3 Ways by which organisations can reduce their Datacenter costs

In today's globalised, tech-centric economy, datacenters play an important role in driving business outcomes. However, building, managing and sustaining a datacenter itself involves a significant cost to the company as organisations need to keep up with the capacity demand and reduce the ever-expanding carbon footprint. In the years ahead, digital content is only likely to increase with digital content - doubling every 18 months, according to market research firm IDC. Power consumption additionally will continue to be an area of concern as nonrenewable energy resources diminish and electricity costs rise. This is resulting in a rapid increase of datacenter costs and CIOs are required to balance pricepoints between innovations and business requirements.

The long-term implications of inefficiency and expensive datacenters can be huge to an organisation. Most functions of an organization including key segment of human activity such as energy, lighting, telecommunications, internet, transport security systems etc. are controlled by datacenters. Any malfunction in these datacenters can potentially threaten the company's functioning, with regards to security/ privacy, compliance with regulatory norms and a smoother functioning of the organization. Adopting some simple strategies can change the economics of your datacenter considerably and make it work for you in a way that reduces datacenter costs. These are:

1. REDUCING COOLING COSTS THROUGH ECONOMISATION

Cooling costs account for a significant portion of the energy consumption of a typical datacenter. While some hyper-scale datacenters have demonstrated significant reductions in operational and capital expenses by building chiller-less data centers that rely entirely on the use of outside air for data center cooling, these data centers have been built mainly in northern climates that don't experience excursions to hot temperatures or high humidity levels.
Servers are the primary generators of heat within a datacenter. It is important for IT managers to think long-term while choosing their datacenter infrastructure that generates less heat. Modern day storage infrastructure makes use of economisation which involves involves using the 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.

2. SERVER VIRTUALISATION
Datacenter Operators typically install several physical servers to run various applications in their organisation. This means that most servers run at a low "utilisation rate" which is the fraction of total computing resources engaged in useful work. Server virtualization offers organisations with a method to consolidate servers by allowing you to run multiple different workloads on one physical host server. A "virtual server" is a software implementation that executes programs like a real server. The advantage of Server Virtualisation is that multiple virtual servers can work simultaneously on one physical host server. Thus the utilisation rate of your datacenter increases. Virtualization enables you to use fewer servers, thus decreasing electricity consumption and waste heat.
In addition, 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 optimize 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. Due to these benefits, virtualization has become commonplace in large datacenters.

3. BETTER MANAGEMENT OF DATA STORAGE
Storage plays a critical role in the reduction of costs within a datacenter. According to a Dell commissioned Forrester Survey 66% of storage administrators believe that storing and managing data with the solutions available today is generally complex. Bajaj Capital, a company in the Financial Services industry needed a storage solution that could scale effectively, improve processing performance and ensure regulatory compliance due to the rapid growth of financial data. By making a few changes to their datacenter, they 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. Therefore, making changes to how you manage data storage by incorporating some modern technology can help your organisation reduce costs considerable:
Convergence: Convergence or Converged Infrastructure helps minimise compatibility issues. It simplifies the management of servers, storage systems and network devices.

Software Defined Networking: Software defined storage (SDS) offers flexibility and also reduces the overall cost of storage.
Deduplication: Technologies such as data deduplication which refers to the process of finding and eliminating duplicate pieces of data stored in different data sets is said to reduce data storage needs by as much as 90 percent. This helps in reducing your data footprint , cuts costs for hardware, software, power and data center space.

Automated tiering of Storage: Data stored in your datacenter looses its utility slowly as it ages. However at the same time, the data needs to be maintained as it is required for future records for the organisation. Since the data is not used on a daily basis, there is no requirement to store it on high performance drives and can be shifted to drives with lower performance to save energy. It is possible to conduct storage tiering in your datacenter automatically and this simplifies the process further. The use of automated tiering has increased from 13% to 20% from 2011 to 2014 as more IT administrators are seeing the value of relieving themselves of manual data storage tiering.

Flash at the Price of Disk: Today traditional flash offerings are available for the enterprise at the price of the disk. Flash makes retrieval of information faster and has a minimum susceptibility to damage. Hence it is an effective way for organisations to increase the performance of their storage architecture.
The three mentioned points can ensure that costs in your datacenter 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. Infact, when employed wisely an efficient datacenter could mean more business productivity and continuity.