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Customers from the US and Europe who recently attended the last few executive briefings in Houston had one question on their mind; how can we reduce our costs? It was that simple. Networking costs are too high and customers want solutions, now.

The good news is that Hewlett Packard Enterprise networking offers data center solutions that are helping customers worldwide reduce costs and support changing business needs. Most customers know that their networks are costing more than they should, not as reliable or secure as they need to be. Interestingly, many don’t take the next logical step of seriously considering different networking options that can correct their situation and available in the market today. Once you recognize that you have a problem look for solutions that may not come from the vendor that created the problems in the first place.

Reign in Hidden Operating Costs

Many customers spend more time negotiating purchasing costs at the expense of scrutinizing operating costs. Many networking contracts contain hidden built-in operating expenses. For example, “SmartNet” and similar arrangements end up resulting in high costs for advanced L3 features or FCoE, where new FCoE licenses may cost you about $11,000. HPE networking removes such creeping costs by giving you switches with all L2/L3 advanced features already covered in the switch price. No hidden costs, but known operating costs for better business predictability.

Reduce Cost and Complexity with Convergence

Operating purpose-built separate networks for data and storage is a costly proposition. Converging IP and storage data onto a common Ethernet transport significantly reduces the cost of acquisition and operating costs of your data center. Convergence with FCoE using higher Ethernet speeds eliminate costly Fibre Channel switches, reduce switch ports, cables and transceivers used in data center networks by half. It also enables more efficient deployment of servers with higher VM density benefiting from shared faster I/O channels.

Work Smarter with SDN

There is no doubt that manual, tedious and repetitive tasks are pervasive in today’s decades-old networking environments. Automating manual tasks is one main benefit for adopting Software Defined Networking (SDN). For example, with SDN, you can reduce the time wasted on provisioning a network from two long weeks to short five minutes. Yes, you can save two weeks of tedious work and turn your attention to innovations that will better improve your business and give you a competitive edge in the market.

Consider Open Networking

The primary reason for high networking costs is vendor lock-in. Aside from freeing you from vendor lock-in, open networking and disaggregated switches give you higher scalability and reduce costs. By deploying Open Compute Project (OCP) compliant hardware, enterprises have been able to save about 10% of their costs. An even better case is Intel, who reduced annual IT spending per employee by $500 by using a combination of SDN and open networking devices. Your business will realize lower TCO with HPE’s open networking solutions while you get freedom of choice and break free of vendor lock-in.

When things get complicated and costly in your data center, help is available. Look at your options away from those who created your problems in the first place. HPE networking is here to help.

Read more about HPE networking, Altoline disaggregated switches, FlexFabric switches and OpenSwitch at www.openswitch.net .