Driving IT Efficiencies in Your Organization

During the current global economic “reset”, organizations and companies around the world are looking for more ways to do more with less. We call it the concept of “New Efficiency.”  So, let’s talk about how you can save the hard-earned IT dollars to more quickly deploy, manage and operate your desktops, servers and applications.

Over the past few months, I met with a lot of IT managers and consultants in tradeshows who want to reduce their IT costs and raise operational efficiency.  Here are their concerns and they will likely be yours.

• I need to cut down hardware and power/facility costs.  Can virtualization and OS power management help me?
• I know I have some or many under-utilized servers in my datacenter.  But where are these servers?  Can Hyper-V help reduce power and cooling costs?
• Down-time is undesirable for my IT department.  Does Microsoft have virtual machine migration feature to move workloads in real-time from one server to the next?
• Managing VPN networks is painful.  Does Microsoft offer any alternative to secure data access via desktops and laptops without VPN?

Fortunately, Microsoft has answers to all these questions. The best part - these features are part of the Windows operating systems that you are already familiar with and using:

• Power management is available through Group Policy of Windows Server 2008 and R2. You can enforce power management easily.
• Hyper-V and Live Migration are part of Windows Server 2008 R2 that offers server consolidation of under-utilized servers and enable you to move workloads in real-time.
• DirectAccess is a “better-together” feature that is part of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that gives you a great way to let you gain access to corporate resources (e.g. e-mail, shared data, etc.) without the need for VPN tunnels.

Central Bank of Brazil, through deployment of Hyper-V virtualization, was able to cut power costs by 20 percent, boost IT productivity by 20 percent, and increase processing speed by 50 percent.  Check out their recent Hyper-V case study and see if you can gain the same efficiency!

Get Started Now!

• Learn more about Power Management with Windows 7
• Enforce Power Management with Group Policy
• Learn more about Hyper-V virtualization technology
• See Live Migration video demo
• Check out DirectAccess web site
• Download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit to help you determine virtualization candidates

Lastly, don’t forget to pass the following list of free Microsoft tools (called Solution Accelerators) to your IT managers.  They are Microsoft best practice and automated tools that help your IT department to more quickly plan, deliver (deploy), and operate your systems:

• Windows 7 Solution Accelerators (e.g. Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Security Compliance Management Toolkit, Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for DirectAccess, etc)
• Windows Server Solution Accelerators (e.g. Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides, Service Level Dashboard, etc)

Cheers,

Baldwin