5 Tips for Increasing Infrastructure Efficiency

Apr 19, 2016 | All Blogs, Systems

Today’s IT departments face significant challenges from two opposing forces:

  1. the unprecedented growth in the information and applications required to run business infrastructures
  2. the shrinking of funds available for IT optimization projects

This conflict has a direct and unavoidable effect on productivity, performance and the ability of the IT department to be on the cutting edge of innovation while keeping up with expected service levels.

At a time like this, the platform for your mission-critical application and database workloads must be dependable. Whether they rely on SAP, Oracle, Microsoft® SQL Server®, or IBM DB2®, many companies are finding that their current IT infrastructures can no longer accommodate these critical applications. At the same time economic conditions continue to add strain to declining budgets.

In order to manage both sides of this equation, businesses need smarter systems to provide optimal support for growing application and database workloads, while reducing their overall cost structure. How is that possible?

1. Work smarter

It is important to develop a dynamic infrastructure for your application and database workloads so your business can become “smarter”—by being more service oriented, finding new efficiencies, reducing overall TCO, and being more responsive to changes throughout the organization and across the globe.

2. Work within the economic growth curve

Companies need to be given the time to grow economically. Look for a vendor that lets you “pay as you grow”. For instance, some vendors offer the option to scale from four cores to 64 over time, allowing you to add capacity as you need it.

3. Scale back

Try to minimize the number of servers your company needs by incorporating higher per-core performance and integrated virtualization capabilities, which means that fewer servers are needed for the same application or database workload. Fewer servers equates to lower software license fees, lower energy costs, and less floor space.

4. Scale up as needed

Utilize hardware that features thin provisioning, which enables applications to dynamically add storage capacity as needed without requiring assistance from IT staff members. You can also streamline systems maintenance by enabling your systems to support more users and more substantial workloads per server. Capacity on Demand, is a feature which can help ensure your systems have the resources to run applications at peak performance.

5. Reduce risk

For your most critical business applications and databases, reliability, scalability, and resilience are a high priority. There are a wide range of tools are the market for monitoring your entire infrastructure, offering proactive alerts. There are even tools that can automatically restart applications on backup equipment when failures occur or when performance degrades.  Look for a vendor that can be a one-stop-shop for infrastructure and security solutions – one with a proven track record of leadership in servers and storage, and one that is fully committed to your 24×7 availability.

Flagship Solutions Group can help optimize your heterogeneous infrastructures to increase efficiency and reliability, allowing you to be competitive in the marketplace. Regardless of your size, location, industry, or IT environment, we offer the systems, solutions and services that can meet your needs.

Schedule a consultation to learn more.

If you liked this blog, you might also like: Are Storage Arrays Dead?

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