Author:  Roger Sumner

If you want to make your contact center IT-ready, it is imperative that you take a good look at the physical footprint of the hardware running your contact center applications and ask yourself some potentially difficult questions.  Are you using an excessive amount of power?  Are you spending an unreasonable amount of money on real estate and cooling?  Are your IT management costs through the roof?

If you answered, “yes” to any or all of these questions, it’s time for you to begin exploring the ways you can reduce your physical footprint.  This will help you gain greater flexibility, reduce costs and complexity, and increase security and business continuity.

Your first option is hardware virtualization software.

Hardware virtualization software is a great tool that enables a single physical entity to be partitioned into multiple logical entities.  In doing so, the software eliminates the number of servers you need and helps you to reduce your physical machine count and potentially your carbon footprint to subscribe to a more “Green IT” approach. 

What does that mean?   Suppose you have three applications running on three separate servers because you want to isolate the applications for better control.  You don’t, however, need the horsepower of three servers.   Using products like VMWare, you can create three instances logically within one physical box and still provide the application isolation you need.  The end result is that you use fewer servers, which yields lower up-front costs and decreases your maintenance expense, without giving up any of your application requirements.  Virtualization software can also help simplify application backup and upgrade strategies in the enterprise.

Many of our customers who are implementing virtualization software are concurrently deploying new technology infrastructure profiles, such as blade servers, Citrix and Terminal Services technologies, and invasive security processes and software.  It’s a great idea, but I have a word of caution for you here – don’t try this at home without the help of experienced professionals. While these evolving technologies are presenting a growing number of benefits, they also have the potential to increase system conflicts. Working with a specialized partner during your virtualization software evaluation and implementation process is key.  It can help you avoid some unpleasant pitfalls.

Next time, I’ll talk about some of the other ways you can IT-ready your network/telephony infrastructure.  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Performance Optimization, Unified Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.