Blade Watch

I was having a chat with one of the Heads of IT over at one of the multi-nationals the other day asking him if money comes into play when buying servers/network switches, and this is what he said. I’ve removed any references to company names etc, but the content remains the same:

“It depends on what we are buying and in what scale. The first thing that matters to me is value for money or at the very least the perception of value for money. Only last week we had one vendor come in and do a presentation and everything was wonderful, she was offering twenty percent of the retail price and some free bits to encourage the sale, but its only when we asked about software deployment licenses, the extra bits we needed that we found that the twenty percent was not necessarily the best deal, so we ended up buying more expensive blades because everything was included. It’s a marginal cost thing, yes I (we) want the best deal, but I want crucially the best business value, it makes little sense to save money in one part of the transaction which is then used to pay for another set of features and end up spending more.

The key thing is solving my business needs. I have constant barrage of well meaning people from inside the company saying we need to do it faster, we need to do it cheaper or more effciently and obviously I am all for that, but those are issues with deployment, with builds and dynamic computing with the future. My favourite one is the statement “.. can rebuild a server in 45 minutes”, “Fine, is the server being rebuilt on the same network, does it need any additional storage allocated, does the 45 minutes include the post build and application load and as part of that who’s managing all the licensing and layered product configuration within that 45 minutes?”. It’s so easy to quote figures without ensuring that you are comparing the same thing, besides often you spend too much focussing on the little stuff when you should be looking at the big picture.

Right now, I need to be able to deploy servers more easily, I need to be able to allocate storage, and networks in a way that does not mean I have three guys a raft of paperwork debate and when can we do this. This needs not only a new server, better switches and storage, it requires best practice and knowledge, that is what I want help with. I’m not after state secrets, but we’re currently deploying our operating system using Altiris images, we manually change networks and provision storage, who can help me reduce the deployment time, remove the nuts and bolts type stuff so to speak, but at a cost/benefit ratio that I can afford or put forward. Remember it is the business units that sign off the investment, they want results as much as I do.”

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