The Three Barriers To IT Infrastructure Consolidation

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•White Paper: Infrastructure Consolidation

Federal, state, and local government agencies are making the strategic choice to consolidate remote site IT infrastructure into central data centers. They are compelled to move some or all remote file servers, email servers, backup, and other servers because through such site consolidation they can jointly address the need to reduce remote site operating costs and mandates for more rigorous security and compliance.

The stumbling block to consolidation, however, is the severe impact on application performance as seen by remote users. Relocating local servers to a data center and connecting them across a wide area network (WAN) link often results in order-of-magnitude slowdowns to response times and data transfer rates. At these levels of delay business processes are impacted forcing site consolidation efforts to be stalled.

CIOs and CTOs often discover that upgrading bandwidth to remote sites has little or no effect on application performance. The problem lies instead with the way the applications interact with the server across the WAN. Microsoft Windows file systems, Microsoft Exchange®, NAS, backup applications, CAD applications, and many others were developed with the idea that the client and server were local. Across the WAN, however, where congestion, resource contention, diverse routing conditions, and high latencies exist, these applications grind to a crawl.

Click Here To Download:
•White Paper: Infrastructure Consolidation