Quocirca's Straight Talking: Drop those bad habits

Getting a handle on all aspects of IT operations - and employing certain efficiency boosting technologies - can quickly lead to savings and greater productivity, says Quocirca's Elaine Axby.

It's a constant refrain in business: how can we make savings on our day-to-day IT operations in order to have more money to invest in business enhancing applications and services?

As common as the need to save money is the mishmash of different hardware, software, devices and applications found in most organisations. When we want a new service, we typically develop a new application, put it on its own server, plug that into our network and voila - another separate silo to manage, another bit of kit to service, more floor space taken up.

Premises are not always capable of supporting all this kit. In government, for example, IT is either housed in lovely but impractical classical buildings or unlovely and inadequate 1970s lash-ups. IT (and hence business) performance suffers as inadequate data centre accommodation leads to IT equipment failure through overheating or unexpected power outages.

Worst of all, IT assets are under-utilised. Quocirca research shows CPU usage as low as 10 per cent of capacity, and storage down at 30 per cent. Our research also shows that finance directors are key decision makers when it comes to IT projects. Thus an IT organisation managing its assets badly is not going to be viewed very favourably when it comes to new investments.

So what can be done to improve the basic management of the IT estate?

Firstly, knowing what you've got is a big step. This is still a weakness in many organisations, with companies often paying for support for equipment that is no longer being used.

However, simply knowing what you have is not sufficient in today's environment. Being able to analyse asset performance and manage the asset lifecycle is also key. To improve asset performance, knowing which parts of your estate are more vulnerable to outages than others can help maximise the effectiveness of maintenance programmes and hence reduce operating costs.

Knowing where assets are in their lifecycle can help you plan for replacement. Support for both hardware and software will almost inevitably be withdrawn by vendors at some point and you need to be able to plan for replacement, rather than being caught out.

To further develop the effectiveness of IT asset management, it needs to be linked into overall business strategy. For instance, what services will IT need to support in future - with what sort of service levels? And how can we map our asset management plan to the needs of the business?

A more recent imperative for better management of IT assets is the need to save on energy costs. The increase in server densities and the greater computing power required in IT today means organisations need more power, both to run and to cool systems, than ever before.

Energy costs might not be the direct responsibility of the IT department but with oil prices soaring, and governments obliging companies to cut down on carbon emissions, energy cost-saving is becoming a key corporate focus. Both major equipment vendors and specialist companies offer services to help improve the design of data centres, and specialist advice in this area is useful.

One further option for cutting costs is blade computing. Here, a single chassis contains a number of 'blades', containing one or more processors, memory and storage capabilities, along with network connections. Or each function may be kept separate - CPU blades may be installed as a collected resource, with storage blades housed elsewhere in the chassis, or indeed kept completely separate.

However you configure it, a blade chassis is intelligent, enabling the blades to share data and power. Resilience can be built in and the whole unit engineered for optimum cooling. The chassis manages much of the necessary wiring between blades via high-speed data buses, thus lowering the amount of external wiring required.

Savings can be significant. Vendors quote in the range of 25 to 45 per cent for power savings for blades versus conventional servers, as well as big savings in floorspace and operational costs. Floorspace savings might not necessarily be an issue unless organisations are moving or expanding - recent developments in compute density have meant many data centres are not strapped for space - but reducing the complexity of the hardware to be managed can cut down on the number of different skills needed, management time and thus ultimately costs.

There are many possible means of improving the performance of the IT department and cutting operational costs. We have not even touched upon virtualisation technologies to improve asset usage or the possibility of using hosted services in some areas to improve performance.

What is vital, however, is that IT asset management is linked to the needs of the business - the move to blade computing may cut costs, for example, but it should not be forgotten that blades, as is the case with virtualisation or hosting, offer the opportunity to change the organisation's whole approach to IT management.

This is the real challenge for IT directors and their board colleagues - moving away from past habits to a better integration of IT and business needs.