10
The far reaching benefits of IT efficiency
Regular columnist, Enterprise Strategy Group’s Steve Duplessie, focuses
YSIS
on the business of doing more with less.
ANAL
Recently, I had a discussion efficiency and gain even problem further as we
with a very senior operations greater benefits, despite the duplicate and replicate data—
manager at a major European current economy. All this normally for good reason. We
telecommunications company happened as a result of must protect our data and our
who was under pressure to cut something as seemingly simple ability to execute on it in the
GEMENT
costs. We were discussing his and benign as consolidation; I event of local and site failures.
experience with a backup became interested in We push data to the far edges
consolidation effort (hundreds discovering what other value of our remote organizations
MANA
of remote data sites) which could be derived by pushing and throughout our supply
leveraged VTL (virtual tape overall efficiency improvements chains to extend the value of
library) systems with data throughout the business and that data over the entire
deduplication technologies he IT. organization.
had deployed approximately
six months earlier. What I Overview The primary means of gaining
learned was entirely Data Growth is the Common efficiency across the business
unexpected and became the Factor Driving Inefficient IT and IT is realized by
impetus for this paper. consolidating infrastructure
Data growth is the only and data, both physically and
It seems that not only was the absolute constant in IT and, virtually. In addition, we must
company able to realize the arguably, is the inevitable begin to look outside of the
assumed and obvious benefits cause of most operating data center—to the business
of consolidation that one problems. New data growth processes and applications
would expect, but because the rates never abate; they only driving much of the data
new process was so much accelerate. Data growth occurs growth that will be impacting
more efficient, it altered the whether the economy is up or our spending over the coming
way the company down. months and years.
fundamentally viewed all of the
applications, processes, and As a society, we are constantly Infrastructure
services IT delivered to the increasing the capabilities and Consolidation
business. He stated that there opportunities for people to There are three primary
were substantial gains in far create even more data at an “layers” of data center
reaching areas—from IT’s even faster pace. Its growth infrastructure: server, network,
ability to significantly improve naturally causes “sprawl” and storage. Consolidating
ITSM delivery capabilities throughout the IT ecosystem. physical servers mean less
across regulatory bodies and We need more devices to store network connections, less
borders, to security, privacy, it, more servers to execute “boxes” to manage and
and beyond. Because of the upon it, more applications to support, and so on.
success of what began as a manipulate it, and more Furthermore, virtualization
fairly simple “consolidation” networking to connect to it. technologies enable IT
exercise in the area of backup More data generates more new operational and administrative
and recovery, the company is use cases, which in turn personnel to respond to
now aggressively investigating generates even more data, and business unit requirements
other opportunities to improve so on. We perpetuate the significantly faster due to
MAR/APR 09 WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44