Is it time to refresh your data center? Stay ahead of the growing digital landscape with a modern data center strategy

The massive changes brought about by generative AI are putting pressure on IT to modernize and optimize to meet demand. Cloud service platforms promise greater elasticity and cost savings. However, there are times when organizations prefer to keep certain applications and data in their own data centers (for example, for security and compliance requirements or sensitive data control). However, on-premise may also mean renewal is needed, especially as new technologies, services and processes are adopted.

Migrating to the cloud and replacing your data center is a complex decision. Both options have pros and cons, and the best choice will depend on your current and future business needs. While many people are choosing the cloud, let’s take a look at some reasons why replacing your data center may be a more advantageous choice.

operational efficiency

We see that rising energy costs and increased focus on sustainability are driving better, more energy-efficient infrastructure. Modern design and advanced technology allow data centers to significantly reduce energy consumption and cooling requirements, helping to reduce energy costs and environmental impact.

Regulated Cloud Costs

To ensure application performance, organizations too often overprovision resources in case demand surges. However, the costs of running inefficient workloads are often higher than expected. Add this to the ongoing costs of constantly running workloads, and finance teams are asking why cloud costs always exceed budget.

Control and Security

An on-premises data center gives you complete control over your infrastructure, data, and security policies. This is often important for industries that need to maintain high security for sensitive data or maintain strict compliance requirements.

Continuous cost savings

While the initial capital investment requires upfront costs, the long-term operating costs of an on-premises data center can be lower, especially for organizations with predictable workloads and large data storage requirements.

Customization

Building your own data center gives you the opportunity to customize the environment to fit your organization’s specific needs and design efficiency and security based on your company’s needs.

Hybrid solution with IBM Turbonomic

Consider a hybrid cloud approach when evaluating your options. This gives you the ability to manage on-premises data centers and access cloud-based SaaS applications or burst to the cloud on demand. This flexibility and efficiency provides the balance you need to meet ever-changing business needs.

Of course, there are challenges and complexities that come with managing workloads across data centers and clouds. That’s where IBM® Turbonomic® comes in to help you reimagine your data center as the next hero of your ecosystem.

Turbonomic can automatically optimize resource levels for your applications while maintaining performance and dynamically scaling in response to business needs in near real-time. Optimizing your data center first can help you better plan for hardware replacement. In some cases, it can also help reduce the amount of infrastructure needed to modernize your data center.

How can Turbonomics help?

It starts with a plan. Whether your organization is looking to refresh its data center, consolidate within an existing private, public, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud environment, or increase on-premises efficiency, Turbonomic can help accelerate the process. Turbonomic software helps you plan your data center transformation and supports the performance of mission-critical applications throughout the process.

Turboeconomic planning helps organizations determine what hardware they can or should maintain. When planning, Turbonomic software takes into account the efficiency and depreciation schedules of various hardware and associates tags that indicate when leases will expire. With data center consolidation, organizations typically consolidate to fewer hosts and then to fewer data centers. We help by providing the following services within Turbonomic:

• On-Premise Optimization Plan to allow users to expand or move virtual machines and consolidate hardware
• Hardware Renewal Plan When users upgrade, they can see how many new hosts they will need.
• Host retirement plan If a user shuts down a host, you can check whether it can support the current load.

Before choosing a plan, organizations should consider sizing their test/development to get the most out of their hardware. With the help of AI-powered insights, Turbonomic can help guide your considerations.

Figure 1: IBM Turbonomic Plan Management Tool

The goal of consolidation is to minimize downtime and optimize use of data center hardware and resources. After consolidating to fewer hosts, you can potentially reduce licensing costs by moving to fewer data centers. By creating appropriate policies to merge clusters (even between vCenter and datacenter), you can live migrate virtual machines to a new destination.

Once you decide where to place your workloads, Turbonomic helps automate application resource allocation to ensure your applications run optimally in the cloud or data center. Turbonomic’s AI-powered platform can continuously analyze application requirements to prevent applications from running out of resources or experiencing outage/modification scenarios.

Here are five ways Turbonomic helps keep your applications running optimally.

1. Workload placement

Turbonomic provides AI-powered insights to analyze workload demands and understand customer demand and resource availability across data centers and clouds for optimal deployment for cost efficiency and performance.

2. Resize VMs

Turbonomic does not simply analyze and propose solutions like other solutions. Automation allows you to migrate workloads to underutilized resources and take action to scale those resources up or down based on demand. You can also save money and increase infrastructure capacity by terminating unused workloads or resources, allowing you to expand your space without purchasing new infrastructure. Rather than increasing their footprint, customers can save long-term costs by replacing their current infrastructure with a more energy-efficient model as needed.

Figure 2: Turbo-economical virtual machine sizing

3. Continuous storage deployment

Turbonomic software helps optimize storage devices by moving data across virtualization layers while maintaining performance or reconfiguring the array itself.

Figure 3: Persistent storage deployment

4. Capacity management

Turbonomic software uses a real-time view of your environment to simulate changes you define, such as the amount of physical infrastructure needed to support growth or migrate workloads.

Figure 4: Turbo-economical capacity management

5. Supercluster optimization

Turbonomic software allows you to create “superclusters” or virtual pools that utilize the total amount of cumulative resources by allowing workloads to move between clusters as demand increases. This can help improve data center resiliency, performance, and cloud economics.

Figure 5: Optimized super cluster

Realizing the potential of the cloud: true flexibility and elasticity

Locking in a supplier can be difficult, with concerns about price increases, licensing changes, and customer support. This has the potential to hinder innovation and cost efficiency in both the data center and the cloud. The ability to run your workloads on cost-effective, optimal infrastructure can mean all the difference.

Turbonomic helps organizations leverage flexibility by providing integrations and recommendations for:

Infrastructure Compatibility—Turbonomic integrates with existing and next-generation data center technologies to enable rapid automated discovery and time to value for VMware® Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Kubernetes, and ServiceNow. Turbonomic helps you operate your environment efficiently and provides flexibility and resilience.

Multicloud Compatibility—Turbonomic supports numerous public and private cloud providers, including AWS, Azure Google, VMware, Red Hat® OpenShift®, and more. Turbonomic can analyze and determine the optimal infrastructure to run your applications on to do so cost-effectively.

Reach the right conclusion

After a thorough analysis of your specific needs, resources, and budget, you can determine whether it is time to replace your data center. IBM Turbonomic helps you make optimal decisions for your organization. Learn how our software platform can help you achieve a modern data center.

Learn more about IBM Turbonomic