Choose the right IT systems to innovate

• Traditional IT systems simply aren’t designed to handle today’s demanding tasks
• What companies seeking to modernise their data centres should look for

ONE of the biggest challenges confronting chief information officers (CIOs) today is how to do more with less. IT departments are facing increased demands to deliver new and innovative applications and services to users, at a faster speed.
 
Consider a bank launching a new online customer banking system -- imagine the new and increased amounts of data it would have to manage, and the need for an always-on infrastructure.
 
Amongst other things, storage becomes an increasing challenge in terms of the cost of hardware and the management resources required.
 
Companies are also facing the challenge of integrating mobility solutions, social networking and analytics to enable them to make real time decisions; and big data to discover growth opportunities and turn social streams into market intelligence.
 
Traditional systems simply aren’t designed to handle those demanding tasks. As a result, companies are seeking to modernise their data centres to accommodate all the new data and applications. They are also looking to take advantage of new cloud services, to deploy information more effectively and with greater efficiency.
 
It is therefore essential that companies implement hardware which provides both extreme performance and that is versatile enough to handle the variety of workloads needed to run the business – now, and in the future.
 
So what should companies look for when choosing infrastructure to support a next-generation data centre platform?
 
Extreme performance
 
All companies, regardless of size and industry, are focusing on how they can make better decisions and improve customer experience. They need systems that can handle extreme performance – merely ‘good’ performance is no longer good enough.
 
And while speed isn’t everything, companies should certainly look for the fastest they can afford.  What may seem more than enough for current and old-world business applications may be inadequate for future, more complex applications.
 
Take as an example a manufacturing company competing with nimble companies around the globe.  Or a clothing maker looking to monitor and optimise social-media marketing campaigns involving tens of millions of socially connected consumers, thousands of SKUs, tens of thousands of retail outlets, and a booming online presence.
 
Solid operational cost savings
 
Every year CIOs are asked to take on the latest buzzword technology and make it priority No 1 while budgets are always being cut. The only way forward is to change current operations to find the funds needed to fuel innovation.
 
Consequently, upfront cost when acquiring new assets is clearly an important consideration.
 
That said, the real advantage may come with assessing and computing cost savings that may be  realised throughout the three to four years of the useful life of the resources.
 
Selecting servers that deliver these higher levels of transactions, have the ability to perform even higher ratios of consolidation of existing systems and at a reduced cost – including maintenance costs and spending on power, space and cooling – can help lower the total cost of acquisition and ownership.
 
Uniform management interfaces and the adoption of standards can help simplify administrative tasks, while an innovative framework design shared across volume servers provides density, efficiency and economy for modern data centres.
  
Increased business agility
 
With enterprise data growing and demand for computing resources increasing, companies need to be sure their cloud and data centre solutions can scale up cost-effectively and also help provide the flexibility to meet changing demands, thereby enabling the business to be agile.
 
Any new server has to help provide flexibility and scale for both cloud and IT infrastructure requirements.
 
Security without compromise
 
Organizations are increasingly security conscious; at the same time, they don’t want security measures slowing down the computing performance of their applications and database.
 
Look for servers with advanced features – for example, on-chip cryptographic acceleration. With technology like this, customers no longer need to deploy specialised encryption devices or use precious processor compute cycles to make sure their applications are secure.
   
In summary, it is essential that companies select the right infrastructure that can provide them with the ability to run business applications faster, make them perform better, and gain faster outputs, all for less cost and lower risk.
 
The right infrastructure can help companies transform and innovate. The result can help organisations become more agile and able to focus on more strategic innovation or transformation projects, rather than worrying about ‘keeping the lights on.’
 
Ron Goh is vice president of System Sales at Oracle Asean, where he is responsible for driving the business strategy and sales for the company’s server and storage portfolio.
 
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