A friend of Mine shared these question to help his friend to face the media...
All the answers are straight from my heart...
1. Is cutting costs in the data center a priority for most of your customers? What are the key factors pertaining to cost that pose a problem in data centers?
Security enforcement, Power Density and Cooling efficiency
2. How do you propose to go about helping clients cut costs without new investments?
Reuse servers, Reclaim Storage and Consolidate Database/application workloads – this will help in cutting costs.
3. What are the key criteria to improve performance of the data center?
- Balanced architecture with mixture of Dense(blade-like) and standard Workloads to balance power and cooling requirements.
- Well planned storage foot print with balance of performance and capacity storage.
- Plan a Flat low latency network core switching and routing with properly configured structured cable plant.
- Simpler non-intrusive security infrastructure so that server cycles are not used extensively by security applications.
4. What are the architectural changes / enhancements that could improve efficiency?
Influence Applications to utilize a scale-out architecture. Simplify the Database setup into Scale-up clusters for license optimization and easier management. Centralize security for improving the efficiency in access, authorization and audit functions.
5. Is server virtualization the best way to optimize a virtualized environment?
Holistic view of servers, storage network needs to assessed. Measure cost/benefit of virtualization. Specially due to significant licensing costs and performance requirements, some workloads may not be viable as virtual instances.
6. What advise do you give your customers who want to optimize their infrastructure at the same time plan for the future growth?
Focus on periodic de-staging of critical assets into lower tiers. Build capacity with commodity hardware. It is cheaper to acquire and run more standard commodity servers than fewer high performance servers.
A Well architected Standard server farm with 1 U/2U servers can help in maintaining a balance in power and cooling in the data center.
Invest in server virtualization and storage management software for monitoring usage and intelligent workload distribution.
7. While data centers are regaining a lot of traction, what are the common mistakes to be avoided?
- Plan your cooling capacity in a scalable manner ( wall the unused areas of datacenters to reduce power and cooling)
- Carefully plan the purchase of highly dense servers/blade, ensure the per rack cooling and power requirements are not violated
- Avoid costly upgrades and maintenance contracts by moving servers into lower tiers of usage (dev/stage/poc)
8. How can companies design contribute much towards cost saving?
Simpler well architected application design and deployment strategy can take advantage of commodity hardware virtualization to result in dramatic power saving and reduced cooling complications.
9. With Cisco entering the server market with unified computing, what impact will it have on the ecosystem dynamics?
The initial investment in UCS from cisco may pay for itself. With its tight integration to VMWARE and Concepts like VN-Link in Nexus class switches, it is a compelling environment to reduce cost of running Highly available server environments.
10. Companies may tend to neglect security enhancements with limited budgets. What is your opinion?
Security in Data center environments is not only about tools, it about right type of processes and their enforcement. Open source tools allow low or no-cost security enhance while right processes are required to make it happen.
All the answers are straight from my heart...
1. Is cutting costs in the data center a priority for most of your customers? What are the key factors pertaining to cost that pose a problem in data centers?
Security enforcement, Power Density and Cooling efficiency
2. How do you propose to go about helping clients cut costs without new investments?
Reuse servers, Reclaim Storage and Consolidate Database/application workloads – this will help in cutting costs.
3. What are the key criteria to improve performance of the data center?
- Balanced architecture with mixture of Dense(blade-like) and standard Workloads to balance power and cooling requirements.
- Well planned storage foot print with balance of performance and capacity storage.
- Plan a Flat low latency network core switching and routing with properly configured structured cable plant.
- Simpler non-intrusive security infrastructure so that server cycles are not used extensively by security applications.
4. What are the architectural changes / enhancements that could improve efficiency?
Influence Applications to utilize a scale-out architecture. Simplify the Database setup into Scale-up clusters for license optimization and easier management. Centralize security for improving the efficiency in access, authorization and audit functions.
5. Is server virtualization the best way to optimize a virtualized environment?
Holistic view of servers, storage network needs to assessed. Measure cost/benefit of virtualization. Specially due to significant licensing costs and performance requirements, some workloads may not be viable as virtual instances.
6. What advise do you give your customers who want to optimize their infrastructure at the same time plan for the future growth?
Focus on periodic de-staging of critical assets into lower tiers. Build capacity with commodity hardware. It is cheaper to acquire and run more standard commodity servers than fewer high performance servers.
A Well architected Standard server farm with 1 U/2U servers can help in maintaining a balance in power and cooling in the data center.
Invest in server virtualization and storage management software for monitoring usage and intelligent workload distribution.
7. While data centers are regaining a lot of traction, what are the common mistakes to be avoided?
- Plan your cooling capacity in a scalable manner ( wall the unused areas of datacenters to reduce power and cooling)
- Carefully plan the purchase of highly dense servers/blade, ensure the per rack cooling and power requirements are not violated
- Avoid costly upgrades and maintenance contracts by moving servers into lower tiers of usage (dev/stage/poc)
8. How can companies design contribute much towards cost saving?
Simpler well architected application design and deployment strategy can take advantage of commodity hardware virtualization to result in dramatic power saving and reduced cooling complications.
9. With Cisco entering the server market with unified computing, what impact will it have on the ecosystem dynamics?
The initial investment in UCS from cisco may pay for itself. With its tight integration to VMWARE and Concepts like VN-Link in Nexus class switches, it is a compelling environment to reduce cost of running Highly available server environments.
10. Companies may tend to neglect security enhancements with limited budgets. What is your opinion?
Security in Data center environments is not only about tools, it about right type of processes and their enforcement. Open source tools allow low or no-cost security enhance while right processes are required to make it happen.
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