Blade Watch

Arguing about $800 cost us $175 per server for life

I got told this story over dinner with colleagues over the weekend, they had recently started working at this small business, which shall remain nameless, and found it quite funny how for the sake of $800, the company was now subscribed to a server build service for the next year. The story has been summarized and any company specific data removed.

The CIO had got a complaint from the business that in their SME world, (with 150 servers), that the server build process took too long. It took the best part of a day for the engineer to load Windows on the server, then install the drivers, the security patches and whatever applications they had. It was 2009, why were they doing this manual stuff, over at company B (one of their competitors), could build a server using an image in 45 minutes, why were we not doing that?

The CIO said “he would get back to them”, and phoned the Head of IT, “fix it”, he said, “not interested how, just fix it”. The Head of IT asked the team and responded that they had a server they could use to build servers, but they would need a few days of time for an engineer to configure the network and load the automated build tool and get a base image which could be deployed to servers as they arrived, reducing the load time to about 30 minutes, plus a few reboots to rename and re-configure a big improvement from the previous day or so.

The CIO thought that was fine and forwarded on the email to the business saying in effect, “we are going to take Jim and allocate him to do this, this will result in an indirect cost to you in two days project time, or $800″. The business manager replied that this was an IT cost and why should they pay for something that IT should have done, the CIO stated that it was not an issue, simply two man days, billing Jim to the projects/investment budget line, not support, “so there was no real money involved, it was a matter of cross charging Jim.”

“No” said the head of business, “we are not subsidizing IT, find another way”. The CIO forwarded on the message to the Head of IT saying “can we look at an alternative please”. The Head of IT in the business of protecting his business line, and complying with the business wishes for openness when it came to costs, and everything being billed properly decided that he would find another easier way.

The Head of IT spoke with the supplier that provided the servers and asked if they could load the operating system before delivery, certainly said the vendor, “though there will be a per server load cost of $175, plus an initial purchase/setup cost of $750 which would be directly billed with the first server loaded”.

The CIO agreed informing the business, net result? fifteen servers purchased for the month of October $3375 spent on builds so far (including set up costs), with another 12 on the way for November.

An interesting story, and it highlights one of our regular commentaries, often the issues inside a company are not so much technical, but non technical or organizational, sorry that’s not how we do things. Hopefully though, the more we discuss them, the more as an end user community we can move forward and help each other benefit from IT as a service, as a commodity or a business.

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