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Thought Leadership from Computacenter

Managing IT in a crisis - The “Systems Insight” advantage

We are facing a challenging economic landscape that seems to increase in uncertainty on a daily basis. The recent failure within the banking system, coupled with a global downturn has forced a review of financial and operational activities within many organisations. Governance at company level is under serious scrutiny and with it a drive to reduce unnecessary expenditure, cut costs and to finally realise a frequently abused term in business - "to do more with less"...
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Beating back ‘bad’ data

History may very well show that what saved the day during a tumultuous financial period in 2008 and 2009 was not a silver bullet but, rather, hard work and strong leadership. A similar view can absolutely be taken when discussing data storage and the market reaction to the proliferation of data. That data is growing exponentially isn’t news any longer, and one can easily find any of a number of different references regarding grains of sand, grains of rice, stars in the sky and so on to illustrate how quickly data is growing and how much data we now store.

The fact is, customers create data every day some of which is useful but most of which will become redundant and/or duplicate. Don't believe me? Watch how quickly a 'joke' email is forwarded to a distribution list. Innocent enough, but now you've sent a 30MB file to 30 people who will open it, laugh, and never open it again...although probably not before forwarding it on to another 30 people. So, if you're counting, that's 30 original copies, each forwarded to 30 additional mates, that's 930 copies at 27.9GB of the exact same file not likely to ever be accessed again.

And how to find that 'bad' data whilst looking after the 'good' data such as sales spreadsheets, customer orders, maintenance agreements, and so on?...
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Planning the fall of sprawl

Consolidation. It continues to be the most prolific data centre infrastructure project for all the usual reasons. Ease of management, reduce capital spend, reduce operational costs, running out of data centre space and Going Green.

And we are consolidating everything. Whether we are consolidating our server estate by introducing server virtualisation technology from the likes of VMware, or application consolidation, by introducing a single vendor’s application suite to replace multiple applications from a variety of vendors.

Consolidation is what IT departments are doing, because they have to...
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Beating the Power Crunch

Just as any political scandal will inevitably be referred to in the popular press as “something-gate”, it is now de rigeur to refer to a crisis in supply of anything as a “crunch”. It therefore comes as no surprise that Datacenter managers are talking of an impending “Power Crunch”.

Over recent years, Datacenter power consumption has come under more rigorous scrutiny. Rising energy prices and corporate focus on environmental issues have forced IT departments to look for ways to reduce power consumption and carbon emissions. At the same time, continuing growth in demand for Datacenter services and higher component-level power requirements have exerted pressure in the opposite direction. Now there is a new element to consider. Increasingly, limits are being reached on the amount of power that can be provided to the Datacenter as a whole. Where previously there were very persuasive arguments to reduce consumption, now there is no alternative...
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Managing your networks needn’t be complicated

The IP network is recognised to be the foundation of a modern Enterprise which values increased efficiency from investments, environmentally sustainable IT, reduced costs and a reliable system that supports business critical applications. Networks need to be flexible, easy to manage and able to adjust to new innovation.

The Enterprise demands additional value from their network. Some of the drivers for growth that we see include conducting business over ever increasing distances, consolidation of dispersed datacenters, convergence of applications and technologies, the advent of unified communications and cost reduction...
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