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IT leaders would preer to spend more o their constrained IT budgets on innovationthan operational costs, much o which is consumed by hungry server estates constantlyeating management time and expensive energy.

Reversing the budget ratio, which currently is commonly 70% on costs and 30% oninnovation, is impossible unless the operational burden o servers is lited, and there isa lot organisations can do to lighten their server load so they can ocus on developingtechnology to drive new applications and competitiveness.

Calculations or metrics or measuring costs vary depending on the size o theorganisation and where it is starting rom, says Dale Vile, managing director at analystFreeorm Dynamics.

A large organisation with six or seven datacentres will have very dierent calculationsrom a small business with a computer room, but both need to steer people to where toput the emphasis when looking at costs or savings and have their own calculations, orotherwise people get distracted with things that are not important,

Reduce the administrative overheadVile says when considering servers, the sotware and management layer is as importantas the hardware. You can do a lot to reduce the operational burden o servers withouttouching the hardware inrastructure. Much o the 70% operational costs are made up othe manpower and overheads o running the system. I you put virtualisation on top o thehardware, you will get eciency savings and enhance the management environment sothe administrative overhead is reduced, he says.

However, Vile points out that using management solutions on ageing server technologywill not do the job eectively. He says recent developments in chipsets and processors

will help reduce costs as they make the server environment more manageable, power-ecient and cooler as organisations can get more out o a chip with lower voltages,power and heat.

I the average age o your servers is more than ve years old and you want to makespace savings and power savings, you will have problems as ve-year old servers arepower-hungry, generate a lot o heat and are not as manageable as modern serverswhich declare a lot more about actors such as the memory state, disk or thresholdaccess, and report back, making it easier or the IT department to reduce operationalcosts, says Vile.

Asset managementBob Tarzey, service director at analyst Quocirca, says that in an unmanaged datacentreenvironment, patching, upgrading and general maintenance are big costs associatedwith servers, but only about 70% o organisations conduct any asset management.

Many are waiting or something to happen to x it. A problem can take hours to xand i it is a remote datacentre, it may take someone to drive to it, which is crazy.Server administrators are paid to sit and wait or something to go wrong. I nothing isgoing wrong, you are paying them to do nothing and cant redeploy them to ocus oninnovation, he says.

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Most IT budgets work on the basis that 70% of costs go on operations,and 30% on innovation but many IT managers would prefer thatratio to be reversed. Servers are often seen as an operational burdenrequiring costly management time, so how can you free up cost andtime to allow more of your server budget to be spent on innovation? Thisreport examines the roadmap to move from high operational costs toinvest more in innovation.

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7/30/2019 Invest in innovation by reducing server mgt burden

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Becoming more proactive, increasing automation and reducing the number o supportsta needed will reduce costs and ree up money to invest in innovation.

I you have got the base rules in place, management tools will identiy a problem beoreit happens. Use o trending, or example, will show you whats happening that maybecome an issue in the uture. Humans are not involved and you can save salaries, havegreater availability and less downtime, says Tarzey.

Managing servers proactively means problems can be spotted beore they become majordisasters, agrees Vile. Getting close to ailure, whether it is disk memory or networkinterace cards, can be pre-empted and you can spot bottlenecks. Users scream whena system is down, but they also scream when it is going slowly, so you can prevent thatsituation rom happening, he says.

Investing in new serversVile adds that although a modern server environment needs less looking ater,organisations can be too cautious about investing in new server technology.

It might just be necessary to buy new servers in certain parts o the inrastructure, orexample, supporting a critical system or a dynamic part o the business where there arelots o change requests or demands or new applications or modications, he says.

Organisations that are modernising their server estate and opting or virtualisation orconsidering consolidation should have a clear picture o how they can reduce theiroperational costs.

I you have 10 physical servers managing 10 applications and you consolidate themdown to two, thats eight less servers you have to patch and you reduce your overheadsto a th o what they were, says Vile.

Tarzey says the more you virtualise, the less server overhead you have to deal with, andhigher availability is built in. Organisations should also consider the various processesrunning and decide where the ocus should be. By optimising processes, more can bespent on innovation and invention.

Do what you have to do to optimise the server environment because over 70% omoney spent on costs is wasted. I you optimise, you create a virtuous circle as the

money saved can go to innovation and invention, he says.

Energy efciencySlashing costs spent on power and at the same time reducing the organisations carbonootprint is also possible with new, more power-ecient servers.

Vile says: A big chunk o costs is spent on power and space. When you are right on theedge in terms o cooling and capacity, and you need extra compute power, but have hitthe 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 costsskyrocket.

Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum, says organisations considering virtualisation or thecloud must pay close attention to governance, otherwise they could incur costs later.

Governance is oten neglected, but you need policies in place to maintain control oinormation outside the datacentre. I they dont put rules in place they will be playingcatch-up over the next 10 to 15 years, he says.

Service managementVile also suggests another approach - rather than talking about systems, talk aboutdelivering a service to business users.

So you dont talk about running the e-mail system, or example, you talk about thee-mail service and agree with the business what it looks like. Its a progressive way othinking, but it helps to get agreement about what costs the business is willing to payand behind the scenes IT managers have the fexibility to make key decisions aboutreducing costs.

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 useulinnovative projects, so CIOs can swap the cost/innovation equation. says Vile.

Nothing is purely about cost. By reeing up resource you can reduce headaches andshit distractions. However, only around one in ve companies are ollowing this servicemanagement view, but it is a good way to help decide what really matters, so you aredirecting resources where it makes a positive impact on the business, Vile concludes.

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