How to get the most out of the same hardware

“How much capacity does your data center have?”

When asked this question, the answer is often: “X megawatts.” Or: “Y racks.” Or: “We're at 70%.”

All useful... if you're giving a tour of the facility.

But totally useless if you want to know whether your IT is helping the business move forward.

I recently saw an overview of data center capacity per country, expressed in megawatts. Sounds nice and measurable. You know how much power it needs, you can estimate the CO₂ footprint, and you have a proxy for costs. But it says nothing about the question that really matters:

What does that capacity deliver?

How much revenue, productivity, speed, and continuity do you actually buy with all those watts and square meters?

I saw this on a small scale, very concretely, years ago. Due to an acquisition, we had to move our equipment to another data center. There, we suddenly received an offer that seemed logical on paper: twice as much rack space, but with only 1/6 of the power capacity. According to the MW measurement, the data center was smaller. According to the floor space, it was larger. And according to the business, it was mainly hassle, risk, and eventual delays.

And that is precisely the problem with “capacity” as an IT term.

You can measure capacity in power, cooling, rack units, CPU cores, memory, IOPS, network... and you can create endless dashboards for it.

But your management (and secretly you too) only wants to know one thing:

How much business can you safely run—per euro and per watt?

How many users remain productive without waiting times?

How many orders pass through the chain without errors?

How many customer queries can you handle without your team having to put out fires at night?

The crazy truth: most data centers are not “full.” They are inefficient.

You pay for space, power, and hardware... while your capacity leaks away in waste: incorrect sizing, unnecessary peak space, overly thick platforms, applications that consume more than necessary, and “growth” that you solve with yet another layer on top.

The good news: this can be solved. Easily, even. Without a mega project. And usually faster than you think. In this blog, I'll show you how to measure data center capacity in business value, how to make waste visible, and what it will bring you: more performance, lower costs, less energy, and above all, more peace of mind.

You don't know your IT consumption (you only know the grand total)

Most organizations “know” their IT costs... in the same way that you know your energy bill.

You know what is being debited.

What goes out every month.

And that it increases every year.

But ask a few more questions.

How much does your CRM cost per user per month?

How much does a single order in your webshop cost in terms of infrastructure + licenses + storage + network?

How much does a single minute of waiting time in customer service cost, in euros and in reputation?

Usually, there is silence.

And that's exactly where it starts.

Because then an order comes from ‘above’: “We have to save money and become more sustainable.”

Fine. But... where?

If you only have a total amount, you're steering on panic and guesswork:

• Budget cap

• Pause projects

• “Just use 10% less cloud”

• Or even worse: “We'll turn off monitoring, saves on licenses”

That's not cost control. That's blind cutting.

If you really want to save (and reduce energy consumption), you need to be able to pinpoint your consumption as if you were pointing a laser pen at it.

Not just in euros, but also in kWh, peak load, idle capacity, and waste due to inefficient software.

Because IT doesn't consume “in general.”

IT consumes per application chain. Per environment. Per team. Per customer group. Per feature. Even per release.

As long as you don't measure that, you can't choose:

• Where is the waste that yields nothing?

• Which workloads are secretly the big consumers?

• Which application is cheap in licenses but expensive in CPU?

• Where are you paying for peak capacity that you don't use 95% of the time?

And here's the twist: once you know this, you often don't have to work harder. You just have to work smarter.

Less waste. More capacity. More business per dollar and per watt.

And yes, technology is part of that. But it doesn't start with technology.

It starts with insight.

Optimization: the only savings that improve your performance

The best way to save money in IT is not to “do less.” It's to consume less for the same result. Or a better result. In other words, optimize. And that hits two buttons at once: lower costs and lower energy consumption.

Waste in IT rarely comes from one big, clumsy decision. It comes from a thousand small ones: resources that are always left on “just in case,” processes that once made sense but have now gotten out of hand. And applications that get heavier every quarter because no one knows exactly what's happening where anymore.

The great thing is: the ROI is often absurdly good.

Halving costs sounds like an ambitious goal, but in practice it's often just low-hanging fruit that has never been picked. Not because it's difficult, but because no one has made it measurable. And that's exactly what makes my work so enjoyable: I'm the bearer of good news.

Take one of our customers with a data warehouse that was getting slower and slower. Every month, more CPU, more storage, more costs. And therefore more energy. The cause? Unknown. The reflex? Scale up. Because “it's just growing.”

We turned it around: measure → locate → optimize.

Not at the “server level,” but at the process level. We mapped out where the consumption was really coming from: which ETL processes were guzzling resources, which queries were exploding, which datasets were growing for no reason, which batch runs kept running because that's how they were set up.

Once you see that, optimization becomes almost boring.

No big-bang redesign. No heroic cloud migration. Just targeted pruning and smarter design.

The result: the hardware was cut in half.

And then came the bonus: because the footprint was smaller, the customer was able to switch to a cheaper license variant. Double the profit, without sacrificing functionality.

The savings amounted to more than 50% in costs and energy consumption—over €50,000 per year. And they are far from finished.

Many organizations think that saving money has to be painful.

Optimization proves the opposite: saving money can actually make your IT faster, more stable, and cleaner.

Optimization isn't sexy. But it does make money.

Many organizations waste money and energy because “that's how it's always been done.”

Servers that are too big. Queries that secretly go off track. ETL jobs that keep running as if it were 2012. Licenses you pay for because your footprint is unnecessarily large.

And the frustrating thing?

The savings are often already there. No one picks up on them because no one measures exactly where the waste is, and perhaps because optimization doesn't sound sexy in a steering group. Saving does!

At Sciante, we've been doing this for over 15 years.

We find the waste that others miss or overlook and turn it into results: lower costs, lower energy consumption, higher performance. Without big bang projects. Without disruption. With measurable ROI.

Want to know what opportunities are up for grabs at your company?

Schedule a no-obligation 30-minute appointment with me. Together, we'll identify your biggest leaks... and the optimizations you can start implementing tomorrow.