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.

Virtualization Expert Cisco's Omar Sultan

Bottom-line, companies today are looking for any way to decrease costs.  Cost savings strategies currently being implemented by many companies include upgrading data centers by leveraging solutions such as server, storage and network virtualization.

Evolving Solution’ Data Center Leaders interview series turns its attention back to the subject of data center cost avoidance this week in our interview with Omar Sultan, Senior Solution Manager for Data Center Switching for the Cisco Data Center Solutions team.

Sultan has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry working work for a number of Fortune 500 companies. Prior to joining Cisco, Sultan developed a broad range of experience ranging from data center management to network operations.  A member of Cisco’s team since 1999, Sultan’s current responsibilities center on the Cisco data center switching portfolio.

In our interview with Sultan below, we discuss how server, storage and network virtualization can lower data center costs today and look into our crystal balls to determine what solutions may be on tap for the future:

Evolving Solutions:
What tips would you offer for business seeking to reduce data center costs?

Omar Sultan:
I think, in the long run, server, storage and network virtualization is the best bet for sustained cost reductions. Technologies such as VMware or Hyper-V can be enormously helpful in reducing the cost of server infrastructure.  Similarly switch virtualization technologies such as virtual device contents (VDC) and virtual port channels (vPC) on our data center switches can simplify network infrastructure.

So, these technologies can save you CapEx up front, but they open up a second area of savings by reducing OpEx–less infrastructure will lower costs around power, cooling, cabling and rack space.

Unified fabric would be another example of both reducing upfront costs and setting the stage for sustained savings. Virtualized infrastructure is also simpler to manage, so that opens up another avenue of savings–increased productivity of your operations staff.

This brings us to the second area, which is improved operations efficiency.  While this is often viewed as “soft” savings, the truth is the people are often still the biggest single budget line item so anything that can be done on this front is important, whether it is improved management and automation tools or a more efficient organizational structure.

Evolving Solutions:
Are there inherent dangers in trying to make your data center too cost efficient?

Omar Sultan:
With a few exceptions, customers are telling us that their year-over-year budgets are flat to declining, so I am not sure “too efficient” is an issue.  I think the bigger risk is not being able to provide support to the business in the areas it needs–and these days, that especially means areas that impact the top line.

Things like energy efficiency and server, storage and network virtualization help drive budget efficiency–they let you target spending where it does the most good.  They also give you more efficient and flexible access to you IT resources so you can run a leaner provisioning model (i.e. less over-provisioning) without running the risk of being caught flat-footed if the business buts some kind of unexpected demand on the IT infrastructure.

Evolving Solutions:
What products or solutions do you envision reducing data center costs 5 years down the road?

Omar Sultan:
If we fast forward 5 years, I think we will continue to see the existing virtualization trends mature–I think they will be fully mainstream by them and will be the de facto operating environment for most companies.

I think we will see a sea change in management in the next five years, with greater use of automation and the introduction of more holistic management models, which will further drive up operations productivity and reduce the costs associated with management and operations.  I also think we will see a continued evolution and maturing of cloud computing as a solution to the point that enterprise companies will start designing their facilities to handle more typical loads and rely on cloud providers to help weather peak load situations.