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Servers are the workhorse of the modern business, and as IT demands

increase, so your server technology needs to be able to grow and scale

cost-effectively to meet future requirements. Here are eight key consider-

ations when buying server technology to ensure your business growth will

be supported.

1. ScalabilityThe ability to scale up your server cost eectively, to reect either growth in the businessor increasing business demands on the IT inrastructure, is o primary concern to many ITproessionals.

Traditionally, organisations in all sectors have installed additional application servers asrequired, expanding their IT systems horizontally as they adopt new business sotware ordatabases, or add new departments, branch ofces, or businesses.

This method o scaling out the server inrastructure has certainly added more process-ing capacity. But at the same time, organisations have oten ound themselves loadeddown with complex, sprawling IT landscapes as a result.

In addition, IT management costs have increased while server utilisation rates have allen.

Meanwhile, mergers and acquisitions have added to the complexity, bringing in a rangeo hardware running dierent avours o server operating systems and business applica-tions.

Consequently, over the past decade there was a move towards regaining control over theserver inrastructure. Organisations in all industries opted to consolidate their out-o-con-trol IT estates onto ewer, more powerul machines on the one hand, and blade serverson the other, with many enterprises doing both.

Blade servers are stripped-down servers with a modular design, which minimise theuse o physical space and energy and are hot-swappable meaning they can easily beadded and removed rom the rack. Blade enclosures, or chassis, can hold multiple serv-

ers which share power, cooling, networking, storage and other components.

Blade servers unction well when they are dedicated to single specifc tasks such as webhosting, fle sharing and cluster computing. But or many enterprise applications, highercapacity servers are more suitable or the simple reason that they can run multiple busi-ness applications on a single machine and oer greater processing power and, arguably,value or money.

As a result, opting or a high-capacity server platorm is an efcient way to support busi-ness growth because it can generally be scaled up easily by adding additional proces-sors, memory, storage and other components.

2. Processing powerThe best server platorms will have room to grow, allowing you to add processors andprocessing capacity as your business expands. It is a good idea to consider systems

that have multiple processors with multiple cores, and the ability to add more processingpower when you need it.

Todays high-capacity servers oer multiple processors, each with two, our, six or eveneight cores, with each individual core being able to run up to our processing threads. Asa result, an individual server could run two or three dozen tasks simultaneously, whichmeans greater throughput.

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Machines can also come with redundant capacity, cores that can be switched on asrequired. This makes them ideal or uture expansion.

Choosing the right server inrastructure will enable you to scale up quickly to manage, orexample, millions o data-intensive transactions, or analyse data in real time, eeding backspeedy and tangible results to both the business and customers.

3. SecuritySecurity always comes up as a top concern or IT managers, and as the business ex-pands it will remain a top priority. This is the case whether you are scaling up an enter-prise server or scaling out the server inrastructure to cover multiple branch ofces ornew business ventures.

Christian Christiansen, programme vice-president or IDCs security products and ser-vices group, says it is essential to scale up your security as the business grows, using avariety o technology and security policies and practices, although this oten presents achallenge.

As servers have prolierated throughout enterprise IT inrastructures, native server oper-ating system security has proven to be insufcient. It does not provide adequate controlover who can access what resources, nor does it provide the granular auditing needed tomeet compliance requirements, he says.

Because most enterprises have many dierent operating systems with many dierentembedded server access management utilities, building and maintaining common poli-cies and controls, as required or compliance, is difcult to impossible.

However, consolidating onto a new server platorm can bring a resh and uniorm ap-proach to security, along with new levels o security technology and security policyautomation, and help the IT department to maintain control over server access acrossthe operating environment.

4. ManageabilityAll IT managers know that server management is a multi-aceted discipline. It encom-passes patch management, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, proac-tive server and network monitoring, workload optimisation and balancing, componentconfguration, security and so on.

Having the right server management and automation tools rom the beginning can helpto support business growth because it can anticipate extensions to and increasing de-mands on the IT system.

