Does Your Data Center Pass the App Test?

Lara Greden is a senior principal, strategy, at CA Technologies.

In today’s application economy the app is the public face of a successful brand and behind every great (or not so great) app is a data center. Apps need data. They need APIs. They need patches. They need authentication.

The data center is fundamental to the application economy, as well as supporting apps throughout their lifecycle; it also provides the compute resources needed for software development.

As organizations ramp up their development efforts and app portfolios, the pressure on the data center will only increase. With many facilities already struggling to meet business demands, IT departments need to ensure their data center is fit for the application economy.

Keeping Your Data Center in Check

DCIM enables organizations to give their data centers a health check and keep them in optimum condition. It helps achieve such optimum operating conditions by bringing greater control and visibility to three key areas:

• Availability: It can lose revenues. It can damage reputations. It can derail application programs. Data center downtime has far-reaching consequences, which is why 55 percent of organizations now measure the costs associated with downtime. IT and facilities teams need to spot the potential for a data center outage before it happens and take faster remedial action when it does. In the application economy, this is essential for safeguarding the time-to-market for new offerings and the user experience on existing apps.
• Capacity: With a steady stream of new apps and users, data center capacity can quickly disappear. This invariably results in capital expenditure on new resources, which can undermine the overall ROI from the application economy. This investment, however, is not always justified. Untapped capacity is concealed in every data center. Using 3D maps of existing data center assets and ‘what if’ scenarios, organizations can right-size rather than over-size their data center roll-outs, reducing both costs and complexity.
• Efficiency: Although data centers need to do more to support the application economy, they need to do it for less. As density and workloads increase, data center energy consumption can spiral out of control. IT and facilities departments can stop this spiral using tools that provide granular information and metrics about when and where energy is being consumed.

Increased Adoption of DevOps

Another area where DCIM can help organizations is by facilitating the move to DevOps, which can help accelerate the delivery of proven, high-quality applications. Almost half of application economy leaders have adopted DevOps.

The demand to launch new applications at an increased cadence is placing additional pressure on IT and facilities to work together to ensure that the data center infrastructure delivers efficiency, availability and agility. From real-time data collection for timely insight to analytics-backed capacity planning and integrated workflow capabilities, DevOps leaders are finding that DCIM solutions are an essential technology component for enabling the people and process changes needed to facilitate a DevOps culture.

With DevOps and DCIM underpinning development activities and ongoing management, organizations will be better placed to take full advantage of the application economy. And it could prove to be one big advantage.

Application economy leaders (as compared to laggards) are achieving more than double the revenue growth, 68 percent higher profit growth and have 50 percent more business coming from new products and services. These numbers speak for themselves.

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