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Whitepaper Invest in innovation by reducing your server management burden

Most IT budgets work on the basis that 70% of costs go on operations, and 30% on innovation but many IT managers would prefer that ratio to be reversed. Servers are often seen as an operational burden requiring costly management time, so how can you free up cost and time to allow more of your server budget to be spent on innovation? This report examines the roadmap to move from high operational costs to invest more in innovation.
IT leaders would prefer to spend more of their constrained IT budgets on innovation than operational costs, much of which is consumed by hungry server estates constantly eating management time and expensive energy. Reversing the budget ratio, which currently is commonly 70% on costs and 30% on innovation, is impossible unless the operational burden of servers is lifted, and there is a lot organisations can do to lighten their server load so they can focus on developing technology to drive new applications and competitiveness. Calculations or metrics for measuring costs vary depending on the size of the organisation and where it is starting from, says Dale Vile, managing director at analyst Freeform Dynamics. A large organisation with six or seven datacentres will have very different calculations from a small business with a computer room, but both need to steer people to where to put the emphasis when looking at costs or savings and have their own calculations, or otherwise people get distracted with things that are not important, Reduce the administrative overhead Vile says when considering servers, the software and management layer is as important as the hardware. You can do a lot to reduce the operational burden of servers without touching the hardware infrastructure. Much of the 70% operational costs are made up of the manpower and overheads of running the system. If you put virtualisation on top of the hardware, you will get efficiency savings and enhance the management environment so the administrative overhead is reduced, he says. However, Vile points out that using management solutions on ageing server technology will not do the job effectively. He says recent developments in chipsets and processors will help reduce costs as they make the server environment more manageable, powerefficient and cooler as organisations can get more out of a chip with lower voltages, power and heat. If the average age of your servers is more than five years old and you want to make space savings and power savings, you will have problems as five-year old servers are power-hungry, generate a lot of heat and are not as manageable as modern servers which declare a lot more about factors such as the memory state, disk or threshold access, and report back, making it easier for the IT department to reduce operational costs, says Vile. Asset management Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst Quocirca, says that in an unmanaged datacentre environment, patching, upgrading and general maintenance are big costs associated with servers, but only about 70% of organisations conduct any asset management. Many are waiting for something to happen to fix it. A problem can take hours to fix and if it is a remote datacentre, it may take someone to drive to it, which is crazy. Server administrators are paid to sit and wait for something to go wrong. If nothing is going wrong, you are paying them to do nothing and cant redeploy them to focus on innovation, he says.

a whitepaper from ComputerWeekly

in association with HP ProLiant G7 servers featuring AMD OpteronTM 6100 Series processors

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Becoming more proactive, increasing automation and reducing the number of support staff needed will reduce costs and free up money to invest in innovation. If you have got the base rules in place, management tools will identify a problem before it happens. Use of trending, for example, will show you whats happening that may become an issue in the future. Humans are not involved and you can save salaries, have greater availability and less downtime, says Tarzey. Managing servers proactively means problems can be spotted before they become major disasters, agrees Vile. Getting close to failure, whether it is disk memory or network interface cards, can be pre-empted and you can spot bottlenecks. Users scream when a system is down, but they also scream when it is going slowly, so you can prevent that situation from happening, he says. Investing in new servers Vile adds that although a modern server environment needs less looking after, organisations can be too cautious about investing in new server technology. It might just be necessary to buy new servers in certain parts of the infrastructure, for example, supporting a critical system or a dynamic part of the business where there are lots of change requests or demands for new applications or modifications, he says. Organisations that are modernising their server estate and opting for virtualisation or considering consolidation should have a clear picture of how they can reduce their operational costs. If you have 10 physical servers managing 10 applications and you consolidate them down to two, thats eight less servers you have to patch and you reduce your overheads to a fifth of what they were, says Vile. Tarzey says the more you virtualise, the less server overhead you have to deal with, and higher availability is built in. Organisations should also consider the various processes running and decide where the focus should be. By optimising processes, more can be spent on innovation and invention. Do what you have to do to optimise the server environment because over 70% of money spent on costs is wasted. If you optimise, you create a virtuous circle as the money saved can go to innovation and invention, he says. Energy efficiency Slashing costs spent on power and at the same time reducing the organisations carbon footprint is also possible with new, more power-efficient servers. Vile says: A big chunk of costs is spent on power and space. When you are right on the edge in terms of cooling and capacity, and you need extra compute power, but have hit the wall, you will have to extend your datacentre or build a new one. It is a notional idea, but you dont ever want to be close to that because it would clearly make your costs skyrocket. Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum, says organisations considering virtualisation or the cloud must pay close attention to governance, otherwise they could incur costs later. Governance is often neglected, but you need policies in place to maintain control of information outside the datacentre. If they dont put rules in place they will be playing catch-up over the next 10 to 15 years, he says. Service management Vile also suggests another approach - rather than talking about systems, talk about delivering a service to business users. So you dont talk about running the e-mail system, for example, you talk about the e-mail service and agree with the business what it looks like. Its a progressive way of thinking, but it helps to get agreement about what costs the business is willing to pay and behind the scenes IT managers have the flexibility to make key decisions about reducing costs.

in association with HP ProLiant G7 servers featuring AMD OpteronTM 6100 Series processors

Nothing is purely about cost. By freeing up resource you can reduce headaches and shift distractions. However, only around one in five companies are following this service management view, but it is a good way to help decide what really matters, so you are directing resources where it makes a positive impact on the business, Vile concludes.

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Although this approach may look like a cost-neutral move, it potentially allows CIOs to reduce overheads spent on IT. Resource can be redeployed and spent on more useful innovative projects, so CIOs can swap the cost/innovation equation. says Vile.