Reduce Your Infrastructure Costs with Optimization

Organizations of all sizes can achieve significant cost savings when they adopt core infrastructure best practices for their key server workloads. Research shows that the more best practices organizations adopt, the greater the cost savings thanks to more efficient server management and significantly lower labor costs.

One sensible plan for adopting best practices is to adopt them in a systematic way using Microsoft's Core Infrastructure Optimization Model as a framework. This enables your organization to progress over time from a "basic" level of infrastructure optimization through "standard" and "rationalized" levels to a fully optimized and highly efficient "dynamic" level as more best practices are adopted. The Microsoft System Center family of management products can provide the key core infrastructure capabilities you need to implement these best practices and realize the cost savings. The Microsoft System Center family includes Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Mobile Device Manager, and Service Manager.

Significant Cost Savings per Server
How significant are the cost savings that Microsoft System Center can help you realize? Research carried out by Hansa|GCR in 2007 found that organizations running a collaboration workload using manual, "basic" optimization level infrastructure incurred IT labor costs of $23,807 (US) per server per year. By contrast, organizations with a managed and consolidated "rationalized" optimization level for their IT infrastructure, with maximum automation, incurred costs of just $1,201 (US) per server per year. This story is repeated with many different workloads: companies with "basic" optimization level infrastructures spent an annual average of $15,045 (US) on IT labor per server for their e-mail workloads, compared to just $6,285 per server per year for those with a "rationalized" optimization level, and $3,753 (US) per server for connectivity workloads such as DNS and DHCP compared to $301 (US).

Cut Configuration Management Costs
Microsoft System Center can also help you cut costs related to configuration management. System Center Configuration Manager automates some of the key tasks that need to be performed on physical and virtual servers. Configuration management best practices include automated virtualization, automated provisioning, and automated patching and updating. In addition to System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager can also help with configuration management. Together the two System Center products can enable:

• rapid server provisioning and automatic deployment and updates
• server virtualization and automate physical to virtual (P2V) server conversions
• unified management of physical and virtual machines (including those virtualized using VMware's ESX hypervisor) from a single console.

Cost savings are achieved from:

• more efficient use of IT staff thanks to automation
• reduced physical server purchasing requirements due to virtualization
• reduced energy costs

Trim End-to-End Monitoring Costs
Microsoft System Center can also help you run more efficiently by introducing automation to monitor your systems more efficiently. Monitoring best practices include automated feedback and reporting, automated trouble handling, the thresholding of monitored parameters, and integration with predictive maintenance databases. The System Center modules that you can use to implement these best practices are System Center Operations Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, enabling you to:

• automate routine monitoring tasks
• monitor applications and services proactively
• carry out end-to-end system monitoring across different operating systems, virtual environments, and physical servers
• provide intelligent reporting

Cost savings come from:

• more efficient use of IT staff thanks to automation and intelligent reporting and monitoring
• reduced maintenance costs

Savings for Data Protection, Recovery, and Restore
Microsoft System Center can help you reduce your data protection, recovery, and restore costs dramatically in both virtualized and physical environments. Best practices in this field involve automation of backup, recovery, and restore operations themselves, as well as automated archiving of content and hierarchical storage management. The key enabler for implementing these best practices is System Center Data Protection Manager, along with System Center Virtual Machine Manager to handle virtualization. The combination of these two System Center modules enables you to:

• centralize backup and restore for physical and virtual machines
• backup to disk for faster restore
• reduce the cost impact of server failure by enabling high availability and business continuity using a virtualized infrastructure and virtual fall-back servers

Significant cost savings stem from:

• Reduced need for IT staff to be involved in backup and restore operations thanks to automation
• self-service file recovery performed by end users
• Reduced outage costs as virtual and physical workloads can be restored automatically in minutes

More Efficiently Manage Security and Compliance
When it comes to security and compliance, core infrastructure best practices involve automated system isolation and reconfiguration, integration with intrusion detection systems, and the ability to decommission without downtime. Used in tandem with Microsoft's Forefront security suite, Microsoft System Center provides you with:

• a console dashboard and reporting tools to help your data center staff understand and control the state of you server configuration to comply with regulatory requirements
• automated reporting,
• support for comprehensive security and identity access management
• layered server application security
• the ability to manage servers automatically to meet compliance standards

Costs reductions flow from:

• more productive IT staff thanks to automated detection, decommissioning, and trouble handling
• lower labor costs due to the automation of complex compliance procedures

Long-Term Benefits for the Business
Reducing costs is always a sound business objective, and with IT infrastructure it can be especially important. That's because around 80 percent of a typical enterprise's IT budget is used on operations and maintenance, leaving just 20 percent to be used on new projects designed to further your business goals. By helping you cut day-to-day operation and maintenance costs, Microsoft System Center can leave your IT department with more money to invest in these value-adding projects. And since System Center has been designed to become a part of a long-term investment roadmap, that means that it can continue to help you realize significant IT cost savings and business benefits well in to the future as well.