Why it pays to upgrade your IT infrastructure
Posted by Sean Houghton on Wed, Oct 28, 2009
Many businesses we work with are always looking to save money by reducing costs, whether they have a large internal IT department or an outsourced IT support agreement the remit is the same... Do more with less. With this in mind you may think investing more of your IT budget on new hardware & software is only going to make you feel the pinch more. However making the right investments in IT will save you money!
Here are just four ways you can save by upgrading your infrastructure to Microsoft Server 2008.
1. Reduce Power Consumption
By upgrading to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 you can reduce power consumption as it has been designed with energy efficiency in mind. Recent tests found that straight out of the box Windows Server 2008 R2 improved power efficiency by up to 18 percent over Windows Server 2003.
Windows Server 2008 also introduces a 'balanced' power policy. This monitors the utilisation level of the processors on the server and dynamically adjusts the processor performance states to limit power to the needs of the workload. Windows Server 2008 R2 further enhances this power saving feature by adding more granular controls to manage and monitor server and server CPU power consumption. At the same time Server 2008 R2 extends these policies to the desktop via new "power-oriented" Group Policy settings.
2. Improve Branch Office Performance and Management
Many remote offices IT infrastructures have lower bandwidth or smaller ‘pipes' compared to their Head Office counterparts. Slow Wide Area Network or ‘WAN' links can impact the productivity of branch office employees while waiting to access application or files from the main office,
Through Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft has introduced a feature called BranchCache, which reduces WAN utilization and improves the responsiveness of network applications.
With BranchCache, content requested from the corporate network is cached at the branch, either in hidden caches on Windows 7 clients (distributed mode) or on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine (hosted mode). Clients requesting cached data are authorised at the corporate network, but then download their content from this cache at the local branch, resulting in a more productive network environment for them, while simultaneously decreasing expensive WAN bandwidth usage.
3. Reduce Desktop Costs
Some of the latest buzz words and hot topics that being discussed at the moment are related to virtualization (both servers and desktop), hosted desktop and cloud computing. These technology advances are playing a major role in shaping the way we work both now and in the future.
Not only are they exciting, but the advances in presentation virtualization in server 2008 are also very useful. By utilising RDS (Remote Desktop Service) applications are processed at the server end while the graphical interface is delivered to the user desktop. RDS allow virtual resources (and that includes applications and even entire virtual desktops) to be made available in the same way as applications hosted on your local machine.
This gives many advantages in terms of not requiring expensive desktop hardware refreshes and by allowing IT administrators to update applications centrally and once, thus reducing the costs in deployment to multiple machines across multiple offices).
RDS and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) have also benefitted from improved protocols, which mean the end user receives a graphical and multimedia experience that mirrors local PC performance.
4. Increased Availability
For some companies the costs for server downtime can run into the hundreds of thousands per hour, for smaller companies in the current economic climate it can mean the difference between survival and failure!
The increasing independence on IT means that there is often little room for scheduled maintenance of servers let alone unscheduled downtime.
With Windows Hyper-VTM Live Migration, you can move Virtual Machines (VMs) from one physical host to another without any disruption of service or perceived downtime.
Live Migration will allow you to reduce costs and increase productivity by allows you to move running VMs to the best physical machine for performance and during times of low demand reduce power consumption by consolidating VMs and then powering off un-used physical hosts.
Aztech IT Solutions are a IT support & services company based in Milton Keynes we save our clients thousands of pounds by advising the on the right IT strategy. To find out how we can do the same for you feel free to contact us to discuss your requirement.