Reduce TCO and Accelerate Innovation with Data Center Modernization

Understand and Identify Current and Future Business Drivers

Today’s competitive business environment demands that companies deliver innovation, real-time insights, and strong business value while reducing capital and operating expenses. The complexity of existing systems, the explosion of data generated, and the business need to grow new offerings to remain competitive are driving the need to evolve infrastructure.

To succeed, organizations must develop a holistic infrastructure strategy that determines the best location for processing workloads—on-premises, in the data center, in the public cloud, at the edge, or a combination of these locations—to maximize business return.

Data center modernization and optimization can help you maximize your technology investments, delivering increased performance and efficiency, infrastructure flexibility to enable new opportunities, advanced data protection and security, and a reduced TCO.

Leadership Insights

• CIOs are increasingly responsible for accelerating change in their organizations, including data center modernization.
  Read the findings from a Forbes Insights survey on CIO infrastructure strategies to innovate and modernize.
• Technical business leaders are looking to accelerate a more secure path to artificial intelligence (AI) innovation while maximizing technology investments and minimizing costs.
  Read the IDC Spotlight paper, Enterprise AI Strategy in 2024, that showcases a path toward continuous AI adoption.

Case Study: Intel IT

At Intel, we follow the same guidance we offer our customers and partners. Read our 2023-2024 Intel IT Annual Performance Report, and learn how we’re modernizing our IT infrastructure to deliver the trusted and resilient technology solutions you rely on and the benefits we’ve seen from our efforts so far.

Develop a Data Center Modernization Strategy

Modernization can take many forms, depending on your business goals and unique circumstances. To make the most of your efforts, take the time to assess your opportunities, and plan your modernization journey as part of your overall strategy before you begin so you can prioritize your action steps.

Prepare for Growth with Data Center Modernization

The pace of progress will depend on the scope and timeline of your modernization project and how your systems are currently integrated. The following steps can be implemented separately or together.

1. Start: Identify and resolve potential barriers up front to minimize implementation challenges.
2. Create: Define your business objectives and initiatives to help prioritize areas for modernization investment.
3. Assess: Evaluate your current portfolio of applications and workloads, including dependencies, data accessed, connectivity requirements, and current platform support. Be sure to include an audit of your cloud technology and fleet of employee devices, and do an assessment of your current security strategy for a holistic understanding of your technology, capacity, and security requirements.
4. Evaluate: Evaluate whether it is time to retire older applications, rehost them to a cloud operating model, replatform or refactor them, or replace them with a SaaS application to best achieve strategic business objectives. For employee devices, determine if a PC fleet refresh is needed for AI readiness, productivity and employee satisfaction improvements, or endpoint security reasons.
5. Embrace: Learn and adapt for continuous improvement through agility and flexibility. As you progress through your modernization projects, monitor and manage against objectives and success metrics, fine-tuning as needed. Scale the most-successful approaches as you continue to modernize subsequent workloads. Adjust your operating model based on actual outcomes and evolving business needs to optimize results.

Reasons to Modernize: Reduce Cost

Outdated hardware and software infrastructure can result in inefficient and underperforming systems that drive higher operating expenses and prevent organizations from leveraging the benefits of digital transformation. Perhaps more significantly, legacy infrastructure can also result in insufficient privacy and data security protections, leading to lapses in SLA or regulatory compliance and risking exposure of data and customers to expensive data breaches.
You can address these challenges and gain access to new capabilities, acceleration, and optimization tools by updating your data center infrastructure and your cloud investments. The variety of purchasing options available from most server OEMs and cloud service providers can even remove the hurdle of costs for new infrastructure, if you prefer to operationalize modern infrastructure as a service.

Benefits of Data Center Modernization:

• Reduce costs and accomplish more using fewer servers. Support the same workload capacity in less space and with higher performance per watt for a more efficient data center footprint.
• Gain more performance to support new deployment models, achieve goals, and meet evolving application and workload demands, unlocking your ability to roll out new services and experiences and enter new markets.
• Adapt to changing market conditions, comply with regulations, protect against emerging cyber threats, and build new opportunities while protecting your data with hardware-assisted security.
• Innovate faster with new hardware that unlocks the infrastructure capabilities needed to adopt emerging and complex technologies like AI.
• Support needed end-of-life or application upgrades by incorporating new technologies.

