The growing demand for digital transformation drives a worldwide server market growth. As the costs of running a large, distributed infrastructure grow, so does the awareness of the importance of focusing on server capacity and performance management.
Many installations have looked to cloud approaches such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where the customer can easily adjust capacity to the actual needs. In reality, cloud solutions have often only made the problem worse. The driving force behind cloud is agility – additional cloud capacity can be acquired with the click of a mouse. The power to create servers and add capacity can be widely delegated within the organization, often outside the control of the IT organisation. This flexibility is generally used to create new servers or provide under-configured servers more capacity.
SMT Data’s experience shows that in a typical large IT installation, more than half of the servers are either idle or severely underutilized. While there can be good reasons for this, the rightsizing potential is significant and can lead to both large cost reductions and cost avoidance.
In a typical large IT installation, more than half of the servers are either idle or severely underutilized.
Some servers have much more capacity than they need to be able to run their workload smoothly. Some of them are not doing any useful work at all but have simply been forgotten and never decommissioned.
Identifying the low hanging fruit – the expensive servers with low utilization – and rightsizing these servers typically results in savings of 10-30% – equating to millions of euros for a large IT installation.
Reducing the capacity of over-configured servers or stopping servers that get launched and forgotten, requires a concentrated effort based on an understanding of where there is excess or idle capacity.
ITBI for Servers makes it possible to obtain a total overview of your server infrastructure by collecting capacity- and performance-management data, no matter what the underlying platforms are (On-premise / Outsourced / Cloud – physical or virtual) and independent of operating system (Windows, Linux, z/Linux).
ITBI for Servers is an advanced business intelligence analytics tool that allows customers to analyse and understand the data in order to reduce capacity related costs, improve performance and improve availability, for example by identifying rightsizing potential.
Ongoing data collection with ITBI for Servers, in conjunction with our Managed Service helps you avoiding over-configuration and helps you in getting Cloud-ready.
Our expert consultants can help you carry out a server rightsizing on your distributed platform.
Additional advantages that we typically see with this important exercise are:
Getting a better overview of what you have, thereby improving the accurateness of your CMBD.
Avoiding costs by optimizing purchase at hardware refreshes.
Optimizing the hypervisor utilization.
Saving costs on your software licenses (e.g. SQL server licenses).