CIO’s Guide to Make $ense of Data Center ModernizationLeave the speeds and feeds talk to your tech team. Here are the bottom-line numbers to carry to the executive board room.

IntroductionAs a C-level exec, you have learned to delegate. You trust your appointed cabinet of experts to present the latest ideas and innovations. But, while they hunt product details, you are pursuing business outcomes.

The end goal of your company is to dominate competitors and the market. What is the big IT picture that you can pitch in the executive board room?

Our easy translation guide lets the bottom-line numbers tell you a story of value beyond performance metrics and features. We boil down the hard-hitting facts so that you can carry a well-formed strategy back to your fellow execs.

Consider this your speed translator to help make $ense of an integrated infrastructure investment.

With a single point of control over an entire data center environment, IT departments can reap the rewards of enhanced management capabilities, simplified upgrades, and easier problem resolution for better support.

What this means for your tech department:

» Manage your entire infrastructure from one central location » Virtualize the entire stack, including existing storage systems » Make your existing storage 3x faster1

» Gain a 47% reduction in management effort3 » Easily make changes across data center (computing, networking,

storage) without disrupting host apps

Making $ense out of Tech Talk

Centralized control of storage management may not resonate with your C-level comrades – until you mention the savings that UK Bank saw when they implemented a unified control solution.

With the ability to make changes and upgrades to systems during regular business hours, UK Bank was able to save an estimated £1 million pounds a year in overtime costs. This translates to around $1.5 million dollars.2

Centralized Control of Your Data Center

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Oftentimes, the greatest risk of a project is its planning and execution. 76% of CIOs find it difficult to stay on-schedule and on-budget.3 With pre-configured settings and a simplified architecture that is designed to reduce deployment time from weeks down to minutes, integrated architectures lower project risks.

And the functionality of these systems speaks for itself. With integrated infrastructures, companies can triple system performance while reducing operating costs by 60%.3

What this means for your tech department:

» Gain 53% lower TCO and 52% lower CapEx » Obtain greater business agility and ease of use with a reduction of

provisioning times by 84% » Reduce management costs by 61% » See a management effort reduction of 47%

Making $ense out of Tech Talk

In just the deployment phase of an integrated infrastructure project, your teams can reduce design, deployment, and management overhead costs by 50%.1 With faster provisioning times, your organization can even deploy new virtualized servers in a matter of minutes, making it easier to launch new applications. In turn, this makes your business more adaptable to changing markets.

Integrated infrastructures make it possible to support 50% more customers without increasing IT staff.3 And by operating on more efficient infrastructure, your company can reduce power and cooling costs by 54%.3

Ease of Deployment

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Fault Tolerance and High Availability

Downtime is a profit sucker and the bane of every CIO’s existence. On average, large corporations lose around $686,250 dollars for every hour of downtime suffered. Even companies that manage 99.99% of uptime still average around 52.56 minutes of downtime a year.4 This leads to a total loss of over $600,000.5

The fall-out from IT outages spreads beyond basic equipment failure and lost workforce production, though. It also leads to damaged reputations, lost business, and other crippling side effects. With fault tolerant systems available via integrated infrastructures, companies can gain an infrastructure with zero points of failure. This mitigates the possibility of downtime.

What this means for your tech department:

» Work using redundant networking, compute, and storage » Mitigate downtime with zero single point of failure » Cluster compute, network, and storage layers » Accelerate failure identification with a validated design

Making $ense out of Tech Talk

With a comprehensively pre-tested solution, companies can more easily pinpoint and correct failures, which significantly reduces risk. And, by implementing fault-tolerant systems that have zero points of failure, companies can mitigate downtime to save over $600,000 per year in unplanned IT costs.5

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Building a Future-Proof Data Center

Organizations need to back their operations using the latest application-centric designs in an intelligent way. To build a future-proof infrastructure, your data center has to harness an integrated, seamless design that propels performance while reducing costs.

What this means for your tech department:

» Reduce cabling costs by 77%3

» Shrink power and cooling costs by 54%3 » Store up to 5x more data in the same footprint6

» Operate using application-centric technology that adapts to workloads » Easily control a variety of enterprise apps

Making $ense out of Tech Talk

With the ability to fit twice as much data on one system, companies can cut their annual storage costs in half.8 Stuttgarter Straßenbahnen AG, for instance, reduced total data storage costs by 50%.3

Also, by reducing cabling costs, companies can lower the total cost (TCO) of their networking by 75%.3

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Conclusion

1 http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/mem/ContentHandler/TSP12948USEN 2 Video Slide Deck PowerPoint – slide 33 Edge2015 Infrastructure Innovation Conference PowerPoint 4 Google Books 5 http://v1.aberdeen.com/launch/report/perspective/8623-AI-downtime-disaster-recovery.asp 6 http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/resource/info/compression-guarantee.html 7 https://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/mem/ContentHandler/TSP12949USEN

To make the best decision possible for their organizations, CIOs are tasked to see past the features, bells, and whistles to the bottom-line value. As you present your strategies to your fellow C-level comrades, let the numbers weave a story of value beyond features and product details.

To translate the latest IT features your IT team raves about into bottom-line value, let the numbers speak for themselves:

Need help building a strong case for an integrated infrastructure solution within your IT department? Pitch a product that has the validated design and proven industry use to back it.

Born from a Cisco and IBM alliance, the VersaStack solution offers unified management of your entire data center – from networking to compute and storage. This simplifies ease of use for your teams while improving the versatility and efficiency of your infrastructure.

» 53% lower TCO6

» 52% lower CapEx6 » 47% management effort reduction3 » 86% reduced provisioning times3

» 61% reduced management costs3 » 50% reduction in design, deployment,

and management overhead costs1 » 0 points of failure3

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Ready to start building a value case for an integrated infrastructure implementation? We can help! Reach out to your local Cisco and IBM partner today.

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