reduce the number of servers needed by 36 percent and realize savings equivalent to $1 million (U.S.), because of lower server hardware costs and associated reductions in space, power and cooling costs.

Many customers have realized similarly dramatic electrical savings as a result of server consolidation, which is a particularly important benefit in today’s climate of volatile power prices. TALX expects to save approximately 50 percent in annual power and cooling costs by consolidating its server environment with Hyper-V. HotSchedules, which noted that its No. 1 cost in the datacenter is power, spent about $11,000 (U.S.) a month on datacenter power costs, but with Hyper-V it anticipates that this monthly figure will go down to $2,500. Santa Barbara Web Hosting uses Hyper-V to reduce its power consumption costs by $5,220 (U.S.) per month, helping the company provide more cost-effective services to its customers. And Slough Borough Council took advantage of the savings from eliminating 10 physical servers to preserve the electrical power needed to turn on a new storage area network.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see us virtualize 60 servers once our physical-to-virtual analysis is complete, which represents nearly half our server holdings,” said Chris Wintermute, technical infrastructure manager for Slough Borough Council. “We’ve achieved hardware savings of $148,000 (U.S.), and we expect to reduce server deployment costs by $23,700 (U.S.) annually, based on rolling out 20 servers a year.”

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Hyper-V Could Ship Sooner
2. New HP Data Center Design Methodology Saves Customers Millions in Capital, Operating Costs
3. Retailers Look to Virtualization

As part of its commitment to simplify management of IBM mainframes in heterogeneous enterprise environments, CA (NASDAQ: CA) today announced new releases of its network and systems management solutions that help customers improve performance and increase availability for their increasingly complex business-critical applications.

Enterprise IT organizations continue to run most business-critical applications on IBM mainframes, but their network and systems management staffs have to cope with an increasingly complex range of tasks requiring a broad range of skill-sets. CA’s newly enhanced solutions—CA NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP r11.6 and CA SYSVIEW Performance Management r12—greatly reduce the complexity of managing mainframe-based services, enabling IT to deliver greater value to the business with its existing resources.

In accordance with CA’s Mainframe 2.0 initiative, both products are available via electronic software distribution—allowing customers to install them directly from local DASD without creating a tape cartridge.

“As companies leverage their mainframe investments to deliver a growing portfolio of services to internal and external users, they must be able to quickly discover and correct technical issues affecting those services,” said Mark Combs, senior vice president of CA’s Mainframe Business Unit. “CA’s latest releases of CA NetMaster and CA SYSVIEW directly address this critical issue by enabling IT personnel to more quickly and effectively prevent outages and optimize performance.”

CA NetMaster Reduces the Impact of Network Problems on Business Availability

The new release of CA NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP helps organizations address network management challenges with IBM’s Enterprise Extender (EE) technology, which enables legacy applications to run over IP networks without modification but keeps these layers of network activity hidden from view.

Powerful exception-based diagnostics in r 11.6 reveal “hidden” EE issues that enable IT to better safeguard application availability and performance. New EE functions include visual indicators, proactive warnings, packet traces using SmartTrace, resource usage reports, diagnostic tools and built-in best practice recommendations.

Supports ZIIP Processing, IPv6

CA NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP r 11.6, which supports IPv6, offloads a large part of its processing to zIIP engines, thereby enabling sites to reduce their consumption of costly general processor CPU cycles. It also helps organizations address Requirement 11 of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, which governs the protection of customers’ personal information.

Through integration with solutions such as CA Service Desk, CA NSM and CA OPS/MVS Event Management and Automation, CA NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP r11.6 enables organizations to integrate mainframe-related network management tasks with their overall enterprise management processes. Organizations also can view and manage systems alerts from CA SYSVIEW on the CA NetMaster console.

CA SYSVIEW Features New GUI, Auditing Capabilities

CA SYSVIEW Performance Management r12, an interactive solution for proactive management and real-time monitoring of z/OS® environments, makes it easy for IT staff to optimize service levels across multiple systems.

Enhancements in r12 include:

• Graphical performance “dashboards” that enable users to easily manage diverse mainframe systems, subsystems, databases, networks, and middleware from a single point-of-control, personalize data displays for individual manager’s needs, and set customized alert thresholds.
• Integrated access to performance data from other CA solutions—including CA Vantage™ Storage Resource Manager, CA 1® Tape Management, CA ASTEX™ Performance, and CA PDSMAN® PDS Library Management.
• Intuitive reporting tools that let users quickly produce customized reports that can be easily exported to Excel, PDF, XML, text file, email, or HTML formats.
• Compliance-focused auditing that allows commands entered by all users to be recorded and reviewed as required to manage IT compliance requirements.
• Simplified deployment and maintenance that enables faster adoption of new releases by maintaining settings and thresholds. The new release also simplifies the transition to new releases of CICS® by eliminating the need to recycle CICS regions.
• Advanced centralized management through the added support of IMS Type 2 commands that enables users to centrally issue IMS commands and query responses across multiple systems.

