As new technologies continue to proliferate throughout the enterprise, IT leaders must cope with constant changes and are increasingly feeling pressure to deliver new services, improve performance speed and manage complex environments. Mobile data access, virtualization and cloud computing are three of the most prominent factors that are driving this change. Conventional client server computing is evolving into virtualized and cloud environments that are tapping into data and information in new and powerful ways. Mobility, social media and a wide variety of other tools and capabilities are moving to the forefront of enterprise information technology. What’s more, the nature of existing systems is changing and evolving as collaborative tools are going mainstream and consumer technologies like tablets and smartphones are driving productivity and profits.
As companies compete in today’s single, global marketplace, the speed and complexity of business seem to escalate by the minute. Disparate and unsynchronized communication devices and applications create an environment of complexity that can prevent companies from improving their communications and competing effectively. Our partner Microsoft continues to roll out innovative unified communications systems that can integrate all types of business communications and provide a framework for mobile users. To support these technologies, companies must be equipped with updated IT infrastructures and improved processing, memory and storage capacities that keep up with Exchange’s requirements.
In this dynamic environment, companies need to protect their investments by deploying flexible IT architectures that allow employees to access information faster for insightful decisions. Companies can achieve more by improving system performance, increasing throughput capacity and turning data into insights faster. For example, with the recent launch of Dell’s 12th generation servers, we are extending the Fluid Data Architecture storage technology to servers to give customers the information they need in a flash. New innovations in PCIe solid state disks, data accelerators and scalable internal storage also offer significant improvements in ERP, Business Intelligence and database performance.
Supporting open standards is essential to making it easier to quickly and efficiently design, deploy and manage solutions across various platforms and infrastructures. Using servers that feature powerful processors such as the Intel Xeon E5 allows companies to handle extremely demanding workloads like collaboration and high-performance computing with ease.
As technology evolves, data center energy consumption and the resulting costs continue to skyrocket. Recent studies by Gardner and Stanford University (Ken Toomey) show that from 2006 to 2011, data center energy consumption increased by 56%. With this growth rate, the carbon footprint we can expect from the world’s data centers during this decade is staggering. Data center energy consumption is increasingly becoming a concern for IT departments and not just facilities.
Companies clearly must find ways to control data center energy consumption to minimize total cost of ownership. It’s also critical to offer secure, reliable access to valuable information and have resilient infrastructures to maximize uptime. Using servers that are engineered to run at high temperatures can help minimize environmental cooling expenses. We’ve also equipped our PowerEdge servers with reliability features like hot swappable fans, disks and power supply units and redundant failsafe hypervisors for the virtualization environment.
Action Item: Multiple challenges face IT leaders in today’s evolving enterprise technology landscape. By deploying flexible IT architectures with the latest server technologies, companies can achieve more with their IT assets, deliver results to employees and customers faster and maximize data center efficiency. This will enable them to operate effectively in the collaborative, mobile world in which we live, and ultimately succeed in a hyper-competitive, global business environment.
Footnotes: Samir Ahmad is Enterprise Marketing Manager - Global Commercial Channels at Dell. During his tenure at Dell, Samir has led global marketing launches of major Dell PowerEdge server offerings to global resellers, VARs, distributors and IT solution providers.