Maximizing Organizational IT Efficiencies – Server and Software Virtualization
In today’s economy, companies are struggling to control costs.
For IT professionals, being asked to do more with less is a common undertaking, in hopes to get the most out of current infrastructure. Corporations are accomplishing this goal while taking multiple paths:
With stretched resources, the process of managing is becoming more challenging, yet vital, at the same time. Virtualization can obscure performance issues and confuse storage management. Administrators trying to maintain their SLAs can quickly lapse into reactive mode, delaying true management of the environment by focusing on the immediate issue without a view of the big picture. Often reactive management leads to further complications and inefficiency. Homemade tools and scripts can become outdated quickly, with changes in employees and techological advancements. In these conditions, an ineffectual and incomplete evaluation of the environment is made by management, and future forecasts are based on inaccurate or incomplete data.
Getting information and gaining visibility into how an IT environment operates shouldn’t be a tough task. The reality is that it is difficult, unfortunately. Particularly in diverse, heterogeneous, and distributed environments made up of storage, servers, and applications from different vendors and serving different purposes. Further complicating this issue are native tools that provide limited visibility, and often only into the devices they’re bundled with, preventing administrators and managers from seeing those devices and their performance as they relate to the larger networked environment.
What’s needed is a simple and easy-to-use tool that provides end-to-end, actionable visibility into the IT infrastructure, and that also enables cost savings and optimization. Here’s where Tek-Tools Profiler steps in. Profiler offers a vast amount of information, but how do you leverage the info to your cost control strategies and reduce the pain of implementation and tracking?
Profiler can identify opportunities for storage reclamation and resource optimization, allowing you to leverage those opportunities into real storage, performance, space, and power savings. Profiler taps the same data collected to provide management with forecasting and trending, as well as categorization information to help make proper decisions relative to organizational needs. With Profiler, customers have reclaimed an average of 30% of their storage that was unused or wasted. For every terabyte of reclaimed storage, organizations save approximately $10,000. The average Tek-Tools customer realizes an ROI of up to 40% within 3 – 6 months.
Illustrated below are 10 ways you can reclaim or repurpose resources in your organization’s environment.
1. Server Consolidation – Profiler identifies candidates for virtualization via its server consolidation reports, allowing organizations to retire hardware, reduce power consumption, streamline management, and free up rack space.
2. Recover Resources in the Virtualized Infrastructure: 1. Identify unused virtual machines that can be turned off in order to reclaim performance capacity, or deleted in order to reclaim storage. 2. Find orphaned VMDK files that can be deleted, freeing space and improving performance. 3. Expose virtual machines with over-allocated resources (storage, CPU, memory, etc.) that can be released back into the virtual infrastructure.
3. Array Capacity Reclamation – find storage on arrays that is unused or allocated but free: If you are leveraging your storage fully, you can retire storage you don’t need anymore, and put off future purchases of additional storage.
4. Clean Your Files – Do you know what files can be archived or deleted? Identify files and directories by age, size, and ownership that can be relocated or removed, reducing primary storage usage, backup size, and duration, as well as disaster recovery requirements.
5. Snapshot and Mirror management – Do you know how much storage you are using for snapshots and mirrors? If the protection policies exceed your SLAs or recovery point objectives, you could be consuming production storage with copies of data you don’t need.
6. Identify Thin Provisioning Candidates – Discover file systems using a fraction of their allocated storage and that are growing slowly.
7. Tier Your Storage – Do you know when you can move your storage to less expensive tiers? Identify storage that can be moved to other tiers based on usage and performance, and either free up your performance storage for I/O hungry applications, or add less expensive storage in your next capital expenditure.
8. Save Time – Are your administrators tracking storage the old way – with manual processes and populating outdated spreadsheets? Profiler can alleviate the data collection, correlation, and dissemination of reports with automation, allowing administrators to focus on productive tasks.
9. Grouping and Reports – Do you need to perform budgetary planning, charge other departments for your storage or size your DR site (plus growth)? Profiler allows you to group resources in ways that serve your business needs and meet your business objectives of maximizing the use and effectiveness of IT resources and budgets.
10. Profiler can identify underutilized backup resources, as well as identify old and stagnant data that can be removed, freeing storage, reducing the size of backups, and enabling you to maximize the use of tape drives and media servers, so that money doesn’t have to be spent needlessly.
Organizations pay employees and consultants to manually track backup failures, manually collect performance and storage trending, and manually track storage utilization. All too often this leads to an incomplete an ineffectual view of IT, as these efforts are ineffective, inefficient, and complex. Even without today’s economic challenges, companies cannot afford to continue managing IT resources blindly and with inefficient, error-prone procedures.
In this light, a tried and proven tool for monitoring, reporting and forecasting is invaluable. To figure what resources will be need short term, as well as long, IT managers and administrators need the proper usage data of their resources; they need to be able to pinpoint where there is availability and what is being used, if they’re expected to maximize their IT infrastructure. Tek-Tools Profiler provides a solution to this challenge, enabling organizations to do more with less, allowing resources to operate in the most coste effective manner available.
