Nowadays, datacenters play an important role in driving business outcomes. However, building, managing and sustaining a datacenter itself involves significant cost to the company as organisations need to keep up with the capacity demand and reduce the ever-expanding carbon footprint. Adopting some simple strategies can change the economics of your datacenter considerably and help you to reduces datacenter costs.
Reducing cooling costs through economisation
Cooling costs account for a significant portion of the energy consumption of a typical datacenter. Servers are the primary generators of heat within a datacenter. It is important for IT managers to think long-term while choosing datacenter infrastructure that generates less heat. Modern day storage infrastructure makes use of economisation which involves using outside climate conditions to cool the datacenter to save money on energy and cooling costs instead of using mechanical cooling means such as air conditioning. There are two primary forms of economization: air-side and water-side.
Air-side economization brings outside air directly into the data center as the primary source of cool air, whereas water-side economization uses an air-to-water heat exchanger and then brings cooled water into the datacenter where a second heat exchange takes place that uses the water to cool the datacenter air.
Server Virtualisation
Server virtualization offers organisations with a method to consolidate servers by allowing you to run multiple different workloads on one physical host server. “virtual server” is a software implementation that executes programs like real server. Server Virtualisation is that multiple virtual servers can work simultaneously on one physical host server. Thus the utilisation rate of datacenter increases and decreasing electricity consumption and waste heat.
Server virtualisation improves scalability, reduces downtime, speeds up disaster recovery efforts, and enables faster deployments. Server Virtualisation is also advantageous as it can move entire systems from one physical server to another in just a few seconds to optimise workloads or for maintenance without the hassle of downtime. Some virtualization solutions also have additionally features such as load balancing, failover capabilities and built-in resiliency features.
Better management of data storage
Storage plays a critical role in the reduction of costs within a datacenter. By implement Automated tiered storage to datacenter, this were able to improve employee efficiency through a four-fold increase in processing speed. Additionally, the Automated tiered storage delivered regulatory compliance and cost efficiencies and storage management was simplified.
The three mentioned points can ensure that datacenter costs are optimised while at the same time meet the performance demands of the modern datacenter. Cost-effectiveness within a datacenter, does not necessarily have to mean reduced efficiency or high impact on the environment. In fact, when employed wisely an efficient datacenter could mean more business productivity and continuity.
