The Benefits of Data Center Consolidation

Businesses generally invest in data center consolidation projects as it ensures to reduce costs, increase the business value of IT and make a realistically manageable footprint. Data center consolidation is an IT strategy brought on by the changing IT climate to combine substantial number of servers into a compact, cost efficient system. The logic to the strategy is simple, having less should be easier to maintain. The primary objective is to provide a cost efficient and profitable system without losing the uptime and power provided by existing infrastructure.

The benefits of data center consolidation are as follows:

• Disaster Recovery: With data center consolidation, the planning, implementation, and execution of disaster recovery solutions are less daunting because all the vital components are in one place, easing replication and failover initiation.
• Increased Control for IT: Consolidation promotes several avenues to optimization, like transport. With a more centralized approach, there are fewer pipes to monitor, the architecture is more straightforward and easier to control, and traffic patterns and volumes are more visible and clearly defined. Consolidation offers the option to deploy more advanced protocols and management strategies that maximize bandwidth utilization and performance of the network, but without straining the network and its applications.
• Reducing the Scope of Security

Consolidation means some locations will be eliminated altogether, and others will see reductions in size and scope. With fewer sites and assets to manage, the task of physically securing the enterprise becomes far easier, less costly, and requires fewer resources. Likewise, more compact enterprise architecture relies on fewer connections between facilities. Simplifying transport layer connectivity sharpens the focus and effectiveness of information security.

• Compliance

Data center consolidation supports compliance efforts on two fronts. First, it promotes process and system automation, which takes the human out of the loop and captures the procedures and functions that must be executed to remain in lockstep with relevant policies, regulations, standards, and quality of service metrics.

• Reduced Costs

A consolidated environment means a smaller network and application infrastructure. As a result, businesses need less hardware, including costly items like servers, routers, and other equipment. A reduction in servers likely means standardizing on a few critical software applications, allowing companies to decrease operations costs.

Further, with the rapid growth of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options, data center consolidation brings many opportunities to slash operations costs further. The consolidated infrastructure also consumes less power and is easier to cool, reducing utility bills and paving the way for green initiatives that are swiftly gaining traction.

However, the most significant cost reducing benefit of consolidation is the lessened burden on IT and operations personnel. With less activity at remote locations, the management and communications requirements for those sites drop dramatically. This allows IT and operations staff to isolate and resolve problems faster and at less of an expense, freeing these resources to address high priority, business-critical tasks.

Comparing to those of other businesses, Data center consolidation can prove to be best in the long run due to its cost-effective advantage, easy to maintain compliance, strong security implementation and increased energy efficiency.