Network Infrastructure Drill-Down: Cost-Cutting Strategies
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As
budget belts tighten, creating efficiencies in the data center becomes even
more crucial, but IT managers and CIOs may be faced with a quandary: what in the data center should be trimmed?
Virtualization
and other consolidation strategies can be beneficial, but before ditching a few
server racks and squeezing functionality from several appliances into one, it's
crucial to create an understanding of network optimization, experts note, since
that's the only way to truly realize if ROI-focused efforts are working.
"At
the end of the day, it's all about supporting the end user experience while
delivering services at the lowest cost possible," says Eric Hanselman,
Director of Sales Engineering at Leostream, a technology-agnostic desktop
virtualization firm.
There
are numerous monitoring tools that track application performance, network
throughput and capacity, and other issues, and CIOs need to be aware of issues
like usage and efficiency, he adds.
"Understanding
what's running on the network can be a complex path," he says. "But
there's no other way to figure out what can be reduced or eliminated."
For
example, he points out, a company might have an array of network resources in
place for handling heavy application activity, but it may be that only one
department is using an app to that level. If accounting is continually doing
large amounts of queries in Oracle, for instance, it would need significant
application performance services, but the HR department, which doesn't run
Oracle, wouldn't need that level of network performance.
For
many organizations, the service delivery perspective is lacking, believes
Steven Shalita, Vice President of Marketing at NetScout Systems, which
specializes in application and network performance monitoring and management.
"You
have to know how everything interoperates, so organizations are increasingly
looking for ways to get that view," he says.
Once
aspects like traffic flow and application usage are pinned down, cost cutting
can come through tweaking optimization in service delivery strategies, says
Shalita. An IT department can get a better handle on how to integrate the
functionality of multiple devices into the larger network landscape.
"You
need to understand the interrelationships of bandwidth use," Shalita adds.
"And you simply can't do that without visibility into the network."
Infrastructure 
