Hot Technologies: Infrastructure Consolidation: Surefire Path

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.

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