These days, high-capacity servers come with very powerul automation and managementtools, and there are also many mature third-party tools available. These tools oer moreintelligent workload management, better redundancy control, automatic handling o pro-cessor ailures, and updating o frmware during normal operations, among other things.

Servers also oer granular energy management, or example power capping, which isan energy budgeting technique that prevents specifc parts o the system rom using toomuch power.

Virtualisation technology brings urther management and automation, with the ability to

move virtual machines while they are still running, rom server to server.

5. Speedy expansionOn the subject o virtualisation, this technology is designed to support business growthbecause o its ability to scale up quickly as required.

Virtualisation enables organisations to test and deploy new applications and technologiesquickly and cost-eectively, providing adequate scalability with no practical limits on thenumber o processors, memory or I/O. Virtualisation also allows or dynamic reconfgura-tion, increasing and decreasing all resources as needed, and workloads can be movedbetween servers while active.

James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, says the way to decide i servervirtualisation is what you need is to examine your current IT asset portolio and deter-mine i you are as efcient as you could be today, and i virtualisation can improve your

efciency.

In general, Forrester has ound that most organisations can beneft rom some degree ovirtualisation, as average server utilisation tends to be below 25%. And by consolidatingthe physical servers in your environment, you should be able to und your virtualisationproject by postponing uture server purchases, reclaiming datacentre space, and lower-ing power and cooling costs, he says.

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Because mostenterprises havemany dierentoperating systemswith manydierent embeddedserver accessmanagementutilities, buildingand maintainingcommon policies

and controls, asrequired orcompliance, isdifcult toimpossible.

Christian Christiansen,

programme

vice-president or IDCs

security products and

services group

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6. Green ITThe spotlight has been on the power consumption o datacentres over the past coupleo years, with industry regulations requiring organisations to cut their IT systems carbonootprints. Coupled with business expansion comes an increased use o energy withinthe enterprise, and there is a requirement on the IT department to ensure their systemsare as environmentally riendly as possible.

O course, this is no mean eat, considering that enterprise servers require signifcantpower and cooling resources to operate. However, server manuacturers have madegreat strides in the feld o green technologies.

Among these are energy-efcient uninterruptible power supplies, water cooling and moreefcient an technologies, plus more energy-efcient processors, networking technologiesand hard drive arrays. Power management is more granular than ever beore, and virtu-alisation has provided the ability to share computing resources among multiple applica-tions, lowering the energy requirement.

When buying new server technologies, these green IT eatures are becoming increasinglyimportant and are well worth investigating.

7. ComplianceAs your business expands, so do your compliance requirements and server technologies

can either help or hinder the process o meeting industry and government regulations.This depends upon whether your server estate is unwieldy and poorly managed, or wellorganised and automated.

Choosing the right server platorm can assist in meeting compliance targets by automat-ing corporate policies across the system, implementing tracking tools, rules or datausage, storage and management, and business process management systems.

Server tools and technologies can help growing businesses by taking on the responsibili-ties or compliance and ensuring targets are met.

8. Supplier roadmapThe fnal tip, to make sure your server technology will support your business growth, is toensure that your server supplier has a long-term investment in their server platorm and aclear technology roadmap that you are happy with.

This includes looking at the processor models that the server is based on, the storageand networking technologies that the machine uses, and its exibility and expansionpossibilities, as well as its support or the business applications that are vital to your busi-ness.

It is important to choose a supplier that has a proven roadmap that matches the growtho your business, with server hardware that can be upgraded and expanded easily, andplenty o options or confguring components such as additional processors and diskarrays.

Hardware and sotware support, migration tools and assistance, and server maintenanceand management are also key areas o consideration when looking or a new platormthat will support uture growth.

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Forrester hasound that mostorganisationscan beneft romsome degree ovirtualisation, asaverage serverutilisation tends tobe below 25%. Andby consolidatingthe physical

servers in yourenvironment, youshould be able tound yourvirtualisationproject bypostponing

uture server pur-chases, reclaimingdatacentre space,and lowering powerand cooling costs

James Staten,

principal analyst at

Forrester Research