The Data Center of the Future

Jody Little, Vice President of DCT Service and Solution for Unisys, gives her thoughts on data center transformation by utilising cloud computing.

In these tough economic times more needs to be done with less, and business requirements may keep growing alongside IT that isn't flexible or efficient enough. In your opinion, how should IT departments better align business demands to IT?

Jody Little. First map your unique business value chain to understand how the business functions and drives value. Then design the digital supply chain services that help the business perform. Next, begin to transform your IT into an efficient and high- performance environment by leveraging the latest approaches such as IT automation and cloud computing.

How can IT departments take advantage of the economic benefits that cloud computing promises?

JL. The immediate hurdle for most enterprises is a lack of experience with cloud computing. The key to realizing economic benefits is to identify which workloads to move to the cloud, which to keep internally and which require a hybrid cloud model. Unisys delivers a range of cloud transformation services that do exactly this; they help clients accelerate transformation while mitigating unnecessary risk.  

Where can some of the savings be realized?

JL. According to IDC, the average data center today spends 60 percent of their budget on administration while servers are 90 percent underutilized. According to Unisys best practices, combining IT automation and virtualization enables server utilization to increase to the 50-80 percent range. Plus, IT automation for many tasks can reduce associated administrative costs by up to 97 percent. Cloud computing can enable a shift from capital costs to a pay-as-you-go model, where you pay only for what is used. Finally, in addition to quantitative financial savings, use of cloud services can help realize faster speed-to-deployment benefits.

What makes Unisys approach to data center transformation and cloud computing unique?

JL. Unisys follows a results-focused methodology. We work with your business and IT organizations to determine the critical linkages between the business and the technology that supports it. Projects can be quick, with high immediate impact, or longer term and transformative. Unisys believes strongly in jump-start tools that help realize benefits quickly and allow a series of measurable results leading to the end-state. We also recognize the need to minimize disruption, so we typically recommend starting with what you have. Our transformation services expertise enables flexibility to start where the client is today and assist them along their journey through a complex multi-vendor environment to wherever that journey leads, be it an internal data center, an internal cloud, an external cloud or hybrid. This approach helps leverage existing investments and reduces unnecessary new expenditures.

How does cloud computing play into data centers of the future?

JL. Cloud computing is a convergence of IT capabilities that lead the way to reduced data center costs and improved efficiency. Cloud is essentially a highly consolidated and automated environment available to run client workloads on demand. Cloud computing can be internal or external, for example, the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, hosted in our outsourcing data centers, delivers on-demand services ready to run business applications securely. It can be more cost-effective and less risky to run some workloads in the Unisys Secure Cloud, with its patent-pending Unisys Stealth Solution for data security than it is to run in-house. Some will find that hybrid models are a good fit, while others will decide that using Unisys blueprints to stand up their own internal clouds is best. 

Case Studies: Savings

• Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: $317 million has been saved by consolidation and efficiencies, while another $240 million in savings are expected over the next five years
• For ourselves: Unisys internal IT group reduced the number of data centers from 50 to two, yielding $500 million in savings over five years, with an additional $324,000 per-year savings in annual server maintenance costs through consolidation and virtualization.

Visit the Unisys.com website for other case studies where these data center transformation projects have yielded impressive results.

BIO

As Vice President DCT Services and Solutions, Jody Little leads the solutions portfolio team at Unisys, which assists clients in aligning IT to business objectives in pursuit of a real-time enterprise.