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IT savings made simple
Given the state of the global economy, reduced capital and operational spending has become the order of the day. Many IT organisations will have to make do with tighter budgets and leaner staffs—without neglecting critical IT functions. In fact, IT’s role may become even more important, helping the business respond to changing conditions and compete effectively for a larger share of shrinking markets. First, you must find a way to cut costs and do more with less.
In this series of articles, Citrix explores cost-saving strategies for every part of your IT environment, from the datacentre to the desktop. While the immediate goal is to reduce IT costs, these strategies will also deliver meaningful long-term benefits by creating an agile, scaleable infrastructure able to support future business needs, an essential IT priority in any economy.
Rethink your network
Citrix looks downstream to the network infrastructure that connects the datacentre to the enterprise. As more of your employees and partners work remotely, WAN application delivery becomes an increasingly complex—and costly—challenge for IT. To simplify the networks supporting today’s distributed workforce while reducing costs, consider these ideas for network efficiency.
Optimise servers
With content-rich applications and streaming media flooding your network, your Web servers are hard-pressed to deliver the performance demanded by users. You have two choices: pay for additional resources or make your existing servers more efficient. The first adds considerably to costs—after all, server expenditures are the largest cost component in Web application delivery. Rather, you should examine solutions that accomplish the second. For instance, Web application delivery appliances deliver rapid return on investment and conserve datacentre resources by offloading common networking-focused tasks from your Web servers, including computing-intensive data encryption and the management of low-level TCP connections. As a result, you can support more users, more effectively, with the same server load—and reduce costs for hardware, management, power and cooling along the way.
Optimise data delivery
The potential efficiencies offered by cloud computing, IT centralisation and Web application delivery can be undermined by rapidly growing bandwidth requirements. Think about the traffic generated by the typical Web application: images, graphics, redundant content—all being served over and over again, often to more than one user in the same location. Rather than allowing these repetitive data requests to swamp your servers and bloat your bandwidth costs, use caching to locally store frequently accessed data—a simple step that can cut a Web server’s load in half. For the remaining data that does need to cross the WAN, compression techniques can yield a size reduction of as much as 75 percent prior to transmission, further conserving bandwidth and server resources. By using these methods to optimise data delivery, you can delay bandwidth upgrade schedules, improve performance and bring new capabilities online more efficiently.
Centralise resources
In addition to seeking new efficiencies within your network, think about new ways to use your network to drive efficiency in your enterprise. In the past, poor network performance has made it necessary to support branch offices with their own local applications. This inevitably creates inefficiencies, as redundant IT resources must be provisioned to each mini-datacenter, and application administration and maintenance overhead are multiplied. Today, network appliances are available that overcome these traditional WAN-based performance challenges—even for users thousands of miles away—allowing IT to centralise applications in a much smaller number of datacentres. Once consolidated in fewer locations, servers and applications can be virtualised for even greater savings.
Improve flexibility
Even within an optimised infrastructure, you have to make sure your resources are always being allocated where they’re needed, when they’re needed, to avoid over-provisioning or shortfalls. Automated server provisioning ensures optimal efficiency by monitoring the pool of utilised servers, their current status and availability, and allocating processing loads accordingly. When a surge in workload is identified, new application servers are provisioned automatically to add processing capacity—in effect, creating new infrastructure on the fly. Similarly, when excess capacity is identified, the process can be quickly reversed and application servers shut down.
Improve traffic management
In many organisations, server requests are forwarded based only on port number, an approach which requires multiple servers with duplicated applications and databases. Layer 7 content switching uses a more efficient approach by allowing IT to define policies based on information in the TCP header or payload to ensure that the right application data is served from the right application server to the right client every time. Global server load balancing takes these capabilities and applies them on a global basis.
Enable the enterprise
The strategies discussed above not only deliver much-needed cost savings to help IT weather the current economic downturn, they also provide the scaleability and responsiveness anticipated for the business needs to come. By making it possible for users to enjoy LAN-like performance over the WAN, IT enables the enterprise to operate efficiently wherever their business takes them—while leveraging the full benefits of centralisation and virtualisation.
