Many companies suffer high operational costs due to use of too many servers. They are aware that they have spent too much cash on equipments and maintenance. The truth is, it is possible to have far fewer servers, instead of having hundreds in the data center. It is truly amazing how companies could spend a lot of money on things that they don’t need. The whole point is that with more servers in the center, companies need to deal with more expensive upgrades and maintenance.
There are solutions in the market that can help us optimize server usages in the center. Unfortunately, many suppliers intentionally conceal this information and they continue to urge companies to purchase more servers and expand their networks. So, whenever a few servers go down, these providers urge companies to set up backup servers, when it is not really necessary. Technically, it is much better to find real solutions that can help us save much less money. Companies as clients should also get words around about the ethical and quality standards of the providers, so they can make proper comparisons.
Many servers are based on Intel’s technology and we should consider whether there are other solutions that can provide us with lower operational costs. The costs of running hundreds of servers can be rather enormous and we should look for ways to reduce them. It is not only about the initial server costs, but also technicians and electricity costs needed to run the servers and the cooling solutions. There are also down-time costs that companies need to consider, because even with 99% uptime, companies need to deal with an equivalent of nearly 4 days of down-time in a year.
Depending on the size of the company, they could lose somewhere between $500 to $5 million for each hour of downtime. We should look for server solutions that can really “serve” our businesses. Many companies also consider a migration to 64-bit systems to help them gain more performance and memory access. Before doing this, we should be aware of the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit solutions. Some types of 64-bit solutions could leverage the performance and capabilities exponentially, but this applies differently in each scenario.
It should be noted that extreme high performance could be achieved only if operating system and software we use are designed for 64-bit capability. A 64-bit system also supports huge addressable memory pool, up until billions of gigabytes. However, this doesn’t mean a thing if there are too many users, too much data in cache, too limited I/P speed and less capable processor. So, it is clear that 64-bit support doesn’t guarantee high-speed performance. Immediate performance gain can be achieved only if we can process large amounts of data and take on more complicated workloads.
We obviously need to consider any scalability option than can be integrated within the network. In-house administrators must be able to gain familiarity with the data center architecture in their company. However, we should be aware that scalability isn’t equal to high expenditures and in some cases, it can be achieved through specific software upgrade and optimizations.