How to plan a cost-effective Data Center transformation

Data Centers have become nerve centers of the organizations in the modern digital world. Their performance and efficiency are crucial levers of organizational success. The challenge for technology heads has been to arrive at Data Center solutions that are cost-effective, offering value without compromising on essential features. Utilizing available space for Data Center scaling is a cost-saving method often employed by organizations. This measure can only yield short-term value. Creating a cost-effective Data Center with optimum performance and decent ROI, in the long run, requires elaborate planning. Companies can plan a cost-effective Data Center transformation using the following measures.

Disaggregated architecture

We often visualize a Data Center like the one with racks of servers, blinking and humming away. What happens when one of the server modules get compromised or damaged? Will you replace the entire server? It will be wiser if you replace or upgrade only the equipment in question as this approach has lower downtime and is more cost-effective. A disaggregated architecture like High-Performance Compute (HPC) offers this benefit. An intelligent HPC architecture can transform your Data Center and give you significant savings in the long term.

The plan for a Data Center transformation or development relies on some key functions like design computing and power management. Making effective use of these functions would result in cost saving. Electronic design automation can shorten the design cycle for the Data Center architecture, which reduces the time to market. Further, with disaggregated architecture offered by HPC, physical operations become more cost-effective than workloads running on the cloud. A comparative cost saving upwards of 60% can be achieved.

Traditional Data Centers used power architectures with limitations and thus, incurred a major cost when scaling up, but modern Data Centers use low power consuming servers and efficient cooling systems and thus, have higher Power Usage Effectiveness and less cost. A desegregated architecture can further bring down the operating costs of a Data Center.

Micro-Data Centers

Scalability, speed and reliability. The modern business world relies on these elements for its operation, and they can be optimized by deploying the right technology. If the costs are not managed well, it can put a strain on the organization. The question is – Is the desired ROI achievable? The use of Micro-Data Centers that are located closer to the points of consumption can reduce latency and cost both for cloud and a remote Data Center. The micro-architecture can reduce up to 42% of the capital expenditure when compared to traditional Data Centers.

Data Centers designed with technologies like virtualization, compaction, and hyperconvergence result in significant cost savings. Virtualization allows a company to use the computing power across workloads in a Data Center, saving power; compaction consolidates multiple racks into one, saving space. On top of it, hyperconvergence integrates high performance compute, high performance storage, and networking, thereby increasing the speed of deployment.

Power provisioning

Around 3% of the total electricity in the world is utilized by global Data Centers, and that amounts to roughly 416 terawatts. By 2025, Data Centers would end up consuming a fifth of the global power. No wonder, power is a major concern when it comes to Data Centers, and power-saving measures bring cost benefits for an organization. Power provisioning can be used to optimize Data Center power consumption by understanding how power is consumed by equipment, servers, and workloads, and optimizing it.

Power supplies have a sweet spot, the level at which high operational efficiencies can be achieved. However, most Data Centers operate below this level. The reason why companies could be restrictive in using enough power is the cautious measure of average and peak power consumption given on the nameplate of a power supply equipment. However, it is important to understand that if the Data Center is operating below this sweet spot, it could be wasting energy, and this wasted energy would further increase the need for cooling. Using the right power supplies, amortizing power across servers, and running Data Centers at optimum loads can bring efficiency and cost-savings.

A cost-effective Data Center transformation can be achieved through effective architecture, fast deployment, and optimized power consumption. Organizations can beneficially employ these measures when scaling up their Data Centers for achieving long-term gains.

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