Blade Watch

Finextra

Don Callahan, Citi’s chief administrative administrative officer, told Computerworld UK that the bank was moving forcefully to hit targets of slashing $3 billion from operational and technology costs by 2011.

The pledge to butcher IT budgets was undertaken by Citi CEO Vikram Pandit in April 2008, as the bank faced up to massive losses from subprime debts. One of Pandit’s first moves was to centralise IT decisions in New York under Callahan.

Callahan told Computerworld that Citi was “well ahead of schedule” with the O&T savings. “We intend to be one of the most efficient operators in our industry, and we have made and continue to make significant progress against that goal.”

An article talking about how this bank is seeking to reduce its IT spend through centralization and improving efficiency, it’s interesting once you look at your costs to see where savings can be made, not just on the technology, but on the operations, the on call. We need to be looking at the way we do business so to speak to identify where our operational costs are, but from several levels for it to be effective, from the engineer to the architect through to the CIO, as all have valid opinions. It was the CIO that told me the story that he was looking through the order approvals and noted that the order included the standard CDROM drive £29 plus the optional DVD, when he asked he got told, it’s always been ike that, the server comes with a CDROM drive but the build is on DVD, so we have to order a DVD drive, fine, he asked, anyone ask if we can not have the CD? Oh I thought purchasing would have said was the reply, purchasing though only ever ordered what they got asked to quote for, the standard server quote included a CDROM. I always at this point quote that rhyme I was taught as a child:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

It can be so easily translated into your IT, in so many ways and so many levels. One example I was using the other day with an IT manager for a medium enterprise complaining about his on call costs and ’stability’ of his server estate. I asked him, what proactive steps on your infrastructure do you take? What do you mean he replied, we respond to the alerts we get in MOM?

No proactive steps:

• Clearing down disk space – operating system and data drives, do we need the web logs from 2007 – can they be archived off or compressed, clearing the temp drive, the old hot fixes etc
• Security patching – this by the very nature of the activity forces a reboot, which clears down all the memory and ensures that the server is up to supported revisions
• Defragmentation of the file systems – this can make a big difference to system performance and end user experience – check though if you’re using thin provisioning
• Upgrading the system and component firmware – again forces a reboot and ensures that your system is operating as recommended by the vendor
• System configuration and fault analysis, are we logging failures and looking for patterns, adapting monitoring tools to suit on a per box basis?

Responding to alerts is fine, but you get what you put in, even a legacy server estate running NT4, Windows 2000, can be made to run very efficiently and with a degree of stability, what you need to do is focus on the core, the server platform, standardizing and bringing everything up to date, just doing this and combining with a “health check” (disk space, memory, configuration) can make a world of difference to your on call, to your support costs and your end user perception.

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