Data Center Infrastructure Management

Most organizations spend more than 70 percent of their IT budgets on infrastructure such as servers, operating systems, storage and networking. This is required to manage the swift yet uneven pace of growth that is essential to survive in today’s highly competitive environment. When organizations achieve the critical mass, they are often bogged down by the widely varying demands placed on their IT infrastructure.

Even as the investments for hardware and software are tracking downward, the costs of managing and supporting infrastructure are increasing. Server sprawl leads to increased operations and support costs, labor intensive legacy platforms lead to increased administration and support costs. Deployment and maintenance of IT systems is costly and consumes too much time and effort and managing system security and user identity information across enterprise systems can be complex.

Identity and Access Management:                                                                       

Rapid search, identification and verification of user access rights helps guarantee information, communication and IT infrastructure protection from malicious attacks. The Activity Directory Domain Services offered help create a scalable, secure, and manageable infrastructure for user and resource management. These services provide the means to manage identities and relationships, and the out-of-the-box functionality needed to centrally configure and administer system, user, and application settings. Some of these services are:

• Active Directory Implementation
• Active Directory Migration from Previous Versions

Desktop, Server and Device Management

Data centers can manage desktops, mobile devices, and servers as well as deploy patches, operating systems, and applications across the network, asset inventory and proactive monitoring of systems by implementing and managing the Microsoft System Centre Suite.

• System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) – The SCCM comprehensively assesses, deploys, and updates servers, client computers, and devices-across physical, virtual, distributed, and mobile environments. Optimized for Windows and tightly integrated with Windows 7, it is the best choice for gaining control over IT systems.
• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) – SCOM uniquely enables data centers to reduce the cost of data center management across server operating systems and hypervisors through a single, familiar and easy to use interface. Through numerous views that show state, health and performance information as well as alerts generated according to some availability, performance, configuration or security situation being identified, operators can gain rapid insight into the state of the IT environment, and the IT services running across different systems and workloads.

Security and Networking

Data centers should guarantee that information and communication are protected from unauthorized access while at the same time provide a mechanism to protect the IT infrastructure from attacks and viruses while preserving access to corporate resources.

• ForeFront Endpoint Protection (Anti-Virus) – By allowing a data center to use its existing client management infrastructure the solution helps reduce ownership costs while providing improved visibility and control over endpoint management and security.
• ForeFront Threat Management Gateway (Firewall and Proxy) – The solution reduces the cost and complexity of Web security through multiple layers of continuously updated protections that are integrated into a unified, easy to manage gateway.
• ForeFront Unified Access Gateway (Firewall, Proxy and SSL VPN) – The solution utilizes a combination of connectivity options, ranging from SSL VPN to Direct Access, as well as built in configurations and policies. This enables the delivery of comprehensive, secure remote access to corporate resources for employees, partners, and vendors on both managed and unmanaged PCs and mobile devices.

Data Protection and Recovery

Organizations require a structured or disciplined backup, storage and restore management solution to protect their data. Disaster Recover Planning – an in-depth analysis of current systems and creation of contingency plans in case of natural or intended disasters.

The System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) from the Microsoft System Center suit can also be implemented for data management. The SCDPM delivers unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Virtualization and file servers, as well as Windows desktops and laptops. DPM seamlessly uses disk, tape, and cloud-based repositories to deliver an easy-to-use and best-of-breed backup and recovery solution for Windows.

Virtualization

In today’s highly automated, technology-enabled economy, business capability has become inextricably linked to IT capability. However, IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex. The need of the hour is to leverage IT so that it becomes a more efficient and strategic asset of business.  By consolidating resources through server, client and storage virtualization, organizations can increase their resource utilization from 10%-15% to as much as 80%. Hardware requirements can also be reduced by 10:1 ratio or better. Automated system management and administration at every level in the data center allows greater focus on more strategic planning activities. Moreover, through virtualization, organizations can achieve a reduced deployment time for new IT services by 50% to 70%

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