How can virtualizing your server infrastructure help your business development team? Sure, there are clear business benefits to server virtualization, but to draw a straight line to sales and client activity may not seem possible. Step back for a moment and consider how your clients interact with your business, though, and it doesn’t take long to understand how your servers can make a profound difference in your top line.

In just about every business, it’s your existing clients that have the greatest potential for new revenue. New client acquisition is extremely valuable, but it’s also hard-won and far more expensive than engaging your existing client base for new business opportunities. So, if you can deliver a superior experience to your clients, especially if they interact directly or indirectly (e.g., through a call center) with your systems, the IT department has a profound opportunity to influence overall business performance.

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The lure of cloud computing is multidimensional. Doubtless, it provides a high degree of datacenter agility and helps you extend the value of investments you’ve made in your infrastructure. The cost savings and flexibility, however, can be crucial to startups, where the importance of every dollar is magnified. Traditional cloud computing models may not be sufficient for some startups, though, especially if they are in sensitive or highly regulated industries. In these situations, a hybrid cloud computing model may be most appropriate.

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Few storage solutions have benefits as easy to quantify as data deduplication. Further, few are able to deliver such impressive returns, making the business case powerful and somewhat easier for the executive suite to approve.

The premise behind data deduplication is pretty straightforward. You have more data taking up space in your infrastructure than you need to store. Duplicates are all over the place. Find and remove the dupes, and you can defer additional equipment expenses and derive more value from your previous technology investments.

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A lot of letters are getting thrown about, as they always do in the IT business, but there are really only three that matter to you: ROI. Unless you can get a return on your IT investment, there isn’t much point to implementing a solution. Well, to get to ROI, a good place to start is with three other letters: UCS. The Cisco Unified Computing System streamlines your datacenter, making it easier for your organization to gain more value from existing staff and equipment.

Cisco UCS makes your infrastructure easier to manage and your team more efficient. Rather than pull together and integrate a variety of “best of breed” solutions – a process that entails a considerable amount of project and operational risk – UCS brings computing, networking, storage access and virtualization into a cohesive system. As a result, you can scale your infrastructure easily without having to add complexity at the same time.

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There’s always some tension between strategy and leading-edge implementation. You want to take advantage of new systems and technologies that can help your company advance in the marketplace, but at the same time, you don’t want “new” and “exciting” to outpace your core objectives and wind up driving your company at the expense of core business objectives.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful, but it’s incredibly important.

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When power becomes more expensive, you feel it. For the months when there’s a spike in oil pricing, “green IT” becomes a priority, only to fade when the cost to run your datacenter comes down again. Even if the ups and downs average out to a tolerable price, the fluctuations make IT budgeting a vexing endeavor, leaving you unable to forecast your costs effectively … and ultimately forcing uncomfortable conversations with the executive team.

Implement a virtual infrastructure, and you’ll gain energy cost containment and better budget predictability along with a more agile datacenter.

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Are you ready to make your datacenter a little easier to manage? For most IT professionals, the answer to that question is pretty obvious. There’s always room for improvement … in ways that cut overhead, make workloads a bit more manageable and increase the quality of service you provide to your end users. Cisco’s Unified Computing System can streamline your datacenter, making your team – and your entire enterprise – more productive at a fraction of the cost.

Here are five ways that Cisco UCS makes infrastructure management easier:

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Are you spending too much time managing your infrastructure? It’s not like you have a choice, of course. When you need to tend to your datacenter, you do it, and it’s your other IT initiatives that suffer. A simplified, straightforward approach not only cures the headaches associated with IT management, it frees up your team to focus on the projects that will drive ROI and company growth.

Chances are you’re overspending on your infrastructure. Research from Cisco estimates that infrastructure management ties up 70 percent of your budget. So, that only gives you 30 percent to allocate for the future. Simplifying your infrastructure could tip those scales a bit – making your department far more effective.

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The problem with “best of breed” platform selections is that you wind up with a heterogeneous infrastructure that can be difficult and costly to manage. When it’s time to add to a particular platform’s footprint, you need to write another check, even if there are under-utilized solutions elsewhere in your environment. Unless you have commensurate equipment available, there’s no choice but to invest more. With server and storage virtualization technologies, you can break out of this rut, and extract more value from investments you’ve already made.

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Have you ever had to deviate from your capacity plan to add equipment? When this happens, you have to do more than dip into your budget and get the requisite approvals. You also need to divert resources from your infrastructure team to plan, execute, test and monitor the change to your server environment, which can cause other projects to fall behind. Expenses increase not only for your datacenter team but for all the IT and business areas affected. Your budget assumes a certain amount of predictability, but real life doesn’t always cooperate.

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