Today’s data centers run the gamut from “eat off the floor” clean and organized—with nary a cable out of place, lights blinking in perfect time and monitored from a NASA-like control center—to a state of complete disarray, with spaghetti-like cable management “systems,” boxes, manuals and CDs askew; and an over-reliance on the “sneaker-net” systems management approach. Maintaining an efficient data center is hard work, and with the proliferation of servers and dramatic year-to-year growth in storage needs, it isn’t getting any easier.

From processes to products, however, there's light at the end of the tunnel with a variety of ways to help improve the efficiency of your data centers. Here are a few ideas.

IT efficiency starts with IT processes

A new way of thinking about the role of the data center has evolved, driven by the IT Service Management (ITSM) model, which advocates that IT groups focus on their relationships with customers (internal and external), as well as on the quality of the services they provide rather than on the technology itself. The most widely adopted set of service management best practices is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which details disciplines and processes for delivering IT services. A recent CMP Research survey on the state of ITIL development revealed that 55 percent of the enterprises polled plan to implement ITIL best practices in the next 12 months in order to standardize their business their IT business processes.

The goal of using service-oriented best practices is to align IT processes with business goals, enabling the data center to perform more efficiently. By building standardized, repeatable processes, organizations can improve service delivery, better align IT with the business and get a better payoff from their IT investment.

A products-approach to data center efficiency

How you design and deploy your IT infrastructure will greatly affect how efficient your data center can be. To achieve and maintain optimal efficiency you should consider server and storage consolidation, and virtualization.

Server Consolidation: Reducing the number of servers in the data center and consolidating onto fewer platforms is one of the most effective ways to boost IT efficiency. Fewer servers require fewer software licenses, enable fewer and more centralized data centers, and simplify systems management. In fact, a recent InformationWeek Research survey on virtualization showed that 88 percent of respondents revealed that their main reason for embracing virtualization is to consolidate servers.

Today’s newest generation of servers, with two and four cores per socket, are better than ever for consolidation. These servers deliver a tremendous boost in performance, yet they actually draw less energy than their predecessors.

Storage Consolidation: When data is stored on multiple servers and storage devices across an organization, performance and availability suffers, and tasks like scheduling and synchronizing backups become complicated. With the volume of corporate data increasing by as much as 50 percent annually, storage consolidation can simplify the process of managing information, improve backups and recovery, and enable additional business continuity and productivity through data replication. And while not as many people focused on storage in terms of virtualization, 26 percent of the InformationWeek survey respondents said storage management was a key reason to embrace virtual servers.

Storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) configurations are centralized systems that are easier to manage and more scalable than direct attached storage. Consolidating storage enables IT organizations to deliver more flexibility, higher availability, faster recovery and better security, since policies can be implemented centrally and consistently.

Virtualization: With the proliferation of industry-standardized platforms and components, virtualization has taken off in the last year or two as one of the hottest technologies for improving asset utilization and simplifying data center operations. Almost 90 percent of the business technology professionals poled by InformationWeek Research have virtualization projects in progress or are planning them for the future.

Virtualization delivers great efficiency in developing and testing applications and is moving more and more into production environments. And because a single physical server can host many virtual workloads—any of which can be relocated or replicated easily—administrators can perform maintenance without taking applications offline. Although still used primarily for server consolidation, virtualization also helps data center efficiency by enabling better overall uptime and disaster recovery.

Systems Management: Where process meets product.

One of the best ways to improve data center efficiency is to automate and integrate systems management. By reducing the number of tools and consoles required to manage your environment, you simplify the overall operations of your data center. This also allows for the consistent implementation and execution of designated policies across your data centers.

Leading vendors are working to standardize the hardware interfaces for systems management so you can choose the tools you prefer and you can achieve the efficient management scheme needed in your data center.

Energy: The last efficiency frontier.

Energy use in the data center has become a “hot” topic over the last several years. Many IT organizations are faced not only with the rising costs of operating their data centers, but also with issues of supply as well as the overall effects of energy use on the environment. The system vendors have taken note, and today you can get new servers with tremendous performance capabilities that actually use less energy than previous generations, enabling the multiple benefits of a consolidated environment that’s easier to manage and actually costs less to power and cool.

Many IT groups focus on processor power consumption, but it’s the systems and data center as a whole that needs to be considered. Beyond the system, IT organizations need to manage energy at the rack, row and room (data center) levels. For example, data centers with racked equipment should use hot aisle/cold aisle configurations and blanking panels in unfilled server racks to manage airflow. Systems should be right-sized to workload demands; virtualization should be used to maximize hardware utilization, and older servers should be replaced with new energy-efficient models.

Conclusion: The achievable efficient data center

An efficient data center truly is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. There are many pieces, each valuable in its own right, which help create data center efficiency. Consider the processes and products in your data center, then look to update both on a regular basis to take advantage of new thinking and new technologies to make your data center more efficient.

Dell has a range of tools, products and services to help address data center efficiency at all levels. Tools such as the Dell Data Center Capacity Planner help estimate data center power and cooling requirements. Dell also offers a suite of IT infrastructure services including server and storage consolidation, data center environmental assessments and virtualization readiness assessments.