These are some typical ways that infrastructure management can give you hard savings.

Server Upgrades at No Cost

A real estate information services firm operated a mission critical, 24 x 7 EDI system on 15 aged IBM AIX servers (R30s, R40s, R50s, 560s, 43ps, C20). This infrastructure generated $7.2 million revenue annually and therefore was extremely valuable to the company. However, due to the fast-pace of the environment, the system ran on 8 to 10 year old hardware, AIX 4.2.0, and AIX 4.3.1. IBM no longer provided operating system support on the system, but they were providing hardware maintenance. Due to the age of the equipment, the support was on a “best effort” basis, without any part availability or service time guarantees.

Using standard asset and infrastructure management techniques, we devised an upgrade to consolidate to 10 current-run servers (P610s, P630s) on the latest operating system, 5L. Over the old system, the new system offered system disk mirroring, memory error correction, application disk mirroring, processor failure isolation and redundant power supplies. The new system outperforms the old infrastructure better than 4 times compute power and provides scalability for further growth.

The cost? – Less than what the old system would cost over 30 months. Recognizing that the new system had more redundancy and faster processing capabilities, the new system would likely pay for itself in less than 1 year.

With the right information, cost-savings projects of this nature can get approved even in tough economic times. Let Net Watch Solutions give you the business intelligence to add value to your business.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

A software services company, as does most companies, had downtime on occasion. The IT Operations group had several warning systems that alerted when a server or network link went down. When a failure occurred, the IT department would send out alerts to designated customers via alpha pagers. No matter what the failure, all designates got the alerts.

This communication approach caused several problems. With the number of alerts and early warnings, all of the designates were inundated with text pages. The system created an information overload, although the information was not useful to most of the people who received it. Furthermore, the frequency of the paging left everyone with an insecure feeling that something was always broken somewhere.

Using standard asset management techniques, the customer was able to identify whom each server affected. Similar information was determined on many of the network links too. We gave the Operations group the information whereby they could contact only the affected group when an outage occurred.

The phone call approach was well received. The operations group went further to give the department designates proactive calls once a month with useful statistics, capacity utilization, and disaster recovery information. Rather than having an uneasy feeling, the business groups felt confident that the IT groups were taking care of the business.

Helping the Business with Needed ROI

A real estate information services firm had a 2TB Informix mainframe database to deliver customer property information. The database was expansive; carrying numerous table values, and was a significant asset to the company. Customers requested information in various formats, based on standard and custom data queries.

The business departments felt they could create a data warehouse and using mid-range systems query tools, be better able to predict key business drivers. The business groups wanted to employ data mining techniques to develop business intelligence data.

When the IT department specked out the infrastructure to support the project, the Sun hardware costs were $1.2M. While the business was fairly certain the investment was warranted, the high entry cost kept the project from being approved.

Using standard asset management techniques, we were able to get the hardware for $600K, half the cost. At the lower cost, the business was able to get approval on the project and create the data warehouse in anticipation of generating more revenue.

Making Friends With Accounting

Once a year, a data infrastructure group dreaded the infamous Fixed Assets List. Yearly, the accounting asked the IT group to verify that all of the fixed assets carried on the books by accounting were actually in use. This list was used for two purposes, yearly tax depreciation calculations and for paying property taxes.

Regretfully, the IT department had no way to reconcile the list. The accounting department only had cryptic names and few serial numbers to go by. Over time, systems purchased for one reason were used for other purposes so historical information wasn’t useful in determining the current state of the asset.

Using standard asset management techniques, the IT department began maintaining current asset lists. Leased equipment was removed from the depreciation tables and lost, salvage and inoperable equipment was removed from the books. Not only were the tax obligations reduced, some unused equipment was disposed while the asset still had some salvage value. But more than anything, the accounting department was pleased that the IT group was keeping better records on the company’s assets.