Of late, infrastructure consolidation has become a hot topic,
clearly both for the CIOs as well as the technology vendors. Enterprises today
are looking to derive more from their IT infrastructure investments. And, this
is being driven by high availability, application rationalization, and
infrastructure consolidation. Globally, organizations are looking to implement
fit-for-purpose-infrastructure components to achieve higher performance while
implementing a scalable, and highly available ecosystem. Experts agree that
infrastructure consolidation is a key for achieving this goal.
In todays climate of flat or shrinking IT budgets,
consolidation offers a means to achieve significant cost savings. But, its
attractiveness does not end with cost savings. The growing need for space and
power in data centers can be curbed; performance of both servers and storage
subsystems can be increased. System administrators time can be sharply
reduced, as system availability is improved, and user satisfaction is increased.
An improvement in disaster recovery capabilities will naturally follow from most
consolidation projects. Finally, the IT infrastructure can be modernized to
support the installations future plans for growth. But, any organization has
to work in order to realize these potential benefits. The targets for
consolidation need to be carefully selected. A bad choice of target may result
in great difficulty in completing the project. In addition, when the equipment
being consolidated does not belong to the IT department, organizational issues
must be addressed, since the installation needs to develop a detailed project
plan for the consolidation. The plan must pay attention to issues like fallback,
and testing.
In todays climate of flat IT budgets, consolidation offers significant cost savings |
Its the Future
According to Gartner, a majority of Indian CIOs will look to maximize return
on investments already made in terms of technology purchase. Consolidating, and
getting the best out of the existing IT set up is likely to be the top priority
for most of the Indian CIOs this year. IT managers will look to revamp their
existing infrastructure in a big way this, year and one of the key ways of doing
it will be consolidation.
Since the Indian market is no different from the global one, the
challenges of legacy infrastructure, and adaptation to emerging technology
trends are burning issues, and they are on the Indian CTO/CIO priority list.
Consolidation, whether at the desktop, server or application
level, will be the driving force behind lot of CIO moves in 2007. But, storage
will be one of the key areas where a lot of attention will be paid. Although the
tremendous data growth, and the challenges associated with managing this data
has made CIOs realize the advantages that these evolved forms bring to a storage
set up.
In India too, market players agree that consolidation will be
the way forward to manage IT costs while improving IT usage and deployment
efficiencies. As all numbers are driven by global market situations, and
technology acceptance dynamics, infrastructure management costs, which are
generally around 30% of any IT ecosystem operating expenses, are under scrutiny.
Infrastructure consolidation is a surefire way forward in meeting slated
business goals, keeping costs, and efficiencies in mind.
Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in