Cover story: The smart money's on IT: How the Efficient Data Center drives growth
Today, efficiency is a basic tenet of business survival. The boardroom IT conversation is no longer restricted to cutting costs — it’s about investing in technology to efficiently drive business and organizational success.
Although IT supports virtually every business process, and tough economic times have led to intensified competition, many organizations are hard-pressed to take advantage of technology advances when they are trapped into spending most of a spartan IT budget on maintenance instead of innovation. As a result, nonstrategic tasks are occupying an increasing proportion of the workday in many data centers.
Most technology vendors are focused on tackling the simplest of IT challenges by virtualizing, consolidating and automating the data center. These vendors typically propose a collection of proprietary offerings designed to lock organizations into vertically integrated, premium-priced infrastructures. Dell offers a model for tackling these challenges and building a solid foundation for enterprise efficiency that does not lock organizations into proprietary solutions — a model that can optimize the existing data center, maintain choice in vendors and technology, and allow incremental implementation as time and budget allow.
The Efficient Data Center model, a key part of Dell’s Efficient Enterprise vision, is designed to go beyond the efficiency basics of standardization, simplification and automation to help unlock the business value of enterprise IT investments. By implementing four key pillars — intelligent infrastructure, simplified infrastructure management, streamlined application and workload management, and Intelligent Data Management — organizations can create an open, capable, affordable approach to infrastructure designed to increase flexibility, reduce costs and shift the focus to how IT can help meet strategic enterprise goals now and in the future.