Saving BIG Money With Hardware Configuration & Maintenance
Some of the biggest productivity setbacks in IT environments are often some of the most overlooked areas, like configurations and maintenance. With strategic planning and consistent IT infrastructure maintenance, companies can take full advantage of their technology assets. Here are some tips to help you save thousands across the useful lifespan of your hardware.
Extend Your Resources with Cold & Hot Spares
On average, businesses lose upwards of $100,000 for every hour their IT systems have failures. IT downtime also affects companies in ways that are not easily measurable, such as company reputation, staff morale, and customer loyalty. Hardware failures are the biggest culprit of productivity breakdowns. Your most common points of failure include hard drives, memory, and power supplies. If your hardware infrastructure is in an upgrade or maintenance phase, consider purchasing a small surplus of components, like hard drives, memory, motherboard, power supplies, and even CPUs to have on-hand or in production. Having a cold spare ensures that you have a part readily available in the event of a failure and don’t have to wait several business days for the part to arrive. You can swap the failed component for your new component at your convenience. One step beyond, using a hot spare, is best for mission critical applications where you don’t want to lose time and risk significant data loss. Hot spares are already in your array but are unused until the array detects a drive failure at which time the system disables the failed drive and enables the hot spare. Talk about a life saver!
Setup the Right RAID Array
Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is effective in minimizing the risk of data loss. RAID provides redundancy to your storage disk array by creating a mirrored, parity, or striped image of data across your hard drives. RAID can be configured several ways, including RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, and more. RAID 1 is the simplest and least expensive redundancy model, only using 2 drives. RAID 5 uses at least three disks to provide high read performance and low write performance. Although, one drive failure can cause a noticeable decrease in performance. RAID 6 is frequently used and similar to RAID 5 but uses an additional parity block. You can have two hard drives fail and still be operational. RAID 10 combines RAID 1 and 0 through mirroring and striping and is ideal for mission critical applications that need a high write performance. Using RAID is a great way to quickly recover from a hardware failure, saving you both time and money.
Support Legacy Hardware With On-Site Maintenance Plans
If you are looking to take your failure prevention plan to the next level, consider next business day parts replacement or even an on-site maintenance SLA agreement. These programs help ease the burden of jeopardizing a running infrastructure and enable IT professionals to focus on the long-term strategies for their department.
OEMs can charge a bit of a premium for expiring warranties and support. Consider third-party maintenance after your warranties expire which can be considerably less than OEMs. In some instances, OEMs will even discontinue support on legacy equipment altogether! Third-party hardware maintenance can be an affordable option to reduce the headache of constant break-fix maintenance for your production hardware. A third-party hardware maintenance company can increase efficiency, minimize downtime, and offer peace of mind that your hardware is managed or monitored consistently.
