Blade Watch

I was talking with some friends, a project manager, a few windows server guys and a CIO, we had met for drinks at one of the pubs in the city to see how we were all getting on. Anyway, one of the server guys was telling us:

“How ridiculous it is that we’re moving servers from one data center to another, we should be buying new hardware and just moving people on to that, or we could even virtualize it.”

The interesting thing was that the CIO agreed and in essence said we know, but we can’t always say that, there are organizational issues involved, I’ve summarized his responses below.

Why not new hardware or virtualize as part of the move?

For each replacement server I have a minimum of:

• 1 – 2 days build and configuration time from the operating system team
• 1 day for networks/patching
• 1 day for storage allocation, configration and deployment
• 1 day to have the server racked and deployed
• Several days for the application to be loaded, configured and soak tested.
• Are the applications validated on that processor type, on that operating system in that configuration to build version 8.091a?

Let us go back to the original issue. Data center1 is coming to the end of the contract, we therefore need to move to Data Center 2. Now before you say but the age of the hardware, but the energy efficiency and the support cost, remember, in some organizations that:

• There is budget for services, for support, for moving the servers.
• There is no budget to replace your servers.
• The project requirements, the specifications are for a data center move

“To move servers from one location to the other.” I see no mention of hardware refresh or swap out, probably for these kind of reasons:

• There is no budget for capital expenditure – if it is on service, then fill your boots
• The application is coded to a legacy platform and operating system - replacing either would require a re-code or re-testing which is out of scope of the data center move
• The operating system build is not ratified for the hardware available, the build might be ratified, globally certified for HP DL380 G5 or Dell 1950s, but not those new Dell R710 servers that your global purchasing agreement allows you to buy
• The end user does not pay their true support or hardware maintenance cost so the difference is marginal
• The annual internal budget on a departmental basis specifies if they have budget for hardware, they might not have asked for any or wanted to – “leave me alone it works”

We need to be efficient with our infrastructure, with our investment, but it’s a two way street, ‘the business’ need to be asking the right questions, focussing on operational and marginal costs of the infrastructure, not marginal cost to their business line, their application or department. That comes back to the post I did earlier about a user saying, “New laptop, that will come out of my bonus, just rebuild the old one.”

In essence as I have discussed with IT people, end users and vendors, we need to run IT as a business and bring an end to the notion of box selling, support providing and move towards service delivery on the basis of more with less, the maximum benefit, at the lowest operational, marginal and total cost. Your pc died, have a virtual machine or a new one, we are under no circumstances fixing it, because our purchasing agreement means it is cheaper to replace than have a guy spend a day fixing a Pentium II desktop.

Related posts:

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2. Some thoughts on the virtual desktop Computerworld Computerworld – Jeff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization,...
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4. You get out what you put into your IT http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/12/04/239596/Will-the-IT-department-die-if-it-does-not-build-private-clouds.htm IT departments face the challenge of making technology available...
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