CIO s Guide to Make $ense of Data Center Modernization Leave the speeds and feeds talk to your tech team. Here are the bottom-line numbers to carry to the executive board room.
Introduction As a C-level exec, you have learned to delegate. You trust your appointed cabinet of experts to present the latest ideas and innovations. But, while they hunt product details, you are pursuing business outcomes. The end goal of your company is to dominate competitors and the market. What is the big IT picture that you can pitch in the executive board room? Our easy translation guide lets the bottom-line numbers tell you a story of value beyond performance metrics and features. We boil down the hard-hitting facts so that you can carry a well-formed strategy back to your fellow execs. Consider this your speed translator to help make $ense of an integrated infrastructure investment.
1 Centralized Control of Your Data Center With a single point of control over an entire data center environment, IT departments can reap the rewards of enhanced management capabilities, simplified upgrades, and easier problem resolution for better support. Manage your entire infrastructure from a single management interface Virtualize the entire stack, including existing storage systems Make your storage 3x faster 1 Benefit from a 66% reduction in management costs 2 Easily make changes across the data center (computing, networking, storage) without disrupting host apps Centralized control of storage management may not resonate with your C-level comrades until you mention the savings that a UK bank saw when they implemented a unified control solution. With the ability to make changes and upgrades to systems during regular business hours, a UK bank was able to save 1 million ($1.5 million) a year in overtime costs.
2 Ease of Deployment Oftentimes, the greatest risk of a project is its planning and execution. 76% of CIOs find it difficult to stay on-schedule and on-budget. 3 With pre-configured settings and a simplified architecture that is designed to reduce deployment time from weeks down to minutes, integrated architectures lower project risks. And the functionality of these systems speaks for itself. With integrated infrastructures, companies can triple system performance while reducing operating costs. Gain 62% lower TCO and 59% lower CapEx 4 Obtain greater business agility and ease of use with a reduction of provisioning times by 83% 2 Reduce management costs by 66% 2 In just the deployment phase of an integrated infrastructure project, your teams can reduce design, deployment, and management overhead costs. With faster provisioning times, your organization can even deploy new virtualized servers in a matter of minutes, making it easier to launch new applications. In turn, this makes your business more adaptable to changing markets. Integrated infrastructures make it possible to support 50% more customers without increasing IT staff. 5 And by operating on more efficient infrastructure, your company can reduce power and cooling costs by 49%. 2
Fault Tolerance and High Availability 3 Downtime is a profit sucker and the bane of every CIO s existence. On average, large corporations lose around $686,250 for every hour of downtime suffered. 6 Even companies that manage 99.99% of uptime still average around 52.56 minutes of downtime a year. 7 This leads to a total loss of over $600,000. 6 The fall-out from IT outages spreads beyond basic equipment failure and lost workforce production, though. It also leads to damaged reputations, lost business, and other crippling side-effects. But what if the threat of downtime never again threatened the productivity of your business? With an integrated infrastructure, companies gain a solution that is pre-tested and put through the ringer before it even arrives on their data center floor. With a no single point of failure design, organizations can mitigate the possibility of downtime all together. Work using redundant networking, compute, and hybrid storage Mitigate downtime with a no single point of failure design Cluster compute, network, and hybrid storage layers Accelerate problem identification and resolution with a single support line for Network, Compute, Storage, VMWare etc With a comprehensively pre-tested solution and single point of ownership for problem determination and resolution, business impact risk is significantly reduced. And, by implementing fault-tolerant systems that have a no single point of failure design, companies can mitigate downtime to save over $600,000 per year in unplanned IT costs. 6
Building a Future-Proof Data Center 4 Organizations need to back their operations by using the latest systems and applications in an intelligent way. To build a future-proof infrastructure, your data center has to harness an integrated, seamless design that propels performance while reducing costs. Reduce cabling costs by 77% 2 Shrink power and cooling costs by 49% 2 Store up to 5x more data in the same footprint 8 Operate using application-aware technology that adapts to workloads Easily control a variety of enterprise apps With the ability to fit twice as much data on one system, companies can cut their annual storage costs in half. 7 Stuttgarter Straßenbahnen AG, for instance, reduced total data storage costs by 50%. 9 Also, by reducing cabling costs by 77% (10), companies can lower the total cost (TCO) of their networking. 2
Conclusion 5 To make the best decision possible for their organizations, CIOs are tasked to see past the features, bells, and whistles to the bottom-line value. As you present your strategies to your fellow C-level comrades, let the numbers weave a story of value beyond features and product details. To translate the latest IT features your IT team raves about into bottom-line value, let the numbers speak for themselves: 62% lower TCO 5 59% lower CapEx 4 83% reduced provisioning times 2 66% reduced management costs 2 no single point of failure design Need help building a strong case for an Integrated Infrastructure solution within your IT department? Pitch a product that has the validated design and proven industry use to back it. The VersaStack solution offers a validated and integrated infrastructure with unified management that includes compute, networking, and hybrid storage. Using this new technology, your company can simplify the work of IT teams while improving the versatility and efficiency of your infrastructure. 1 with only 5% flash storage usage. 2 http://www.slideshare.net/ciscodatacenter/cisco-ucs-marketshare?related=1 3 http://www.delphix.com/2012/10/16/cio-survey-reveals-it-leaders-struggle-to-meet-big-demand-for-enterprise-app-testing-development-and-rollouts-next-year/ 4 http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/versastack_tco 5 http://www.slideshare.net/ciscodatacenter/versa-stack-slideshare-deck-final 6 http://v1.aberdeen.com/launch/report/perspective/8623-ai-downtime-disaster-recovery.asp 7 https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=m7cwxnx53h8c&pg=pa19&dq=52.56+minutes+of+downtime&hl=en&sa=x&redir_esc=y \l v=onepage&q=52.56%20minutes&f=false 8 http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/resource/info/compression-guarantee.html 9 http://www.ibm.com/midmarket/de/de/att/pdf/ssb.pdf Ready to start building a value case for an integrated infrastructure implementation? We can help! Reach out to your local participating partner today.