Of late, infrastructure consolidation has become a hot topic, clearly both for the CIOs as well as the technology vendors. Enterprises today are looking to derive more from their IT infrastructure investments. And, this is being driven by high availability, application rationalization, and infrastructure consolidation. Globally, organizations are looking to implement fit-for-purpose-infrastructure components to achieve higher performance while implementing a scalable, and highly available ecosystem. Experts agree that infrastructure consolidation is a key for achieving this goal.

In todays climate of flat or shrinking IT budgets, consolidation offers a means to achieve significant cost savings. But, its attractiveness does not end with cost savings. The growing need for space and power in data centers can be curbed; performance of both servers and storage subsystems can be increased. System administrators time can be sharply reduced, as system availability is improved, and user satisfaction is increased. An improvement in disaster recovery capabilities will naturally follow from most consolidation projects. Finally, the IT infrastructure can be modernized to support the installations future plans for growth. But, any organization has to work in order to realize these potential benefits. The targets for consolidation need to be carefully selected. A bad choice of target may result in great difficulty in completing the project. In addition, when the equipment being consolidated does not belong to the IT department, organizational issues must be addressed, since the installation needs to develop a detailed project plan for the consolidation. The plan must pay attention to issues like fallback, and testing.

Its the Future
According to Gartner, a majority of Indian CIOs will look to maximize return on investments already made in terms of technology purchase. Consolidating, and getting the best out of the existing IT set up is likely to be the top priority for most of the Indian CIOs this year. IT managers will look to revamp their existing infrastructure in a big way this, year and one of the key ways of doing it will be consolidation.

Since the Indian market is no different from the global one, the challenges of legacy infrastructure, and adaptation to emerging technology trends are burning issues, and they are on the Indian CTO/CIO priority list.

Consolidation, whether at the desktop, server or application level, will be the driving force behind lot of CIO moves in 2007. But, storage will be one of the key areas where a lot of attention will be paid. Although the tremendous data growth, and the challenges associated with managing this data has made CIOs realize the advantages that these evolved forms bring to a storage set up.

In India too, market players agree that consolidation will be the way forward to manage IT costs while improving IT usage and deployment efficiencies. As all numbers are driven by global market situations, and technology acceptance dynamics, infrastructure management costs, which are generally around 30% of any IT ecosystem operating expenses, are under scrutiny. Infrastructure consolidation is a surefire way forward in meeting slated business goals, keeping costs, and efficiencies in mind.