"No C-level executive, whether it's the CIO or CFO, wants to invest in their company's data center, especially not now when the economy is executing an almost perfect swan dive into an Olympic-sized recessionary pool. But an optimally (or even an adequately) functioning data center is not a luxury; it's a business necessity. If it ain't right, it's got to be fixed."  - CIO Magazine, November 19th, 2008

Where does your datacenter stand?

According to a study by the Gartner group, more than a third of respondent's datacenters were over seven years old, meaning they weren't designed for the power and cooling requirements of today's high-density servers.  Due to exponential processing and storage growth, costs are growing more than originally planned, while revenues are falling into the above-mentioned Olympic pool.  Over the years, many datacenters iterate through multiple platforms, developers, and administrators, who leave behind legacy systems with poor or nonexistent documentation.  How can you you avoid the pitfalls (or get out of the pit)?

Building a Base

Just like a house, a datacenter has to have a solid foundation.  Many companies, while focusing on the physical plant (power, cooling, airflow, physical security etc.), tend to neglect the logical underpinnings of a functional datacenter.  In today's environments, the logical foundations of a viable datacenter include identification of applications and stacks, baselining current resource requirements, and design or review of virtualization infrastructure.

Centralizing Resources

After we've identified, baselined, and stabilized, we can implement a consolidation plan for your enterprise.  By leveraging our expertise, consolidation can often be performed at a cost lower than continued maintenance, and result in integrated high availability, resource monitoring and allocation, and significant reductions in TCO

In short, Technology Advocates' experts in datacenter consolidation can work with you to identify your current applications and stacks, isolate business dependencies, create and support a virtual infrastructure, identify candidates for virtualization, introduce configuration management, and provide long term auditing and monitoring.  The result?  Lower total cost of ownership, higher performance, less downtime, and a smaller, less expensive datacenter.