Energy provisioning and consumption are critical concerns for today's CIOs, IT, and facility managers. Energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is being pushed to the brink. "Greening" your data center isn't just the fashionable thing to do these days—it's a vital part of optimizing data center operations and managing infrastructure costs over the long-term.

Creating an environmentally sound infrastructure involves more than conserving power that runs and cools data center equipment. It should take a holistic approach to creating a more efficient information infrastructure.

EMC Consulting recommends an optimized infrastructure design that reduces both energy and infrastructure footprints by incorporating consolidation, virtualization, and information tiering strategies. An optimized infrastructure design can help you:

• Lower data center and IT infrastructure energy costs.
• Reduce your footprint and reclaim floor space.
• Resolve energy-related issues likely to create outages.
• Provide options for power savings associated with future expansion.
• Deploy industry standards and best practices for data center design and power efficiency.

Demands for more cost-effective IT cause many enterprises to operate lean IT organizations that focus on maintaining current operations and applications. This leaves IT little time to address strategic issues such as the optimization of operations, documentation of processes and procedures, or development of staff skills and capabilities. A shrinking pool of senior IT staff and a lack of identified best practices is making this problem worse for many organizations.

EMC recommends establishing standards for IT operations to maximize the efficiency of your information infrastructure. Capture best practices not just from your own experience but also from the experience of other enterprises. This ensures your IT operations are fully optimized.

Leveraging industry best practices and frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to design and document IT operational processes and procedural run books captures the knowledge of your most skilled and experienced practitioners. It also provides the basis for developing these skills throughout your team. Companies that leverage industry best practices gain further efficiencies by automating low-level IT functions to allow IT staff to focus on more strategic tasks.

IT infrastructure has evolved in an ad-hoc manner for many organizations, with modifications to support specific applications or technology-specific upgrades. The day-to-day pressures of keeping applications up and running often prevent IT from discussing their current and future requirements with business stakeholders.

Instead of focusing on the services that IT provides to the business, the requirements discussion becomes a discussion of allocating costs for specific IT technologies and operations to applications and business functions.

EMC Consulting recommends a services-based infrastructure. Structuring tiers of infrastructure with different levels of IT services allows application and business stakeholders to make informed decisions about the service level and cost requirements that best suit their specific requirements.

A service-based infrastructure increases IT operational efficiencies by leveraging best practices across applications and optimizing infrastructure architectures and performance to each service tier. It also aligns applications and infrastructure to business requirements.

An increasing amount of enterprise data resides at remote locations outside corporate data centers. Many organizations have more than half of their data residing in remote offices. This situation makes managing risk, costs, and performance across the distributed enterprise a rapidly growing challenge.

The IT infrastructure at these sites often operates outside the governance of corporate best practices. This results in servers, storage, communication equipment, IT staff, and floor space at remote locations being incrementally increased as the needs of the business expand—without a cohesive strategy. Such practices lead to cost and operational inefficiencies and increased risk of data loss.

EMC Consulting recommends that you fully understand your distributed infrastructure. Create a plan to improve performance and contain costs by optimizing the networked infrastructure supporting your business. This will optimize your operations and infrastructure and bring data center best practices to the edge.