Maximize Operational Continuity in Your Data Center by Reducing Complexity
For years, data center operators have made storage investments based on a few key metrics, such as performance, scalability and management. However, one crucial and often overlooked requirement for nearly every network is availability. Speeds and feeds are important, but they don’t mean a thing if the network is down.
In a 2020 Uptime Institute survey of 846 data center operators, 78 percent of organizations said they had an IT service outage in the past three years. When it came to outages classified as significant, serious or severe, 31 percent said they had been affected.
The Cost of Service Outages
That downtime comes at a steep price. According to Gartner, IT downtime costs a company an average of $5,600 per minute. Respondents to the Uptime Institute survey reported that more than half (56 percent) of their organizations’ outages cost $100,000 or more.
To better understand how quickly the price tag can spiral out of control, consider that downtime-related costs can include:
Reduced Productivity: When the network goes down, your employees may not be able to work, production lines may shut down and other aspects of the business can grind to a halt.
Lost Sales: For online retailers and other companies that do business online, downtime prevents customers from making purchases.
Lost Data: An outage can corrupt data, a devastating blow to any business that can have significant financial and legal implications.
Lost Customers: Losing your customers’ trust and confidence may compel them to find a different vendor to meet their needs.
Customer Payouts: Cloud providers may provide compensation to customers when downtime exceeds limits established in the service level agreement.
Brand Damage: In addition to losing your current customers, potential customers will look elsewhere for a vendor with a more reliable reputation.
It’s easy to see how taking steps to minimize downtime gives you a competitive advantage over companies that don’t. One area that deserves a closer look is the complexity of your data center infrastructure.
What is Complexity?
Even the smallest data centers have an abundance of interconnected networks, servers, storage components and management tools. Complexity results from the interdependencies of these elements and grows when more components and tools are added to handle increasing loads of data.
Data center complexity is a given, considering the never-ending influx of new technologies and business-critical applications that must be deployed and supported. Cloud computing, virtualization, mobile computing and increased security requirements, to name just a few, all put high demands on data center infrastructure and increased pressure on data center operators.
Increased complexity leads to IT systems that are difficult to manage, monitor and maintain, and ultimately creates more potential for downtime. Clearly, your data center needs solutions that reduce complexity, ensure maximum network availability, and provide a more positive end-user experience. Optimizing your storage is an effective place to start.
Microchip: A Storage Leader
For over 30 years, we have built storage products with our customers’ needs in mind, evolving from our origins on the desktop into one of the most trusted data center partners in the world. We work closely with the data center industry and ecosystem vendors to ensure we deliver best-in-class technology and tools to maximize interoperability and integration with your other storage components, and optimal performance and availability of your data center. Our SmartROC/IOC silicon based HBA and RAID adapters can be found in more than 30 million servers around the globe.
Adaptec® storage solutions help your data center avoid cooling issues with Smart RAID 3100 adapters and SmartHBA 2100 and HBA 1100 that draw fewer watts per port compared to competitive offerings. We also offer more low-profile high port count RAID adapters and HBAs than any other manufacturer, reducing your need for additional components. Other key technologies that lower data center complexity include Adaptec maxView Storage Manager which makes it simple to deploy, configure and monitor all the storage in your system built on RAID and HBA adapters. And, if you do run into an unexpected outage, our Zero Maintenance Cache Protection instantly saves cache contents to make it easy to recover data and get back online.
Reduce Complexity with Adaptec Solutions
Providing value to your end-users starts with delivering maximum network uptime. Data center outages can lead to lost data, lost customers, lost revenue and more. One effective method for avoiding outages is to implement solutions that reduce the complexity that creeps into all data centers.
Adaptec HBA and RAID adapters reduce complexity with innovations that help you effectively manage and monitor your storage systems, reduce data loss after an outage and help reduce cooling issues.
To learn more visit building your data center.