Establishing the true cost of the data center, the total cost of ownership ( TCO ), is an operation that increasingly puts IT, managers in difficulty because the variables involved continue to increase. Furthermore, the hidden costs are such many that they often substantially “exceed” the budget foreseen. Thus, CIOs are constantly looking for ways to have certain expenses and precise budget planning. On the other hand, the priority is always to minimize the TCO while trying to implement new technologies as soon as they are available to provide the most effective possible help to the business. But how to get this result?
Consider all expenses
A first step could be to follow a strategic approach to selecting new products or to rationalize using existing ones. This can help manage your capital expenditure (CapEx) and save you money in the long run.
But don’t forget that there are also operational expenses (OpEx), such as infrastructure maintenance, power, networking, and personnel, which can greatly impact TCO. It’s also important to consider how infrastructure choices drive the hidden costs of unoptimized computing tasks, network connectivity, downtime, cooling, and energy inefficiency.
Pay attention to the consumption of idle servers.
A McKinsey survey reports that servers are utilized at only 5% to 15% of their actual capacity. But even when they are inactive, they consume a lot of energy. Not only. Uptime Institute found that 30% of servers worldwide are unused. This, given that a server consumes 30% to 40% of maximum power even when it is only turned on and not performing any tasks translates into a loss of 30 billion dollars a year in electricity that is wasted worldwide.
These considerations highlight that, in calculating the TCO, it is necessary to evaluate the entire life cycle of each infrastructure product. Decisions made could have effects for several years.
The cloud, an obligatory step
Digital transformation is leading organizations across all sectors to change business models. In this new on-demand economy, IT teams must support their businesses in an agile and flexible way, but, as mentioned, data center costs must not rise, far from it. Organizations have become aware that the cloud can achieve this result. However, cloud strategies can differ significantly, and many businesses are forced to use on-premise IT solutions to comply with security and regulatory requirements, existing capital investments, or performance and networking requirements. IDC claims that 70% of applications are still out of the public cloud.
But even in these cases, data center costs CapEx and OpEx can be drastically reduced by choosing a managed service, such as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). A choice of this type allows you to have all the advantages of the public cloud on-premise, such as the latest generation machines, maintenance, updates, and easy and rapid scalability without overprovisioning, but with costs linked only to the resources actually used.
TCO savings of up to 40%
According to a Forrester survey of multiple HPE customers, up to 40% TCO savings can be achieved with an IaaS like HPE GreenLake by avoiding overprovisioning and technology refresh fees, especially when infrastructure requirements itself continue to grow in the face of the increase in business. With HPE GreenLake, businesses can leverage modern, more powerful technology and easily scale up (or down) based on individual business needs.
Forrester’s sample also saw a significant reduction in time to market for global IT projects. Organizations have achieved this benefit by having extra ready-to-use resources available on-site. The use of these resources is measured; therefore, companies only pay for what they use, not what they have installed. HPE GreenLake also allows self-service reporting to budget and predict future computing capacity demands. This improves the efficiency of IT project execution, enables you to scale rapidly, and reduces the time spent procuring resources to align with business needs.
The economic impact of HPE GreenLake on data center costs
You can avoid maintenance and professional services expenses by replacing your legacy infrastructure with HPE GreenLake (and managed services offered by a certified partner like Netmind ). Along these lines, Forrester’s sample said they experienced an average savings of 60% in data center costs and cited HPE support as a significant factor in reducing these costs.
Last but not least, the use of HPE GreenLake has resulted in a 40% increase in the productivity of IT resources. And the support provided in on-premises infrastructure organizational decisions and data center management tasks (including administration and planning) has allowed enterprise IT professionals to assume a more strategic role in supporting business initiatives.
The Greenlake model is successful and consolidated, so Netmind has decided to include it in its offer. However, a basic role in creating an ad hoc solution capable of fully satisfying the needs of a company is played by all the proactive services provided directly by Netmind itself. The set of infrastructure and managed services allows you always to have a single point of contact available that allows you to forget about maintenance, updating, and support activities completely. And also the costs that these activities entail.
Also Read : Infrastructure As a Service, How Data Center Management Is Changing