Supports IBM’s RMF and Other Third-Party Data Sources

CA SYSVIEW Performance Management r12 supports third-party data sources such as IBM’s RMF, including access and utilization of past-performance RMF displays to speed the diagnosis of performance problems. CA SYSVIEW Performance Management r12 is also tightly integrated with CA’s rich portfolio of mainframe and enterprise management solutions—including CA OPS/MVS Event Management and Automation and CA Insight Performance Monitor for DB2® for z/OS.

“Enterprise IT organizations continue to lean heavily on the mainframe to deliver essential services, but they are not able to staff up proportionally to meet the growing demands of the business,” said Clay Ryder, president, The Sageza Group. “With its most recent upgrades of CA NetMaster and CA SYSVIEW, CA is demonstrating its commitment to address this disparity by making it easier for IT staffs to effectively manage and optimize the performance of their mainframe environments.”

About CA

CA (NASDAQ: CA) is the world’s leading independent IT management software company. With CA’s Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision and expertise, organizations can more effectively govern, manage and secure IT to optimize business performance and sustain competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.ca.com.

Related posts:

1. ManageEngine to Offer SaaS Network and Server Monitoring Applications
2. ASG’s Newest Business Service Management Solution
3. iET Solutions Releases iET ITSM 5.0 and iET Enterprise 11.0

Evergreen’s announcement comes one day after HP announced major product upgrades to its Predictive Service Operations software, designed, according to HP, to “help CIOs adapt to new business directives in today’s challenging economic environment and help customers leverage the economic downturn into a strategic opportunity by modernizing and driving more efficiency into their IT organization.”

Evergreen’s CEO Don Casson commented, “This offer will allow clients to apply ITIL® best practices to data center operations, specifically server automation, and transform the data center using HP automation technology.

Not only will this offer help companies re-engineer the high-volume, labor-intensive processes in their data center, consolidating and leveraging their virtual and non-virtual servers, it will also coordinate the workflow initiated by server changes and events through all other ‘silos’ in IT, including the helpdesk, in order to automate change management, transparently, throughout IT, using the HP Operations Orchestration (OO) toolset.”

“Customers need to manage cost, risk and change in a predictive fashion to ensure they are successful now and in the future,” said Walt Rossi, director, product marketing, Software and Solutions, HP. “Evergreen’s offerings complement HP IT Operations software and helps customers meet these goals.”

The new offer assists the client in identifying and re-engineering several key, high volume, labor-intensive technical processes, primarily dealing with server provisioning and deployment, as well as patch and revision management. Metrics are collected on the labor cost of FTE for these processes and savings are demonstrated to the client through an on-site, ‘proof of concept’ system that works with the company’s existing server deployment and testing systems to document the reliability, robustness and time and cost savings associated with automation and thus prove the system’s ROI. Evergreen guarantees that the offer will document at least $500,000 in savings or their consulting services are provided at no charge.

In conjunction with its new offer, Evergreen has released a white paper with HP on Developing a Business Case for Data Center Transformation through ITIL Best Practices and Automation. The paper reviews current industry trends in data center operations, including consolidation, growth, operational efficiency changes, virtualization, ITIL best practices, security, configuration and new expectations from the business that data center operations must make bottom-line contributions.

The paper goes on to explore a variety of optimization strategies for data center improvement that include increasing operational efficiency through workflow analysis and reduction of infrastructure complexity, developing security, disaster recovery and business continuity procedures and ultimately leveraging a variety of HP Server Automation tools to transform its operations. Step-by-step instructions for developing metrics and a business case to justify data center and server automation are included. The paper can be downloaded at no cost at:

www.evergreensys.com/downloads/datacenterautomation/

Related posts:

1. CA’s Data Center Automation Enhancement
2. Gartner Gives Seven Ways to Save Costs in the Data Center
3. New HP Data Center Design Methodology Saves Customers Millions in Capital, Operating Costs

Photo by Brain Hancock

The cast of data center monsters include:

• Dracula, The Data Center Energy Sucking Vampire
• Frankenstein, The Multi-Vendor Environment Monster
• The Blob, The Virtualized Data Center…Gone Wrong
• Skeletons, Legacy, Unknown Server and Storage Hardware
• Ghosts, The Spooks Haunting Unsecured Data Centers
• Werewolf, The Untrained Custodian    

With the initiative, HP is trying to bring a little levity to the challenges IT departments face while educating and engaging with its audience in a fun, creative way.

Skeletons, Legacy, Unknown Server and Storage Hardware

The animated shorts can be found on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/HPMonsters.

HP’s destination site – www.hp.com/go/whathauntsyou – has monster images and sounds, allows visitors to vote for their favorite monster and includes lots of good information on best approaches for ridding the data center of the monsters that haunt it.

Related posts:

1. New Dell Data Center Products Reduce IT Complexity and Improves Energy Efficiency
2. Gartner Gives Seven Ways to Save Costs in the Data Center
3. Evergreen Systems Offers Guaranteed ROI For Data Center Automation