Dive into the Details

• Read more about the quantifiable benefits of data center modernization and cloud optimization in our white paper, Innovate More. Spend Less.
• Watch the on-demand webcast, Reduce Costs by Bringing Your Technology into the Future, featuring speakers from Intel, IDC, and Gunpowder Technologies.
• Find infrastructure upgrade options for your workloads using the Intel® Xeon® Processor Advisor. Sign up or sign in for instant access to recommendations and optimizations based on TCO, sustainability, and power.
• Explore Intel Cloud Optimization Tools for modernizing and optimizing your data center and cloud investments.
• Learn how integrated Intel® Security Engines in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors help to enhance data protection.

Reasons to Modernize: Deploy AI Solutions Today

Among many technologists, there’s a misconception that AI workloads require a GPU or specialized discrete AI accelerator.
In truth, you can support many common AI workloads in the data center, cloud, and at the edge without a GPU by using Intel® Xeon® processors. Enhanced with an AI accelerator, these processors are designed to support your current data center workloads and AI inference workloads, using integrated Intel® AI Engines for AI acceleration.¹
AI inference workloads are the majority of AI workloads running in enterprises. Running AI inference on Intel® Xeon® processors can help you save on hardware and software costs, improve energy efficiency, and enhance security capabilities to stay compliant. Your developers will benefit by avoiding the complexity of specialized hardware that requires proprietary software, minimizing the need for code or application changes.
Your organization is likely already invested in Intel® Xeon® processors, making adopting them for AI an easier choice. If you haven’t updated your infrastructure in several years, you may be running on an older-processor generation. Updating your data center technology to the newest version will not only help to deliver the performance, efficiency, and security benefits of modernization but can also help you to accelerate your AI journey. you to accelerate your AI journey.

Case Study: Ropers Majeski

Ropers Majeski, a midsize law firm, automated data processing tasks and streamlined operations with an AI-enabled solution based on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. The new system increased employee productivity by 18.5 percent and more than doubled the firm’s document ingestion rate without sacrificing data security or compliance.²

Reasons to Modernize: Maximize Value of Application Upgrades ‒ Microsoft Server Upgrade

Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 ended in 2023, and support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 stopped in the summer of 2022.

Migrating to newer versions offers a range of security and performance benefits. To get the most value from your Windows Server investment, consider upgrading to the latest servers featuring Intel® Xeon® processors at the same time, rather than doing a software-only upgrade.

When new platforms running Windows Server are powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, you can expect performance gains, workload consolidation opportunities to reduce TCO and enhance sustainability, and hardware-based security capabilities that can help reduce threats and risks.

• Why upgrade to Microsoft Windows Server 2022: Migrating offers security enhancements, such as virtualization-based security and Windows Defender, faster boot and log-in times, and improved container support. It also enhances scalability, with support for 48 TB of memory and 2,048 logical cores running on 64 physical sockets.
• Why upgrade to Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (ASHCI): Upgrading helps accelerate the transition to multi/hybrid cloud deployments through consolidation of virtualized and containerized workloads, with unified management across hybrid cloud environments.
• Why upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2022: Transitioning from a legacy environment to the 2022 version offers reduced workload times with much faster queries, enhanced database security, automatic resolution of conflicts with different data replicas, and unified data management and governance capabilities. The latest version also includes improvements that help maximize availability and business continuity. A key feature of SQL Server 2022 is Intel® Quick Assist Technology (Intel® QAT), which provides hardware-accelerated compression for faster backups whether the database is idle or in use.

Reasons to Modernize: Improve Employee Productivity

Data center modernization requires a holistic view of system-wide elements, including supporting your distributed workforce. A PC refresh can help improve employee productivity, enhance the workplace experience, and strengthen device security. Knowing when to upgrade or replace your technology with business-class PCs can help protect your business from costly cyberattacks and reduce lost time due to inefficiency.
For employees within your organization running AI workloads, you’ll also want to assess your fleet for AI readiness. AI workloads introduce new demands on the daily-use laptops and desktops of your team—and poor performance on these machines can compromise your upstream investment in AI capabilities.
To support your team’s AI PC needs, we offer the Intel® Core™ Ultra processor, which incorporates three different compute engines into a single package to supercharge AI performance for end users.
We have worked with over 100 ISV partners on more than 300 AI-accelerated features to enhance PC experiences across audio effects, content creation, security, streaming, video collaboration, and more.

Investment in data center modernization offers the potential for high returns in the form of tangible performance, efficiency, security, and cost-reduction benefits. It can also give your organization the flexibility to pivot and scale to meet changing workload and future business needs.

No matter where you are on your modernization journey, Intel offers a comprehensive portfolio of technologies and Intel-powered partner solutions to help you address your objectives and can help make your infrastructure transitions and upgrades easier.

Contact your Intel representative to discuss your organization’s goals and learn how modernization with Intel can help you.