In this series of articles, Citrix explores cost-saving strategies for every part of your IT environment, from the datacentre to the desktop. While the immediate goal is to reduce IT costs, these strategies will also deliver meaningful long-term benefits by creating an agile, scaleable infrastructure able to support future business needs, an essential IT priority in any economy.
Rethink your network
Citrix looks downstream to the network infrastructure that connects the datacentre to the enterprise. As more of your employees and partners work remotely, WAN application delivery becomes an increasingly complex—and costly—challenge for IT. To simplify the networks supporting today’s distributed workforce while reducing costs, consider these ideas for network efficiency.
Optimise servers
With content-rich applications and streaming media flooding your network, your Web servers are hard-pressed to deliver the performance demanded by users. You have two choices: pay for additional resources or make your existing servers more efficient. The first adds considerably to costs—after all, server expenditures are the largest cost component in Web application delivery. Rather, you should examine solutions that accomplish the second. For instance, Web application delivery appliances deliver rapid return on investment and conserve datacentre resources by offloading common networking-focused tasks from your Web servers, including computing-intensive data encryption and the management of low-level TCP connections. As a result, you can support more users, more effectively, with the same server load—and reduce costs for hardware, management, power and cooling along the way.
Optimise data delivery
The potential efficiencies offered by cloud computing, IT centralisation and Web application delivery can be undermined by rapidly growing bandwidth requirements. Think about the traffic generated by the typical Web application: images, graphics, redundant content—all being served over and over again, often to more than one user in the same location. Rather than allowing these repetitive data requests to swamp your servers and bloat your bandwidth costs, use caching to locally store frequently accessed data—a simple step that can cut a Web server’s load in half. For the remaining data that does need to cross the WAN, compression techniques can yield a size reduction of as much as 75 percent prior to transmission, further conserving bandwidth and server resources. By using these methods to optimise data delivery, you can delay bandwidth upgrade schedules, improve performance and bring new capabilities online more efficiently.
Centralise resources
In addition to seeking new efficiencies within your network, think about new ways to use your network to drive efficiency in your enterprise. In the past, poor network performance has made it necessary to support branch offices with their own local applications. This inevitably creates inefficiencies, as redundant IT resources must be provisioned to each mini-datacenter, and application administration and maintenance overhead are multiplied. Today, network appliances are available that overcome these traditional WAN-based performance challenges—even for users thousands of miles away—allowing IT to centralise applications in a much smaller number of datacentres. Once consolidated in fewer locations, servers and applications can be virtualised for even greater savings.
Improve flexibility
Even within an optimised infrastructure, you have to make sure your resources are always being allocated where they’re needed, when they’re needed, to avoid over-provisioning or shortfalls. Automated server provisioning ensures optimal efficiency by monitoring the pool of utilised servers, their current status and availability, and allocating processing loads accordingly. When a surge in workload is identified, new application servers are provisioned automatically to add processing capacity—in effect, creating new infrastructure on the fly. Similarly, when excess capacity is identified, the process can be quickly reversed and application servers shut down.
Improve traffic management
In many organisations, server requests are forwarded based only on port number, an approach which requires multiple servers with duplicated applications and databases. Layer 7 content switching uses a more efficient approach by allowing IT to define policies based on information in the TCP header or payload to ensure that the right application data is served from the right application server to the right client every time. Global server load balancing takes these capabilities and applies them on a global basis.
Enable the enterprise
The strategies discussed above not only deliver much-needed cost savings to help IT weather the current economic downturn, they also provide the scaleability and responsiveness anticipated for the business needs to come. By making it possible for users to enjoy LAN-like performance over the WAN, IT enables the enterprise to operate efficiently wherever their business takes them—while leveraging the full benefits of centralisation and virtualisation.
