Organizations like yours increasingly depend on their information infrastructure to accommodate growth and maximize revenue. In a waning economy, you’re stuck with conflicting goals:
1. To stay competitive, you must provide users with expanding, resource-hungry applications and services.
2. To stay profitable, you must lower costs.
Like most organizations, you’ll follow the path of consolidation, virtualization and automation as means to serving both ends. To respond, you’ll have to provide a fast, reliable and secure environment. That’s where VistaOne backs you.
Consolidation
Data center consolidation is a fundamental way to lower IT operations cost and it’s doubtless been on your radar. Larger data centers are demonstrably more cost-effective on a per-unit basis. For many organizations, combining multiple data centers into a single facility becomes the primary strategy for cutting costs while improving service levels.
Organizations can reverse the proliferation of data centers resulting from mergers and acquisitions through a thoughtful consolidation strategy. Concentrating computing resources into a small number of physical locations boosts the productivity of both IT assets and personnel and simplifies management. Companies regularly realize quantifiable returns from such efforts.
Consolidation begets congestion, however. Plans must include maintaining or improving the performance of key applications. Employees and customers experiencing sluggishness will perceive a lack of investment in technology infrastructure (and potentially project worse things about the company’s stability).
Adding bandwidth defeats the cost-saving goal and doesn’t even solve the problem effectively. Multiplying bandwidth services creates a vicious cycle of escalating CAPEX and OPEX without yielding any returns.
WAN optimization is a crucial element in any consolidation project. WAN optimization enables LAN-like performance over the WAN. Users of availability-critical applications, no matter how remote or mobile, can experience the same responsiveness and velocity as if local, even with chattier HTTP protocols.
Virtualization
The creation of virtual servers is another resource conservation method and is often used in consolidation strategies. Server virtualization allows local, remote and mobile end-users to access applications and information via a server's virtual environment.
This application server optimization creates virtual layers within a physical server, splitting it up so that different applications and operating systems can be run from the same server. This increased availability and subsequent accessibility can provide optimized performance by distributing applications to larger groups of users.
Again, optimizing WAN links contributes mightily to the process.
Automation
A third cost-cutting measure finds manual processes and automates them. If you have teams of I.T. people doing the same task month in and month out, you’ve got a target for automation. There’s a growing demand for tools that help users reduce hands-on labor costs and human error. Instead of having a lot of humans running data centers, enterprises want a 7-by-24, lights-out environment that is monitored, run and controlled remotely.
Automating application deployment saves. Every WAN optimization solution VistaOne recommends offers sophisticated but simple tools for rapid initial deployment and continuing maintenance.
VistaOne
VistaOne has the knowledge and experience to support the indispensible WAN optimization component of your organization’s network cost cutting initiative. First we test current network utilization and capabilities.
We assess the goals and needs of the network to determine the makeup of the traffic. Once network requirements have been identified, we can size the appliances to meet your business’ immediate needs, location by location, while planning-in appropriate scalability.
Finally, we implement the optimization solution. While WAN optimization solutions aren’t extremely complex, they’re not as easy to integrate as a typical switch or router. They’re high-end appliances that must be implemented correctly to be effective. VistaOne has adopted a systematic installation and phased hand-off procedure to ensure anticipated results and return on investment.
Riverbed
Riverbed’s Steelhead products enable end-to-end virtualization for geographically distributed companies. They simultaneously address performance needs at the branch office, availability at the data center and mobility and performance for mobile workers.
Steelheads accelerate response-critical applications in centralized environments, like:
- file sharing
- content management systems
- web-based applications
- design documents and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions
- ERP applications
Administrators can use Riverbed to consolidate these applications without performance penalties--even when driving VoIP and video conferencing over the same WAN link.
Blue Coat
Similarly, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances have made a significant difference in the transfer speed of virtualized traffic and the amount of bandwidth required to move it.
In addition to reducing redundant instructions across the WAN, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances along with the SG client can be used to transfer virtual machine images from off-site customer locations to the central data centers via the Internet. Large images of 10 gigabytes and more require up to 400% less bandwidth and transfer at rates three to four times faster over the Web. Blue Coat SG appliances also provide the bonus of Web security and policy control for Internet access.
Helpful Resources:
Ten Reasons to Deploy WAN Optimization in an Economic Downturn
Extreme Savings: Cutting Costs with Riverbed
Accelerating Virtualized Environments with Wide-area Data Services (WDS)
Server Consolidation with Blue Coat