| Abstract |
In today’s competitive global economy, organizations need to be poised to respond faster to market changes, customer demands, and growth opportunities. In today’s enterprise data centers, for example, it is not uncommon to find servers with utilization rates as low as 5 to 15 percent and storage with utilization rates of less than 50 percent. On the other hand, energy expenditures are going up due to high-density servers, storage power and cooling costs. While data center costs are increasing, the utilization of information technology (IT) assets, including servers and storage devices is very low. Today’s x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application, leaving most machines vastly underutilized. Since the advent of client-server technology, x86 server configuration has been the standard architecture and norm in most organizations. This technology meant that IT administrators spend so much time managing servers rather than innovating. Further, about 70% of a typical IT budget goes towards just maintaining the existing infrastructure, with little left for innovation and provision of quality services. The nature of GDC’s business is complex - in terms of operations, locations and logistics. This scenario calls for robust solutions be put in place in order to meet user and business expectations. To do this, the need for an agile IT infrastructure cannot be over emphasized, one that is built to deliver better business outcomes. This paper, therefore, will discuss how GDC intends to overcome these challenges while improving the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications. It will discuss how GDC will get more value and a higher return on investment by moving away from the old “one server, one application” model and embracing the modern solutions based on blade architectures. The paper will also discuss how, combined with the quickly maturing x86 hypervisor technologies, the synergy of blade architectures and virtualization offers the ability to dramatically increase utilization of server investments, boost uptime, provide a more resilient and available infrastructure, and roll out new infrastructure and services more quickly. |