How To

Smart Datacenter Strategies: Consolidation for Cost Savings and Efficiency

IT decision-makers are increasingly focused on sustainability, resource efficiency, and cost efficacy. Achieving all of these goals requires a strategic approach to datacenter consolidation. When it is not always clear where you should begin, one answer is consolidating your datacenter footprint.

Key Takeaways:

Datacenter consolidation means lessening your reliance on hardware, which you can achieve with software-defined storage.
Intelligent consolidation leads to cost savings as a result of automation, optimization, and freedom from propriety.
You can consider your consolidation efforts a success if they yield more efficient IT operations, a greater end-user experience, and a better potential for an eco-smart future.

Consolidating your datacenter footprint

Consolidating the datacenter footprint for an organization means restructuring entire facilities or equipment deployments to make IT processes more efficient and reduce resource consumption without compromising on your overall goals. This restructuring might include consolidating servers into fewer stacks or downsizing to only the number of servers you need.

Implementing software-defined storage (SDS) can be a particularly big step forward in your consolidation efforts. While hardware remains a necessity, the SDS method offloads much of the burden of managing data to software programs. Abstracting resources from the hardware means needing less hardware overall, allowing for greater consolidation and easier scalability.

True consolidation goes beyond the physical datacenter, though, and extends to how you manage digital files. With Nutanix Files, you can intelligently consolidate data and silos into a single platform that is dynamic, scalable, and simple to operate.

The goals of consolidation are not only to boost cost savings and efficiency but also to reduce your digital carbon footprint. This refers to the emissions and energy consumption associated with your organization’s digital activities. Keeping it as low as possible is important for your company’s overall sustainability.

The cost-saving potential of consolidation

Using SDS when consolidating your datacenter footprint is a smart strategy for generating cost savings and efficiency. The business benefits of SDS include automation, optimization, and freedom from propriety, all of which translate to business savings.

Separating hardware from software also makes it possible to scale endlessly both upward and outward. Consolidation through SDS enables an efficient “provision only what you need” model for datacenter storage. You can therefore be confident in your decision to provision additional hardware when upscaling because you know you are not wasting resources.

In an article for Forbes, Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog emphasized that organizations can “eliminate that unnecessary cost [of calling a technician] by committing to a set-it-and-forget-it approach with software-defined storage that is self-healing.”

Herzog lists further benefits of SDS: “The enterprise does not need 20 traditional storage arrays with dual redundancy architecture when the enterprise can consolidate down to a few software-defined storage arrays with a triple redundancy architecture, reducing capex and opex costs, while increasing performance, cyber storage resilience, availability, and capacity.”

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) brings all these benefits on a platform that simplifies enterprise data storage operations. With one unified data services platform, you have the option of consolidating your datacenter footprint while integrating built-in ransomware protection and easy scalability.

How consolidation fuels datacenter efficiency

Consolidation is a first step and a continuous effort toward building a sustainable IT strategy. When you modernize your infrastructure to generate cost savings, you also have the opportunity to address your organization’s role in keeping the IT industry accountable for its environmental impact and overall energy consumption.

Datacenter efficiency, as it pertains to sustainability, is a matter of exploring new possibilities with existing resources and being flexible in workload placement without the need for inefficient rearchitecting. Nutanix solutions help in these types of sustainability initiatives by providing a simplified avenue toward optimized IT infrastructure consumption.

As a byproduct of consolidating the datacenter footprint, your organization will also be playing a part in designing an eco-smart future. Consolidation is a chance to build a more sustainable datacenter by recentering your operations around renewable energy that is more efficient both for your own company and for the environment.

Of course, business leaders have a responsibility not only to optimize internal operations but also to provide a positive customer experience. With that in mind, the Nutanix approach to unified storage becomes all the more exceptional. Through strategic partnerships, Nutanix is able to provide unmatched simplicity, security, and speed with its integrated storage for an unmatched end-user computing experience.

Nutanix is the platform for consolidating datacenter footprints

Business is dynamic and organic, so there are many ways to successfully generate cost savings and boost efficiency. Consolidation is just one of those smart strategies and one you can carry out with confidence on Nutanix.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) powers businesses with advanced cloud technologies that simplify how you procure, deploy, and manage IT services. It does this with tools like AOS Storage that deliver enterprise-grade capabilities via a highly distributed software architecture.

Make your company the best it can be by emphasizing sustainability and consolidating your datacenter footprint. Contact us with any further inquiries regarding our sustainability initiatives and our commitment to helping you achieve smart datacenter strategies.

Learn more about consolidation in a hybrid multicloud setting and how hyperconverged infrastructure can play a role in the transition.

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