Simplify Your IT Infrastructure

How complex is your Ottawa business IT infrastructure?

Many companies don’t consider IT maintenance as one of their top business priorities. Medium-sized businesses in particular have trouble keeping up with their IT needs because their growth often surpasses their available resources. These businesses could benefit from a more simplified IT infrastructure and compact server solutions. When doing so, they should consider what specific resource limitations they face, what applications they need to run, and what kind of performance they require from their server.

Go Compact

A compact server will reduce your power and cooling needs, as well as your IT costs. It also requires less maintenance.  Compact servers replace the need for a server room, which can be costly to build. A compact server, such as the Dell PowerEdge VRTX, provides a lot of power and flexibility while saving space. It can also power-off when it’s not in use, diminishing the need for a constant cooling source.

Save Your Space

An IT environment should be designed to save data-center floor space, as well as power consumption. According to Deni Conner, founding analyst at Storage Strategies NOW, a dual-core server, can sufficiently host applications like SQL Server apps for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Microsoft Exchange, and front-office apps including SharePoint collaboration software.

Advanced server technology has many benefits including the ability to incorporate business applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) virtualization, and when necessary, racks or blade servers (cost-efficient, slim and less power-consuming servers).

Rack and Blade Servers

For more complex computing environments, towers, racks (a metal frame used to hold various hardware devices such as servers, hard disk drives, modems and other electronic equipment) or blade servers (more cost-efficient, smaller and less power consuming servers) are good choices. However, if you have a lot of servers, you probably don’t want to use a collection of tower servers, because they take up a lot of space.

Rack servers can become computing powerhouses because they support large amounts of RAM (Random Access Memory). Rack servers are also expandable and some include 12 or more disks, and support for four or more processors, each with multiple cores.

Deciding which type to use can be difficult. If you need one or two servers a tower solution makes a lot of sense. If you need three to twenty four servers, or mass scalability, then rack servers are a good choice. When requiring more than 24 servers, consider a blade solution to meet all of your data center needs.

Invest In Your Server

When your server is over three years old it will lag behind newer servers; a newer server infrastructure is mandatory as older server infrastructures have a decreased memory capacity.

According to UBM TechWeb:

“In an age in which victory goes to those who are best-equipped to access, understand and leverage the data they accumulate, next-generation servers … are the gateway to faster access to critical information.”

Better yet, contact Fuelled Networks to help you meet your IT needs and sort through this constantly changing IT environment!