Shams Hasan,Infrastructure Solutions
Marketing Manager
Middle East, Turkey,
and Africa (META)
Dell EMC
Product evolution is an incredible thing: when done correctly it drives progress and satisfaction advancing the demands of the market, concurrently it hastens innovation and enables profitability at an enterprise level.
With the increasingly omnipresent role of technology in modernizing business practices, models, and strategies, the need for companies to adopt and deploy a digital transformation strategy is more of a necessity than a suggestion. In our region, technology evolution is helping all kinds of verticals – healthcare, education, energy, government, and even entrepreneurs – not just run their business, but find their competitive edge, enter markets in new and innovative ways, and do so while changing the economics to their advantage.
In the data center, evolution itself has evolved! Where evolution of servers, storage, and networking took place in the recent past in silos, today we see cross-evolutions in platforms that blur these lines. In this race servers have a new-found position of ‘celebrity’ for those who know!
Moore’s Law Compounded
You may have heard about Moore’s law – an observation by Gordon Moore that compute density will double every year, to be exact every 18 months. What most people do not realize is the compounded effect of a doubling every 18 months – a 10x improvement every 5 years. Think about the implications of this for a second. The servers you have access to today are 10 times more powerful than the ones you deployed in 2012 – 5 years ago and the servers you will deploy in 2022 will be 10 times more powerful than they are today. All for the same yearly investment.
In Digital Transformation, Servers Rule the Data Center
As growing Customer interest towards Software Defined Data centers is being matched by technology that the industry can offer, what is often understated is that the Software Defined need and trend is driving as well as thriving on innovations in servers. Software on standardized x86 server hardware is able to better emulate networking architecture, and software-defined-networking starts to displace specialized hardware for the same function. The same is happening to storage arrays that in the past were dedicated arrays with drives and a storage controller; today with software-defined-storage a server populated with drives and software takes care of collating and presenting a single storage ecosystem. In a Digital Transformation strategy Servers form the foundation of the Modern Data Center.
IT Is Changing, Servers Are Changing … Aging Servers Obstruct Your Transformation
With servers impacting the possible entirety of your software defined data center, a Server Refresh strategy is a total cost of ownership (TCO) discussion today. IDC found that by neglecting to upgrade their server infrastructure in a timely fashion, IT organizations can lose up to 39% of peak performance and add up to 40% in application management costs and up to 148% in server administration costs (Source: IDC). It is not often easy as to where you are seeing the savings, so here’s some things to consider:
- Matching the same performance and optimization to running on older and legacy servers can highlight ROI in your data center very quickly.
- Newer technologies pack more densely memory and storage and performance allowing you to take significant advantage of consolidation; here your footprint costs can scale over-time for significant return.
- The value-add of improvements in systems management capability with new generation of servers is often a forgotten an understated benefit of refreshing your servers; with simplified management and improvements in automation we can save up to 92% of time for employees (Source: IDC).
- As systems fail, they are more likely to fail adding to unplanned downtime, this is compounded by the fact that reliability of systems goes up with every new generation of servers that comes to market.
Server refreshes may be a monotonous aspect of data center lifecycle management, it is an activity critical to the evolution of your technology data center, your business’ IT Strategy, and possibly the bedrock of your organization’s Digital Transformation.
Dell EMC provides industry-leading data center infrastructure solutions, which are agile, scalable, and affordable. And our Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers are no different; they are designed to help simplify IT and optimize workloads by boosting application performance and delivering unrivalled manageability. They are also able to provide versatility and operational efficiency, which makes them the perfect fit for businesses of any size. With Dell EMC holding the #1 position in rack servers, converged, data center, storage and cloud we are ideally positioned to enable customers to transform their data centers with an unrivaled breadth and depth of solution stack and unified support; and with the next industrial revolution happening around us right now, we don’t plan on slowing down any time soon.
Check out a webinar I presented on the same topic.
LinkedIn: Shams Hasan
Twitter: @shamshasan
