A method of enhancing the overall performance of a business's data center capabilities through the implementation of various IT strategies such as server consolidation, server virtualization and service oriented architecture (SOA) in an effort to increase processing efficiency, network availability and business scalability.
When a business implements a data center optimization strategy, it is not only optimizing IT resources and cutting excess expenditure costs, but also better suiting itself for the challenges of operating in a global business environment. By utilizing IT hardware and software to its fullest extent and efficiency, companies have the ability and flexibility to grow. Server consolidation helps by minimizing the number of active servers a data center employs. Often, data centers have many under-utilized servers performing business IT functions. The processes these servers perform can be consolidated into fewer servers, still operate at the same level of performance, and save on the costs of running additional servers. For enterprises and other larger organizations, the consolidation of multiple data centers into fewer optimized data centers is also an option for added efficiency. Within consolidated servers, the process of virtualization can also be employed to divide single servers into multiple virtual layers that can then be used to perform the tasks of several servers.