Reduce Your Infrastructure Costs with Best Practices

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

How do you go about implementing these best practices? A sensible solution is to adopt them in a systematic way using Microsoft's Core Infrastructure Optimization Model as a framework. This enables your organisation to progress over time from a "basic" level of infrastructure optimisation through "standard" and "rationalised" levels to a fully optimised 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 realise 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 Savings for Each Server
How significant are the cost savings that Microsoft System Center can help you realise? Research carried out by Oregon-based Hansa|GCR in 2007 found that organisations running a collaboration workload using manual, "basic" optimisation level infrastructure incurred IT labour costs of U.S. $23,807 (£15,608) per server per year. By contrast, organisations with a managed and consolidated "rationalised" optimisation level for their IT infrastructure, with maximum automation, incurred costs of just U.S. $1,201 (£787) per server per year. This story is repeated with many different workloads: companies with "basic" optimisation level infrastructures spent an annual average of U.S. $15,045 (£9,864) on IT labour per server for their e-mail workloads, compared to just U.S. $6,285 (£4,121) per server per year for those with a "rationalised" optimisation level, and U.S. $3,753 (£2,460) per server for connectivity workloads such as DNS and DHCP compared to U.S. $301 (£197).

Save on Configuration Management
One important area where Microsoft System Center can help you cut costs is 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 virtualisation, 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 virtualisation and automate physical to virtual (P2V) server conversions
• unified management of physical and virtual machines (including those virtualised 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 virtualisation
• reduced energy costs

Cut End-to-End Monitoring Costs
Microsoft System Center can also help you cut costs 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

Reduce Data Protection, Recovery, and Restore Costs
Microsoft System Center can also enable you to reduce your data protection, recovery, and restore costs dramatically in both virtualised 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 virtualisation. The combination of these two System Center modules enables you to:

• centralise 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 virtualised 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

Manage Security and Compliance More Efficiently
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 labour costs due to the automation of complex compliance procedures

Long-Term Business Benefits
Reducing costs is always a sound business objective, and with IT infrastructure it can be especially important. That's because around 80 per cent of a typical enterprise's IT budget is used on operations and maintenance, leaving just 20 per cent 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 realise significant IT cost savings and business benefits well in to the future as well.