IT managers are facing more pressure than ever to rightsize their IT infrastructures and lower IT delivery and management costs. Line-of-business managers are looking for additional flexibility from IT and improved time to market capability. As a result, IT organizations must find new consolidated infrastructure solutions in order to stay within an already constrained budget. Achieving operational efficiency through consolidation will reduce IT management costs and reduce power, space, and cooling costs. In summary, IT organizations must find new infrastructure solutions that are more efficient and more cost-effective than their current solutions.
It is also clear that consolidation increasingly extends beyond the IT infrastructure to include the datacenter facility itself. Many organizations are employing IT consolidation strategies as a critical element of a broader dynamic datacenter transformation. As the fundamental datacenter design requirements change, this has an impact on IT management and system architecture as IT organizations work to lower both capital expenses (capex) and operational expenses (opex). They must do all of this while improving service levels, providing faster response times, improving flexibility, and delivering better integrated applications for their organizations.