Businesses today are finding themselves on a predatory quest to cut costs now, and in some cases, think about the ramifications to efficiency later.  Remarkably, strategies designed to lower data center costs are simultaneously designed to increase efficiency.

Evolving Solutions has gathered insight from top industry thought leaders designed to help our readers lower data center costs and improve efficiency.  Thought leaders, including Microsoft Global Strategist Toby Velte and FOCUS Consulting President Barb Goldworm, have contributed their insight to the Data Center Leaders interview series.   Below, are 5 data center cost avoidance tips from our thought leaders:

1.    Completely Reevaluate The Management Of Your Data Center: Today’s advances in technology, particularly green IT initiatives, offer tremendous potential to minimize consumption of current resources.  Per Microsoft Global Technology Strategist Toby Velte,  by reevaluating data center needs, including how much storage and speed is truly necessary, companies will become armed with the knowledge necessary to achieve sustained data center cost reduction in future projections.

2.    Server and Storage Virtualization: In the long run, virtualization is best for sustained cost reduction, states Omar Sultan, Senior Solution Manager for Data Center Switching at Cisco.  Virtualization, replacing physical servers with a virtual environment, lowers the total cost of server infrastructure, thereby lowering the total energy costs of a business overall.

3.    Move to Blade Systems: Blade systems, self-contained computer servers designed for high data density, can increase your efficiencies in power and cooling, per Barb Goldworm, President and Chief Analyst at FOCUS Consulting.   The amount of servers common in a data center have oftentimes led to power consumption concerns as these large servers must run in a temperature controlled environment.  By minimizing the heating and cooling costs necessary for a  data center, blade centers minimize the heating and cooling costs for a business as a whole.

4.    Go Green: “Organizations are finding that there simply is no more power available to them unless they pay to build the generation plants necessary to support them,” shares Dan Kusnetzky, ZDNet contributor and founding partner of the Kusnetzky Group. It can be tempting to see the green movement as just another fad, but at the end of the day, it is about saving power costs by utilizing more energy efficient technology, such as virtualization, and little else.

5.    Have a Disaster Backup and Data Recovery Plan: “If your server room imploded, what would you do?” asks Susan Snedaker, Principal Consultant with VirtualTeam.  The likely answer is, you would pay – and pay any amount – to get your critical data back.  Disasters happen, and to recover will cost money. By developing a disaster backup and data recovery plan in advance, however, companies can mitigate much of the desperation costs involved with recovery.

Offered to steer your business in the right direction, the cost avoidance tips provided in our Data Center Thought Leaders interview series illustrate ways your businesses can achieve cost cutting initiatives without sacrificing efficiency or productivity.

If you have more tips to share, we welcome your insight and invite you to share via a comment below.

Server Virtualization Expert Dan Kusnetzky

Server virtualization is gaining mainstream awareness in the business continuity as a viable strategy for data center cost avoidance.  As such, this week’s post in Evolving Solutions’ Data Center Leaders interview series shares best practices regarding server virtualization to those companies who have either just implemented or are planning to implement this solution.

Offering insight on the subject is Dan Kusnetzky.  Kusnetzky, along with Paula Rooney, posts regularly to ZDNet’s Virtually Speaking and is a founding partner of the Kusnetzky Group. Since the late 1970’s, Kusnetzky has been involved with information technology, including his work with the Kusnetzky Group, as executive vice president of corporate and marketing strategy for Open-Xchange, and as vice president for IDC’s System Software.  At IDC, Kusnetzky was responsible for research and analysis on the worldwide market for operating environments and virtualization software.

In Evolving Solutions interview with Kusnetzky below, we discuss best practices for companies regarding server virtualization:

Evolving Solutions:
What tips would you offer businesses who’ve just implemented server virtualization?

Dan Kusnetzky:
I’d say “Whoa, big fella (or lovely lady in the case of a female executive). I’d ask them what their overall plan was to deploy virtualization technology and how that fits into their overall IT plan.  If all they’ve done is install virtual machine software from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Virtual Iron, or through one of the distributions of Linux, they may have unknowingly stepped onto a slippery slope that leads to big problems. After all, virtualization technology includes access virtualization, application virtualization, processing virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and both security and management in that environment.

Evolving Solutions:
What are the biggest mistakes companies make after implementing a virtualization initiative, and how can they be avoided?

Dan Kusnetzky:
I’m often surprised that executives who have grabbed onto virtual machine technology as a panacea don’t have a clear understanding of the following:
•    What applications and application components are running on what physical and/or virtual machines?
•    What are the dependencies among these components?
•    How do these components relate to both the network and storage infrastructure?
•    Who is responsible for managing each component, for the underlying physical machines, for the underlying network, for the underlying storage? Do they know one another? Do they have effective processes in place to pass issues to one another for resolution
•    Do the organization’s license management and support policies have a way to deal with easily copied virtual machines that could, in the end, be updated at different rates.
•    Have failure scenarios been explored and plans been created to address what happens if a physical machine, a disk or a network router fail.
I could go on and on about this. One clear message to remember is something Alan Lakein once said “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Evolving Solutions:
In “Has Virtualization Jumped The Shark”, Data Center Central’s Arthur Cole negates the idea that virtualization is losing its luster as little else brings more IT value to an organization.  How would you respond to the idea that virtualization is losing its luster in concurrence with its increased awareness?

Dan Kusnetzky:
Virtualization, taken as a whole, has been in use for well over 30 years in the world of mainframes.  It has been in use for well over 20 years in the world of midrange systems. I expect the technology to be of as lasting importance on industry standard hardware.

What’s likely to change, however, is the giddy feeling about virtual machine technology being the be all and end all of datacenter technology.

Evolving Solutions:
Five years down the road, how do you see virtualization evolving, and what other solutions do you feel will make the leap towards mainstream awareness currently being experienced by virtualization?

Dan Kusnetzky:
I expect that many will realize that a virtual environment (virtual access, virtual application environments, virtual processing environments, virtual storage environments, virtual network environments and the necessary security and management tools for those environments) has many of the same characteristics as a purely physical environments and some strikingly different characteristics.  For example, it is quite possible for a virtual server to run in one part of the datacenter in the morning, a different part of the datacenter in the afternoon and might be assigned to sleep on a disk somewhere overnight. People simply can’t do that with a physical machine.

Functions can be replicated for performance, scalability or reliability reasons. Functions can be replicated for development and testing as well.

Evolving Solutions:
Your post on ZDNet’s “Virtually Speaking” titled “The Green Datacenter” is the latest in a series describing how virtualization can ensure data center energy efficiency.  In your experience, is energy efficiency a driving force for companies to implement virtualization, or a secondary force?

Dan Kusnetzky:
This is a big issue in places in which organizations have found that there simply is no more power available to them unless they pay to build the generation plants It is also a big issue when organizations have no more floor space for computers, storage, networking equipment, power supplies and cooling equipment. It is a secondary or, perhaps, tertiary issue in other places.

It is clear to me that it will become an ever more pressing issue in the coming years.

Evolving Solutions:
Wild Card: Anything else you’d like to add?

Dan Kusnetzky:
As an alumni of Digital Equipment Corporation (may it rest in pieces), I’m convince that building an architecture and then bringing products in that fit the organizations architecture is better than being product driven.  There are times that an organization would be best advised to ignore a specific product or technology because the disruption it would cause far outweighs the value it provides.