Data Center consolidation is an organization’s strategy to reduce IT assets by using more efficient technologies. It is the converging of a Data Center infrastructure in order to either:

1. Reduce the number of devices in a single Data Center, or
2. Reduce the global footprint with fewer Data Centers and locations to manage, for example 4 down to 2.

So why should a company consider Data Center consolidation?

Today’s IT organizations generally buy and integrate numerous point solutions from a plethora of vendors, each with its own training courses, licensing, refresh cycles, and mode of operations. IT executives are under constant pressure to increase the value they deliver to their organizations. Yet, recent trends show a decrease in IT spending. IT departments must find ways to reduce the cost of supporting existing systems.

Fortunately, there exists a solution for cost savings: reducing or consolidating the number of Data Centers in the organization. The primary motivations for Data Center consolidation projects include (Data Center consolidation benefits):

1. Reducing capital equipment costs by consolidating multiple functions into fewer devices – this is hyper- convergence.
2. This hyper- convergence of appliances helps to reduce power and cooling costs by eliminating the total number of devices in the Data Center.
3. And an added benefit of this is it eliminates floor space and building maintenance activities by consolidating within and across Data Centers.
4. Data Center consolidation also helps to simplify operations.
5. It helps to eliminate the need for outside consulting specialists by simplifying management and operations and allowing companies to recommit existing a team members to more value-added activities.
6. Data Center consolidation helps companies to manage growth by accommodating the growing storage capacity, performance, and operational requirements of the business.
7. Companies will also experience an increase in agility and responsiveness to changing business needs allowing them to support new, revenue-generating activities for the business, rather than just trying to maintain the systems they currently have in place.
8. Data Center consolidation helps to reduce the risk of data loss and downtime.
9. It also helps to safeguard against the threat of downtime from hardware figures, power failures, site-wide outages and other disasters.

When should I consider a Data Center consolidation?

Data Center consolidation should seriously be considered when capacity limitations begin affecting business performance.

1. Out of capacity:

This can take many forms. It can be as simple as just running out of insufficient storage capacity. Discs are full. It can also be a matter of insufficient storage performance. A rule of thumb is that a 3 to 4 year old SAN will probably be a performance bottleneck that requires flash or additional spindles. Or you could have an overburdened IT infrastructure with insufficient compute resources. Keep in mind that compute and storage must be kept in balance in a virtualized environment; increasing compute will require more storage capacity and IOPS.

2. Technology refresh:

When support renewals and end of warrantee period’s come up with significant price increases there is a good reason to look for something new. Storage technology refresh cycles typically run 4 to 5 years. It’s often ideal to capture storage refresh at the end of the 2^nd year when maintenance comes up. Server refresh is generally a little faster – – every 3 years.

3. Backup or DR:

When there is a need or a desire to improve backup and disaster recovery driven by compliance and or competitive issues while refreshing the Data Center environment.

HPE SimpliVity Omnistack Data Virtualization

Platform optimizes your Data Center Consolidation

Key Features And Capabilities

The HPE SimpliVity Omnistack Data Virtualization Platform provides you with a globally aware file system and object store that enables 3 key benefits:

• Guaranteed data efficiency which the duplicates, compresses, and optimizes all data globally.
• Built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery delivering the most resilient hyper- converged infrastructure platform.
• Global VM-centric management and mobility which delivers policy-based, VM centric management simplifying day-to-day operations and enables seamless data mobility between remote sites with WAN efficient replication.

The HPE SimpliVity Omnistack Data Virtualization Platform is ideally suited to support and efficiently deploy Data Center consolidation projects.

• As the most complete hyper- converged solution, Simplivity helps to reduce the number of devices by offering the most complete and unmatched hyper- converged solution converging up to 12 devices into a single 2U modular building block.
• This hyper- convergence provides 300% TCO savings across both CAPEX and OPEX.
• It lowers storage capacity requirements with guaranteed data efficiency,
• It reduces risk of data loss and downtime with built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Management of operations is simplified with global VM centric management.
• Agility and responsiveness is increased by creating a global resource pool that can easily scale in and scale out as needs change.

Some proof points supporting HPE SimpliVity Omnistack Data Virtualization Platform includes input from some of the most influential research, IT analysts, and advisory firms in the world:

According to Forrester Consulting, SimpliVity provides a 73% TCO savings compared to traditional IT infrastructure. They also found a 10 to 1 device reduction which means that while it would take roughly 80 IT components to run 1,000 VM’s in a traditional IT environment it only takes 8 SimpliVity Nodes.

As far as improved agility, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) highlights rapid scaling to 1000 VM’s with peak and predictable performance, and 1 hour to provision an 8 node cluster.

And as far as maximized uptime and prevention of data loss, TechValidate reported 57% of customers reduced their recovery time objectives (RTO) from days or hours to minutes.

IDC showed a 70% improvement in backup and recovery and DR and followed that up with 51% of customers using SimpliVity data protection retired existing third-party backup and/or replication solutions.