Private data centers are expensive. They cost money in terms of power, maintenance, and man-hours – and even though many companies are switching to the cloud, 75% of companies still use private clouds. Here are a few ways to mitigate the necessary costs of private cloud ownership.
Increase Utilization
In the average data center, a shocking number of servers are barely used at all. Prior to the advent of the cloud, CIO's needed to plan for spikes in usage that would only rarely occur. Most data centers now offload these spikes in usage to the cloud, but over-planning continues. A Gartner study suggests that up to 28% of servers draw power but carry no workloads. A further 40% of server racks are underutilized.
What this suggests is that most private data centers can slash nearly a third of their servers without seeing any decline in performance. This would represent a dramatic savings in terms of operational costs. There would no longer be a need to pay for the electricity costs necessary to keep under- or unutilized servers running, or to update or maintain them.
EOL Older Equipment
Downsizing equipment that’s past end-of-life is yet another way to save on operational costs in the data center. Once again, a huge amount of equipment in a data center – for example, over 70% of networking hardware – is past its functional end of life. That means that it’s either fully depreciated, or that its manufacturer is no longer supporting the software with regular updates.
Replacing this end-of-life hardware has a twofold benefit. First, newer equipment usually has a lower TCO – you’ll be able to support more workloads with fewer machines, which will draw less power and need less maintenance. Second, newer equipment gets patched regularly, which means it’s more secure – saving you from a considerable financial burden in terms of cyber-attacks.
Implement Proactive Monitoring
Most maintenance is done on a reactive basis. That means that as soon as something breaks, it gets fixed. The problem for data centers is that when something breaks, everything that depends on it also breaks, leading to widespread outages that can affect productivity and customer experience. This costs a lot of money – an estimated $8,000 USD for one minute of downtime.
Proactive maintenance helps administrators take things offline in a controlled fashion, before they break and start cascading failures. For example, one might employ an IoT temperature sensor that can discover rising temperatures in a hard drive bay. This would indicate that a drive needs to be replaced. An engineer would be able to copy the drive’s workload to a different server during replacement, thus ensuring continuity of operations during maintenance.
Cut Costs Further by Working with BIOSME
Our BIOS Assured service is guaranteed to cut data center operating costs by up to 40%. By actively monitoring your infrastructure, reporting problems, and proactively maintaining systems, we can free up vast amounts of money and manpower, letting you focus on strategic management initiatives that are more important to your business. If you want to cut costs, reduce downtime, and improve your quality of service, contact BIOSME today!
