Spotlight on Cost

Microsoft re-launched their Spotlight on Cost site which touts a free downloadable whitepaper titled, Server Infrastructure Optimization: Best Practices to Reduce IT Operational Costs. The whitepaper shows that businesses can often realize immediate savings just by operating their existing datacenters more efficiently.

Here are a few of the cost savings tips, showcased on the site:

1. Adopt core infrastructure best practices for mission-critical server workloads. In the email and collaboration workloads, organizations that adopted core infrastructure best practices reported IT labor costs of more than $10,000 per server per year less than those that did not. Companies are increasingly aware of these benefits and are rapidly adopting these best practices for their mission-critical messaging and collaboration workloads.

2. Think Outside the Box. Just because a particular server workload isn’t top of mind, doesn’t mean that it can’t be managed more efficiently. The print server workload is one where significant savings can be made by best practice adoption. However, participants in our survey tended to focus less here and best practice adoption was surprisingly lower than in other workloads.

3. Utilize virtualization. Virtualization has been seen to deliver physical cost savings around power, cooling and facilities. However, the Spotlight on Cost study shows there is an operational cost benefit to virtualizing servers, i.e. more servers per administrator.

For two more cost savings tips, check out the STB News Bytes Twitter account. https://twitter.com/STBNewsBytes

For more information about Microsoft’s Spotlight on Cost initiative check out the System Center Team Blog.