7 ways to slash costs with the new data center

Storage consolidation Server virtualization Data center consolidation Thin-client computing Open source IP telephony Autonomic computing

The new data center, marked by cutting-edge technologies such as virtualization, Web-centric computing and autonomic computing, promises new efficiencies in hardware, software and staffing. But as more organizations move to the new paradigm, cost savings is rising as the prime benefit. Users and analysts say a business can cut overall operational costs anywhere from 25% to 90% with smart implementation of these seven new data center technologies.

1. Storage consolidation.

A good first step when it comes to slashing data center costs is pooling storage using storage-area networks (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS), experts say.

First, a company must get a handle on the types of storage it has in place - whether direct-attached, SAN or NAS - and calculate the maintenance and operational costs of each. Then, migrate to the most efficient, which in most cases will mean some kind of networked storage, says Johna Till Johnson, president at Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist. Many organizations are still hobbled by inefficient storage architectures, she says.

Such had been the case at American Medical Response (AMR), a medical transportation company in Greenwood Village, Colo. "We had a lot of the servers here in our data center that hadn't been moved onto the SAN and had their own disk array hanging off them. They were all running at about 40% utilization," says Jason Brougham, enterprise network manager at AMR. "That means we were wasting terabytes worth of storage and tens of thousands of dollars. When we combined all of that on the SAN we got to pool all of those chunks of storage. It's a real cost savings."

The deciding factor on storage architecture should be the cost to manage and maintain it. "NAS can be trickier to manage in some cases," Johnson says. "Plus, NAS is generally optimized for file storage, so it's great for archiving. But it doesn't work so well for database access. You have to look at what's best for your organization."

But whatever storage architecture you decide on, the most cost savings come only when it's implemented beyond the individual department. Johnson recommends appointing a "storage czar" to oversee the corporation. "You need one guy in charge, or at least you want to get everybody together on the same page and have conversations about this. That's where you really see your costs come down," she says.

2. Server virtualization.

Most organizations support and maintain a slew of underutilized application servers. The smart moves are server consolidation and deployment of more-efficient technologies such as blade servers or virtualization software.

AMR has seen significant cost savings, especially in terms of hardware and maintenance, by implementing blade servers and virtualization from EMC business unit VMware, Brougham says. "With blades and server virtualization, you quickly find that one server rack can almost run your entire company," he says. "It's hard to put a dollar amount on it since every company is different. But I'd say that from rack space alone there's a huge savings. You don't have to cool as much space, and you don't need UPS for as much."