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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

May - 2007 - issue > Technology

Do More with Less

Praveen Cherian
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Praveen Cherian
In a world where business fortunes may turn in a split second, the key to success lies in the ability to flex and adopt to the unknown and unpredictable. More often than not however, many IT infrastructures that support business processes today are overly complex and rigid, and spread across islands of under-optimized computing resources, hindering a company’s ability to react swiftly.

This problem occurs since over the years, companies have often bought IT systems and applications to support specialized needs on an adhoc basis. As a result, they have built up several layers of systems and servers, each running on a different operating system, supporting a single application, spread out across dispersed facilities and data centers. In addition, server and storage capacities are sized to handle peak workloads, which result in significant under-utilization for regular workloads: up to 90 percent of available capacity can remain idle at any given time.

As operational costs for maintaining existing infrastructure and applications are expected to grow two-and-a-half times faster than hardware spend within the next few years, it is hardly surprising that CIOs surveyed recently have indicated that the alignment of IT to business strategies and cost reductions of IT manpower, management and infrastructure are among their top priorities for 2007.

Simplify, simplify, simplify
To deliver greater business value while reducing costs, simplification is the key. Firms need to start looking into ways to optimize their IT investments, trim the fat off overly complex and underutilized IT systems and create a lean and dynamic IT infrastructure that is easier to manage and upgrade, and less expensive to run. To achieve these goals, enterprises are turning to IT Resource Optimization (ITRO), a predefined set of hardware, software and services which encompasses the concepts of virtualization, consolidation and provisioning. ITRO enables businesses to manage more applications on fewer systems, reduce resource usage and complexity, and improve market responsiveness—all at a lower total cost.

However, while simplification is the goal, implementing ITRO is anything but simple. To be successful, ITRO projects need to be delivered according to a structured and comprehensive framework that covers the following phases:

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