Prepare for the future

- Simplifying operations

- Improving utilisation

- Cost-effective scaling

Managing the IT infrastructure presents its own set of challenges, including increased scale and complexity, an accelerated rate of change and specialised training, and process requirements. As a result, most IT organisations are

faced with using different tools to manage their server hardware, storage hardware, operating systems and applications. This use of multiple tools adds another layer of cost and complexity to the overall IT operation. Because operating system and application updates require more time than server hardware updates, according to IDC2, IT organizations should look to automate updates with tools available today. Leading hardware vendors are working with the operating system and tool vendors to further integrate management tools, lower costs and reduce complexity.

To address the challenges of systems management, IT organisations must begin to simplify their operations through automated, one-to-many deployment and change management tools and integrated monitoring solutions. At the same time, they must look for solutions that are not only robust and reliable, but those that are based on industry standards. Through standards-based systems management, rather than proprietary solutions, IT organisations can retain the flexibility, choice and control needed to best manage their businesses.

Utilising these automated, integrated, industry-standard management solutions is a requirement for simplifying operations today and enabling IT operations for the future.

Improving utilisation

Underutilisation and less than optimum performance from today's server and storage systems are byproducts of two main issues. First, servers and storage have been added organically, whenever and wherever needed, by different

departments, divisions and locations. While this ability to add servers and storage easily is one of the key benefits of industry-standard technologies, it has also come at the cost of IT control. Second, because many organisations deploy a single application per server, many servers, on average, are

underutilised compared to their true performance capacity. The same is true of many storage systemsbecause these storage systems have been deployed in a decentralised fashion or with a single application/single server configuration, much storage capacity goes unused. Server and storage consolidation is one key way to improve utilisation.