Data centre consolidation could save Scottish firms millions

Companies in Scotland could be missing out on multi-million pound savings by failing to consolidate their data centre environments.

Non-standardised and under-utilised data centre infrastructures mean businesses in Scotland are facing escalating operational costs, many of which could be reduced by the adoption of new technologies, such as virtualisation.

Communications giant Cable & Wireless has slashed more than £3 million from its annual IT bill by migrating its applications to a consolidated data centre environment.

Asset optimisation

Speaking at a recent Computacenter seminar, Steve O’Donnell, Vice President for
Infrastructure Transition Programmes at Cable & Wireless, revealed that the migration had helped to not only streamline the company’s IT infrastructure but also maximise its flexibility and utilisation of resources.

“The data centre consolidation has enabled us to identify and remove unnecessary applications and servers from our infrastructure, as well as standardise our operating systems. Prior to the migration we were running various flavours and versions of Unix, which was both costly and complex to support,” commented O’Donnell.

As a result of the ongoing programme, Cable & Wireless will be able to reduce its number of global data centres by a significant percentage, which will aid considerable cost savings. It has already consolidated its UK sites from nine to seven by implementing such technologies as virtualisation and blade servers, and hopes to reduce this number further in the future.

Share and share alike

Attempting such a massive consolidation exercise, however, was a considerable challenge, and required the development of automated migration processes and tools.

Simon Gay, Consultancy Practice Leader at Computacenter, warned delegates at the Coping with Migration event in Edinburgh that planning for the physical migration is not the only challenge they will face.

“Implementing a virtualised or utility-based server infrastructure will also impact the culture of the organisation, and the benefits of the shared services model will need to be clearly communicated to business departments to ensure a seamless transition and change in attitude,” commented Gay.

Services model

Industry watchers believe organisations will increasingly adopt services-centric IT infrastructures in a bid to aid cost control and improve operational efficiency.

Paul Tempest-Mitchell, Data Centre Practice Manager for Sun Microsystems, told delegates: “IT directors need to demonstrate to individual departments how business growth impacts their consumption of IT resources – and the associated costs involved.

“Service-optimised data centres are great enablers for financial transparency, but organisations first need to embrace the likes of standardisation, consolidation and ITIL, to ensure they can prepare their infrastructure for operating in a services-led environment.”