►ROI: Extending the Benefits of
Energy Efficiency
The article re-printed courtesy of IBM ForwardView eMagazine
www.ibm.com/expressadvantage/forwardview

What's good for the environment can also make incredibly good business sense. By taking advantage of green IT strategies such as virtualization and server consolidation, midsized businesses can realize immediate ROI in 2010. What's more, today's energy-efficient technologies do more than just alleviate power and cooling costs. Green IT solutions can also have a significant impact on company-wide operational efficiency.

Facing the rising costs of business
Running a midsized company today calls for doing more with less  -  while also keeping up with the technology curve to remain competitive. Yet supporting new IT services often means increased costs in hardware, maintenance and power. As time goes on and energy costs continue to rise, many companies start to run out of physical space, or overload the power and cooling capabilities of hardware facilities from small computer rooms to large data centers.

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Sandwich every bit of criticism between two thick layers of praise.

~Mary Kay Ash
 

►Just for Laughs

In the current business environment, the old adage "time is money" applies now more than ever. So what happens when everyday operations are disrupted? According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than 40 percent of all companies that experience a disaster never reopen - and more than 25 percent of those that do reopen after a disaster occurs will close down for good within two years. But even if your company doesn't go through a major disaster, chances are high that it will experience the negative consequences of unplanned outages that make business as usual impossible.

The problem is amplified in challenging economic times, says Warren Sirota, a segment executive with IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services. "If the business is already suffering from lower revenue because of the economy and a significant outage occurs, the impact can be much more dramatic than during good times," he says.

Downtime quickly becomes revenue loss
Even though a crippling outage is almost certain to hit most companies someday, many executives running midsized organizations adopt an "it won't happen here" attitude. They would be wise to think again. A business may not be located on the coast where hurricanes strike, but power outages can still occur. According to Infonetics Research, most companies suffer between 300 to 1,000 hours of downtime a year.

"Resilience is the ability to take a blow and keep on going." Wildfires may not be prevalent where a business operates, but no company is exempt from the risk of a building fire. And while Mother Nature is responsible for many outages, downtime can also be caused by air conditioning failures, coffee machine malfunctions, bursting pipes, human error, insects, roof cave-ins and vandalism.

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You've no doubt heard a lot about cloud computing (or the cloud). What you may not have learned is how this misty concept can help with the real problems of operating your business, especially in hard times.

In short, cloud computing offers attractive options for small and midsize businesses that need critical IT upgrades, but may lack the cash for a large capital investment.

Through the cloud, you can add new, vital applications or you can supplement the capacity of an existing infrastructure. Because cloud services are delivered via the Internet (often the Web) you only pay for the features and functionality you use and don't pay for extra hardware, software, staff and maintenance. As a result, your business can grow its IT capabilities, often at a lower cost than doing everything itself. And you can pull the cost from your operating budget rather than your capital budget.

So what is cloud computing exactly, and why is it significant to small and midsize businesses?

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Server virtualization is a great way for your IT organization to battle today's economic challenges. You can reduce costs through server consolidation—which in turn increases ROI as you run multiple workloads on a single server. Plus, the ability to deploy new applications—and scale them up or down—boosts business agility.

But be mindful of pitfalls that can undermine these advantages. As companies large and small have learned the hard way, you can negate the cost-saving benefits of server virtualization by choosing an inefficient SAN storage solution that does not properly support the advanced requirements of virtualized environments.

What to watch out for
While you ride out this recession, you need to make the most of your virtualization investments. It literally pays to be aware of the right storage choices. Here are some things to keep in mind:

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