Achieve Operational Efficiencies To Drive Digital Transformation

Organization across all industries are finding that improving operational efficiencies in IT is one of the most important factors in driving successful digital transformation initiatives—while also helping IT to reduce costs.

• For the Miami Dolphins improving operational efficiencies has meant using video to transform its relationship with fans.
• For the City of Monroe it has meant ensuring 24x7 access to vital services and public utilities such as water, electricity and gas.
• For Frost Science it has freed IT staff to drive transformation initiatives such as a new science-at-home program.

This article discusses these uses cases and others to explore the benefits of improving operations to achieve transformative business results. We also look at the solutions that have made these transformations possible.

The Miami Dolphins use video as a powerful asset for fan engagement, safety and security. However, to meet growing demand, the organization needed to modernize its infrastructure for performance and capacity. The upgrade, including Dell EMC Isilon scale-out storage and Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, has solved the performance issues and enabled the team to expand the storage lifecycle from three to five years, saving $1.2 million.

The City of Monroe is a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., one of the fastest-growing areas in the country and the second largest metro area in the Southeast. The city’s IT needed to continually deploy new applications, automate operations and support data analytics without expanding the data center footprint. Modernizing with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, VMware vSphere and other solutions, Monroe has consolidated servers in co-located data centers by 60%; accelerated time to value; significantly reduced power and cooling costs, and, perhaps most critically, ensured delivery of vital city services 24x7x365.

Lancaster University in Northwest England is an internationally recognized leader in higher education and research with 13,000 students, 2,900 faculty and professional staff and research partnerships in 60 countries worldwide. The university modernized its data center network and integrated its existing server and storage solutions with a new data center core powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge MX modular infrastructure. The results: The university migrated nearly 3,000 VMware instances in less than three weeks with no downtime; consolidated server racks by 75%; and adopted a future ready infrastructure that accommodates growth and development with no disruption while enabling public cloud responsiveness in a private cloud environment.

The Philip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in Miami relies on its IT infrastructure to power its aquarium, planetarium and online and live exhibitions and shows, while also supporting work-from-home employees. Their modernization effort has been built on Dell EMC Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller running on high-performance Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers, in addition to VMware vSphere and vCenter. The museum is now able to deploy servers in minutes rather than days; managing everything from basic IT infrastructure to ticketing, building operations and security using one system. IT staff has been freed from routine tasks to now work on new shows and transformational projects such as the Frost Science@Home initiative.

A large power company was looking at IT transformation to modernize its power grid to achieve savings in both CapEx and OpEx. The utility migrated to a cloud-native environment using VMware Tanzu Architecture for VxRail (TA4V). The advantages were so extreme – virtually eliminating OpEx – that the CEO reportedly didn’t believe them at first. The five-year cumulative OpEx savings will be $3.25 million – or 99.97%. This will positively impact customer rates and help the utility in negotiating its rate structures with various state regulators.

Conclusion
As you can see from this case studies, for most organizations digital transformation is a process, often driven by important, incremental steps along the way – improving performance, adding cloud-capabilities, adding new capabilities such as video, supporting application migrations, ensuring backup, recovery and data protection.

Moving forward on the journey requires having an infrastructure foundation with partners you can rely on to provide solutions, guidance and expertise wherever you are in the process, to address whatever challenges and opportunities are your organization’s top priorities. Please visit Dell Technologies to find out more about IT modernization solutions to support your organization’s digital transformation journey.