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How do you reduce costs without affecting performance or profitability?

Reducing costs and increasing profitability for any organisation must be the main goal. Whether the organisation is a commercial business, an educational establishment or a government agency, lowering their overall costs is paramount. Regardless of the organisation’s purpose, if costs cannot be managed, its success to even exist is threatened.

Many organisations have already started to reduce hardware costs by: extending the life of all systems, matching performance to requirements, restricting the number of notebook users and phasing out inefficient legacy systems. This is illustrated through the massive interest and implementation of consolidation and virtualisation. These actions, alongside the use of power efficient systems, recycling and the reduction of general overheads, are highly effective in making any organisation more productive and profitable.

Implementing these techniques to improve efficiency is of course an excellent strategy. However, it is often the case that the simplest way to lower costs is overlooked.

When considering updating or replacing servers, most organisations will look to purchase a product that is power efficient, has a small form factor, is scalable and cost effective. These businesses will take great care in evaluating the product, negotiating the price and examining the total cost of the purchase over a set period of time – the TCO.

Decisions will be made on: the performance of the processor/s against the cost, the level of storage against expected requirements, and the capacity of memory required relative to cost and resource demand. Processors will be purchased on the basis of scalability and the requirements of the applications. In many cases the increased cost of implementing more expensive processors will be justified as they extend the life of the server without the need to upgrade. Alternative storage solutions are relatively simple to implement. For example they can be attached to a network with minimum cost and maintenance, should demand out-strip resources.

Using memory effectively to reduce costs

Through memory there are several ways that you can reduce the TCO of a server and/or the whole data centre. One of the first and arguably most important steps is to consider the TCO of a new server against the alternative of upgrading the memory. It is important to identify the return on investment (ROI) in upgrading an existing server in terms of its scalability. For example, in most cases using Kingston Technology memory to upgrade an existing server by 32 GB has a considerably lower cost than purchasing a replacement server. The savings generated by maintaining a previously purchased server results in a higher ROI on the overall service. In a recent whitepaper a leading hardware manufacturer stated “memory has a greater impact on performance than processors”. This begs the question, “Why not just invest in memory?”

The decision to upgrade is only the beginning. With the high costs associated with memory from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) many organisations will then face two burning issues: how much memory can they justify, and which capacity of memory modules do they buy?

Organisations are able to purchase more high quality memory from Kingston Technology for less cost than from the OEM. Therefore allowing greater scalability in servers and generating more memory headroom. Following this there is less likelihood that these servers will be taken offline due to necessary upgrading in the future. When applied to virtualised data centres, more virtual machines can be added to each physical server; thereby increasing the efficiency and lowering the TCO of each system. This also has the advantage of reducing the overall energy use in the data centre, which helps achieve environmental goals.

The second issue relates to the actual capacity size of each memory module used. In the past, it was common to achieve the desired memory level using lower capacity modules as they were much more affordable. This is no longer the case; instead it is considered poor planning and increases the TCO of the server. To achieve higher total memory capacity in the server these existing modules would need to be replaced, therefore significantly increasing costs and wastage. The other factor to bear in mind is the actual energy consumed by lower capacity memory modules. In recent tests, conducted by Kingston Technology, the use of 4 GB modules rather than 2GB modules greatly reduces power usage. Due to the vast number of fully populated servers found in a corporate data centre, these savings can offset the increased cost of higher capacity modules and save power over a given period of time.

Now is the time to look deeper into the planning of memory in your data centre and calculate the possible savings for the future. Not just in the short-term.


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