Virtualisation

Up To Five Out Of Ten Organisations Missing Opportunity To Save Up To 50% On Their I.T. Costs, says SCC

Consolidation strategies and technologies proven to deliver ROI within 8 months

As many as five out of ten organisations in the UK are missing out on the opportunity to reduce their operational costs by up to 50%, exploiting proven consolidation strategies and related technology solutions. This finding is based on analysis of its customer base by SCC, the leading independent technology specialist around the infrastructure.

Irrespective of whether there has been significant investment in new technologies in recent years, IT directors are being asked to spend less now. They must do so whilst continuing to deliver better services and the best technologies to ensure competitive advantage and the ability to respond to changing organisational needs.

SCC has already achieved operational savings for many of its customers, in so doing this has paid for consolidation strategies and technologies, within an average of eight months. This highlights the very real opportunity for many more organisations to take advantage of the opportunity to deliver ROI and cut costs in unprecedented economic times.

SCC is confident that its framework for customer engagement, involving an in-depth survey of the existing infrastructure, will establish where the opportunities for consolidation might lie in order to realise sustainable cost reductions.

Rhys Sharp, SCC’s CTO, said:

“Irrespective of whether an organisation is operating with an ageing infrastructure or has invested heavily in new technologies, such as virtualisation tools, the depressed economic climate means there has never been a more urgent but conflicting requirement for the IT Director to both spend less and deliver more. This is the business driver for change.

“The technology solution is a joined up, end to end, consolidation strategy that is proven to remove inefficiencies and their resulting over spend. At SCC, we start with an assessment of our customer’s existing network to identify opportunities. We will then look to maximise the utilisation of existing technologies and upgrade some of its components. In so doing, we reduce fixed costs including power and management overheads.”

Whilst every customer environment is unique, SCC’s approach has a proven track record of success. In some cases, identifiable savings have paid for the fixed cost of the infrastructure implemented by SCC, in addition to the technology delivering it, in a period of as little as five years.

Financial models that help achieve these dramatic results include the sale of legacy technologies to fund new purchases and the very significant and tangible cuts in power, cooling and maintenance costs, typically achieving 20% reductions.

The main focus of an integrated consolidation strategy might involve:

• Delivering more computer power for less money
• Maximising the utilisation of existing resource
• Consolidating servers and/or the storage platform

Rhys Sharp, SCC’s CTO, said:

“Every year, more computer power can be achieved for less cost to purchase. At SCC, we look at the existing network and advise a customer where new technologies will deliver cost savings elsewhere, for example in terms of power. A stack assessment of the hardware, applications, data base and so on will fast indicate where and how the organisation might be able to take advantage of the latest computing performance available.

“By fully understanding where under utilisation of the existing server estate may lie, we can consolidate the oldest resource, which may be power and space hungry. We will then move others to a virtualised world, where under-utilised technology is maximised to its full potential. Consequently, we can decrease the management overhead of supporting a vast number of physical resources.

“Server consolidation strategies will enable many servers to access the same storage space. Whilst a data ‘de –duplication’ approach, deploying modern software tools, will deliver further efficiencies. With storage becoming cheaper year on year, many customers have bought far more space than they require - consequently, data is not being managed efficiently, with duplication common.”