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Even during the recent global economic crisis and recessions, there were few, if any, signs of a data or information recession. In fact, there was evidence to the contrary; for example, while financial institutions were plagued with record negative economic impact they were also generating, moving and processing record amounts of data that also must be preserved. What has changed is the need to do more with less or more with what you have to support and sustain business growth &#040;see Figure 1&#041;. This means leveraging existing and new or emerging technologies and techniques to stretch available resources including budgets, people, floor space and power to support business growth and new applications need for data and information. </p> <center> <img src="http://www.ittoday.info/ITPerformanceImprovement/Images/2011-07SchulzFigure1.jpg" border="0" align="top"> </center> <p class=text> <b>Figure 1.</b> Supporting demand, reducing per unit costs while maintaining or enhancing QoS. </p> <p class=text> The result is that IT organizations are looking for opportunities to do more with what they have while supporting growth along with new services with available budgets without compromising on customer service delivery &#040;figure 1&#041;. In order to sustain business growth while enabling new functionality or services, providers of information services will need to look at options for becoming more efficient. Becoming more efficient means more than cost avoidance; it also includes boosting productivity while streamlining information services delivery. This means stretching resources &#040;people, processes, budgets, hardware, software, energy, facilities and services&#041; further while enabling better business agility and productivity. Considers how IT or other providers of information services can do more with available resources &#040;people, processes, products, and services&#041; while reducing per-unit costs and maintaining or enhancing quality of service and customer satisfaction. </p> <p class=text> Part of reducing per unit costs is having insight into what your capabilities are in order to make apples to apples comparisons with others for a given level of service. For example what is the cost of providing a 100 MByte sized email account that is backed-up and protected, or to provide a database or SharePoint repository of a given size managed to a particular SLO to meet service level agreement &#040;SLA&#041; requirements. Part of reducing per unit costs can be for example to make better use of a fast server on a 24 hour basis while being used at a given level of utilization where peak productivity is balanced with QoS and customer satisfaction to avoid waste, delays or other impacts that result in lost opportunity. Another example of reducing per unit costs are for example leveraging storage performance consolidation such as fast disks or solid state devices &#040;SSD&#041; to reduce the cost of a transaction, message, web page load or other activity that has the benefit of taking less time. By reducing costs without negatively impacting on QoS, performance or availability while supporting growth demand should be enhanced productivity, reduced complexity and cost which results in profitability, that is if it is a priority for your organization. </p> <p class=text> Virtualization, converged and dynamic infrastructure along with IT clouds are popular techniques and technologies not to mention timely buzzword bingo topics as a means to enable organizations to do more with available budgets or other resources. A focus of virtualization, convergence of data and storage networking, storage and servers along with IT clouds for compute, storage and applications has been around cost avoidance or elimination via improved utilization, economies of scale associated with being efficient. Another focus of virtualization and cloud, is the next wave that expands the focus beyond consolation for enabling agility, flexibility, removing complexity which results in cost savings while reducing waste, rework all for which move towards becoming more effective. What this all means is that there will be a continued focus around cost savings, however there is also a growing awareness of reducing costs while supporting demand without negatively impacting quality of service &#040;QoS&#041;, service level objectives &#040;SLOs&#041; and performance or availability. </p> <p class=text> Clouds and virtualization are frequently tossed about being popular buzzwords; there also exists plenty of &#034;cloud and virtualization confusion&#034; resulting in missed opportunity. One of those is that of the expanding focus of virtualization in the role of life beyond consolidation. In virtualization, life beyond consolation the focus of virtualization expands to those applications or systems that cannot be shrunk or squeezed down onto shared physical machines &#040;PMs&#041; nor is it about how many virtual machines &#040;VMs&#041; per PM. Instead, in the next wave of virtualization of servers, storage and desktops, while consolation remains an opportunity, focus expands to enabling agility, flexibility and ease of management including to support high availability &#040;HA&#041;, business continuance &#040;BC&#041;, disaster recovery &#040;DR&#041; along with load balancing for planned maintenance, technology refresh or upgrades and seasonal demands. </p> <p class=text> When it comes to IT clouds and virtualization, don t be scared, however look before you leap! What this means is that you should do your homework, prepare, learn, and get involved with proof of concepts and training to build the momentum and success to continue an ongoing IT journey to enable agility, flexibility, scale and productivity while reducing costs and complexity. &#9830; <br> <br> <b>Read more <a href="http://ittoday.info/ITPerformanceImprovement/index.htm"><i>IT Performance Improvement</i></a></b> </p> <!--DISCLAIMER NOTICE AND COPYRIGHT--> <p class="copyright"> <br> <br> Certain names and logos on this page and others may constitute trademarks, servicemarks, or tradenames of <a HREF="http://www.crcpress.com" TARGET="_parent">Taylor & Francis LLC.</a> Copyright &#169; 2008&#151;2011 Taylor & Francis LLC. All rights reserved. </font> </p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> <td width="300"> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table style="background-color:#E0E0D1;" cellpadding="10" margin="5" border="0" valign="top"> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan=2> <h3>Books by Greg Schulz</h3> </td> </tr> <tr valign="top"> <td> <center> <img src="http://www.ittoday.info/catalog/images/covers80w/K12375.jpg" Border=0> </center> </td> <td> <h4> <a href="http://www.crcpress.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?isbn=9781439851739&AF=WAUER" target="blank">Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking</a> </h4> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <p class=text> <a href="http://www.crcpress.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?isbn=9781439851739&AF=WAUER" target="blank"><b>Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking</b></a>, by savvy IT industry veteran Greg Schulz, looks at converging IT resources and management technologies for facilitating efficient and effective delivery of information services, including enabling of Information Factories. Regardless of your experience level, Schulz guides you through the various technologies and techniques available for enabling efficient information services delivery. </p> </td> </tr> <tr valign="top"> <td> <center> <img src="http://www.ittoday.info/catalog/images/covers80w/AU6669.jpg" Border=0> </center> </td> <td> <h4> <a href="http://www.crcpress.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?isbn=9781420086669&AF=WAUER" target="blank">The Green and Virtual Data Center</a> </h4> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <p class=text> This book presents virtually all critical IT technologies and techniques to discuss the interdependencies that need to be supported to enable a dynamic, energy-efficient, economical, and environmentally-friendly green IT data center. </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <h3>About the Author</h3> <p class="text"> <b>Greg Schulz</b> is founder of the Server and StorageIO Group (<a href="http://www.storageio.com" target="blank">StorageIO</a>), an independent IT industry advisory consultancy firm. He is the author of the books <b>Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking,</b> <b>The Green and Virtual Data Center,</b> and <b>Resilient Storage Networks</b>. He is a popular <a href="http://www.storageioblog.com" target="blank">blogger</a> and also a fixture on <a href="https://twitter.com/storageio" target="blank">Twitter</a>. <br> </p> </p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </table> </body> </html>