Data center flexibility and efficiency and how this works for a business

One of the most significant ways to minimize capital expenditures and measure total cost of ownership (TCO) savings at a corporate level was to migrate and consolidate workloads to the best-fit platform.

Specific workload recommendations from the strategy team were used during execution, including:

• To deliver optimal efficiency and cost savings, virtualization should be the standard.
• Utilization of each data center should be maximized to avoid unnecessary expenditures or new capacity.
• Automation and processing tools should be used to minimize conversion costs.
• Optimal TCO can be achieved by eliminating redundant, overlapping or similar IT services.

With the data center inventory in hand, the execution team was able to eliminate significant up-front effort by contacting application owners to sunset applications and decommission servers that were no longer in use. Initially, over 500 servers in 377 cities were found in the wild—belonging to an individual location or business unit and operating outside strategic data centers. 

Virtualized private cloud has been selected for workloads that are suitable for virtualization, but require a more robust level of security and control than can be supplied in a public cloud environment. Examples include workloads that depend on sensitive data normally restricted to the enterprise, workloads composed of multiple codependent services, and those requiring a higher level of auditability and accountability. Other candidates for virtualized private cloud include workloads based on third-party software which does not have a virtualization or cloud-aware licensing strategy, those that require detailed chargeback or utilization measurement and workloads requiring flexibility and customization.