Data center optimization: Is it time for a refresh?
25 September 2024
6 min read
Author
Paul Carley Senior Product Marketing Manager
Chrystal R. China Writer
Data center optimization: Is it time for a refresh?

With the seismic shift wrought by generative AI (gen AI), IT departments are under pressure to modernize and optimize to meet the demand. Cloud service platforms abound, promising greater elasticity and cost savings. There are times, though, when CIOs and data center operations teams prefer to keep certain applications and data in their own data center (when maintaining security and compliance requirements or controlling access to sensitive data, for example). But on-premises data centers can require frequent refreshes, especially as new technologies, services and processes emerge. 

Deciding whether to migrate your IT infrastructure to a cloud provider or go with a data center refresh is a complex decision. Both options have pros and cons and the best choice depends on your current and future business needs.  While many enterprises are choosing the cloud, let’s look at some reasons why a data center optimization initiative (DCOI) might be the more advantageous and cost-effective choice: 

Operational efficiency

Rising energy costs and greater focus on sustainability are pushing businesses to build better, more energy-efficient infrastructures. Today, power usage effectiveness (PUE)—a metric that measures data center energy efficiency—is the name of the game.

Modern data center designs and advanced technologies have enabled IT operations teams to significantly reduce energy consumption and reliance on cooling systems in physical data centers, which helps optimize server utilization, minimize energy costs and limit environmental impact (emissions).  

Regulated cloud costs

Too often, organizations over-provision cloud resources to make sure their applications function optimally if there’s a spike in demand. But the cost of running inefficient workloads is often more than expected. Add that to the ongoing cost of continuously running workloads and finance (or FinOps) teams will start asking why your cloud computing costs are consistently over budget. 

Control and security

With an on-premises data center, you retain complete control over your infrastructure, data and security policies. This is often crucial for industries that need to maintain high security for sensitive data or strict compliance requirements.  

Reduced ongoing cost

While the initial capital investment might be significant, long-term operational costs for an on-premises data center might be lower, especially for organizations with predictable workloads and extensive data storage needs.   

Customization

Building your own optimized data center can enable you to customize your IT environment to meet your organization’s specific needs, including security requirement and business-specific optimizations.

The best of both worlds: a hybrid solution

As you weigh your options, consider a hybrid cloud approach, which enables efficient on-premises data center management, streamlined access to cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) applications and automated—or on-demand—bursts to the cloud. The flexibility of hybrid cloud approaches can give enterprises the agility and infrastructure scalability to meet ever-changing business demands.  

Managing workloads across cloud and data center infrastructures can, however, present some challenges. This is where IBM® Turbonomic® can help. The IBM Turbonomic platform can help businesses re-imagine the data center as the next-generation hero of their IT stack.  

Turbonomic automatically optimizes enterprise application resources while dynamically scaling with business needs—all in real time and without sacrificing uptime, functionality or performance. With Turbonomic, customers have been able to reduce power consumption and the amount of hardware their environment requires, reduce or avoid annual refresh costs and still add resources when applications need them. 

Optimizing your on-premises data center enables you to better plan for hardware refreshes; in some cases, it can also reduce the amount of IT equipment you need to modernize your data centers.  

How a data center refresh works

It starts with planning. If your organization is looking to refresh data centers, consolidate within an existing private, public, hybrid cloud or multicloud environment, or streamline on-premises architecture, Turbonomic can help accelerate your optimization strategy and process. Turbonomic software can plan data center transformations and help ensure the performance of mission-critical applications throughout the process. 

Turbonomic’s strategic planning capabilities help organizations understand which hardware they can or should keep. It can also serve as a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool, processing metering data for hardware components across the network, identifying inefficiencies, connecting with depreciation schedules and setting up alerts to notify IT teams when leases are expiring.

With a data center consolidation, organizations generally start by consolidating onto fewer hosts and then consolidate to fewer data centers to minimize downtime and optimize data center hardware and resource usage. By creating the appropriate policies to merge clusters (even between vCenters® and data centers), virtual machines (VMs) can be live migrated to their new destination.  

Turbonomic offers several services to help with the process:  

  • Optimize on-premises plan: enables users to scale or move VMs and consolidate hardware to reduce the total number of servers
  • Hardware refresh plan: enables users to see how many new hosts they will need when they upgrade.
  • Host decommission plan: enables users to see whether they can support their current load if they shut down a host

Before choosing a plan, organizations should consider resizing test/dev to get more out of their hardware. With the help of AI-based insights, Turbonomic can help guide you through the consideration. 

Optimizing the data center

Then, you start optimizing. After you’ve decided where to place your workloads, Turbonomic can automate application resourcing to ensure applications run optimally in the cloud or data center. Turbonomic’s AI-powered platform also continuously analyzes application demand to help ensure apps aren’t starved for resources and don’t cause break/fix scenarios.  

Here are five ways Turbonomic helps keep your applications running optimally: 

1. Workload placement  

Turbonomic can analyze workload demand, customer demand and resource availability across the infrastructure to help ensure optimal resource placement for cost-efficiency and performance.  

2. VM rightsizing 

Turbonomic doesn’t just analyze data and make suggestions like other platforms; it can also automatically migrate workloads to underutilized resources and scale those resources up or down based on demand.

Turbonomic can even shut down unused workloads or resources to cut costs and increase infrastructure capacity, enabling businesses to expand their footprint without having to purchase new infrastructure. Customers can replace current infrastructure with more energy efficient models as needed (instead of adding hardware), providing users more long-term savings. 

3. Continuous storage placement   

Turbonomic software analyzes how each workload uses storage and how storage affects the availability and performance of the underlying array. This helps the software optimize storage devices, moving data at the virtualization layer without disrupting performance or forcing a reconfiguration of the array itself. 

4. Capacity management 

Turbonomic software uses real-time environment metrics to simulate changes you define. If, for instance, an IT team wants to migrate workloads, Turbonomic can tell them how much physical infrastructure they’ll need to complete the process. And with continuous data center automation and optimization, IT teams can run any simulation they imagine.  

5. Optimize super clusters 

Turbonomic software enables teams to create “super clusters,” virtual pools that allow workloads to move between clusters when demand increases. These clustering capabilities help teams unlock the total cumulative resource volume in a network, giving businesses greater elasticity and improving infrastructure performance and cloud economics. 

Unlocking the promise of cloud: true flexibility and elasticity

Vendor lock can be challenge with data center optimization tools and concerns about price hikes, license changes and customer support can cause many sleepless nights. Even worse, vendor lock can stifle innovation and cost-effectiveness in both data centers and the cloud.

IBM Turbonomic can help organizations optimize flexibility by offering integration and recommendations for:

  • Infrastructure compatibility. Turbonomic seamlessly integrates with traditional and next-generation data center technologies, enabling rapid auto-discovery and time-to-value for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Kubernetes and ServiceNow. No matter what infrastructure you are running on, Turbonomic can help improve the agility and efficiency of your environment.
  • Multicloud compatibility. Turbonomic supports a range of public and private cloud providers, including AWS, Azure Google, VMware, Red Hat® OpenShift® and more. It can analyze network data to determine the best infrastructure for your application to run on, ensuring top-tier performance at the best possible price. 

With a thorough analysis of your specific needs, resources and budget, you can determine if it’s time to refresh your data centers. And IBM Turbonomic can empower you to make optimal decisions based on what’s best for your organization.

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