Cutting Back on Data Center Equipment Costs

In the November 19 issue of PROCESSOR, Carmi Levy examines how cost-conscious IT directors, CIOs, and CFOs are saving money by turning to the “gray market” to buy name-brand goods through nontraditional channels. The downside to cutting costs in this manner is that it “can impact warranty coverage, parts availability, and service turnaround and must be calculated into the ROI to ensure the cost savings justify these potential drawbacks.”

Key points of the article include:

• Choose usage scenarios carefully. Deploy gray market-sourced hardware in non-front-line applications such as testing and backup, where outages have less impact on business operations.
• Calculate energy costs. New hardware is typically more efficient than used equipment. Project lifetime power and cooling costs to arrive at realistic TCO figures.
• Know your vendor. Work only with trusted partners who own their quality control processes and stand behind their products.

Our team is sensitive to the budgetary needs of IT decision makers. Beyond shopping around for focused purchases of data center equipment, we encourage organizations to look for ways to get the greatest mileage out of existing equipment. To streamline this process, we’ve developed an integrated, best-in-class solution that enables more effective data center management and maintenance of all support infrastructure.

PTS’ Data Center Maintenance Management Software solution (DCMMS) is a turnkey, web-based application which helps organizations increase support infrastructure asset life, track maintenance details, predict and prevent equipment failures, improve labor productivity, reduce equipment downtime, minimize investment in inventory, and lower the total cost of data center maintenance.

This new class of data center management software is available for purchase or as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. The cost of the product is based upon the size of assets under management and is tiered to support large-scale data center management operations. For details, please visit http://www.data-center-maintenance-management.com/.