Data Center Analysis

As businesses continue to expand through either continued growth of their existing business or through mergers and/or acquisitions, the IT department also continues to expand by adding or inheriting additional servers and applications. In many cases, not much thought is put into the big picture, which is evaluating the costs and growth of the data center to determine the best approach in cost effectively managing the software as well as the hardware.

HRG believes that in many cases data centers can save considerable amounts of money if they intelligently grow their data centers.

HRG can work with clients to determine their current costs for running their data center. This includes the cost and maintenance of software and hardware, cost of utilities, cost of manpower, cost of floor space, and cost of future growth. With this information, HRG can determine what alternatives are available to reduce costs of the data center.

From the hardware perspective, consolidation, virtualization, and migration to other platforms can be addressed and analyzed. For software, there are several options that can be addressed, re-write the application, re-engineer the application, rehost the application, move to a packaged application, or a combination of the options. Networking will be addressed to determine the most appropriate and cost-effective approach. Outsourcing some or all of the functions of the data center will also be addressed if reasonable.

As an example, consider a client that has all of the company’s applications running on an IBM mainframe. After determining the total cost of running the data center, HRG would look into the available technologies that could be used to reduce the cost of the data center. One solution could be to migrate some or all of the applications off the mainframe to an open systems environment where the software costs and maintenance costs are considerably less. This may require a DB2 database to be migrated to UDB or Oracle on a Linux or Unix operating system running on Intel or AMD hardware. VSAM datasets may also have to be migrated to UDB or Oracle and the associated applications re-engineered. The applications may be migrated directly if the same environment exists in the open systems environment. If the application was written in assembler, it may be easier to migrate to a packaged application like SAP or Peoplesoft and throw the assembler code away. Other options may require the application to be re-written, say from assembler to Cobol or Java. Again, combinations of the options can be addressed since every client site is different.

Each application and its possible solutions will be evaluated along with the costs involved in either re-writing the application, moving to a packaged application, or possibly rehosting the application to another environment.

All hardware and associated components will also be addressed to determine their costs and best ways to grow the data center, either organically or by consolidating to existing or larger platforms. With the advent of virtualization, maintenance and manpower, costs can be drastically reduced.

Migrating and/or moving to another environment usually involve professional services. In many cases, companies can save considerable costs in this area if they participate in the professional services engagement. The services that would be most cost effective to retain in-house will be addressed and documented.

Results of the Study

HRG will generate a document depicting the current costs of running the data center. It will also describe cost saving suggestions on how to improve the data center along with the potential cost savings that each change will bring. In many cases, there will be more than one suggestion on how to change the data center to achieve cost savings. The client must choose the one that best fits the business needs of the company. It’s also possible that the changes can be planned out across many months to spread out the costs.

Along with describing the cost savings, HRG will also determine the ROI for each change so the client can budget and schedule accordingly.

Conclusions

HRG believes that operations and costs associated with a data center should be analyzed periodically to determine if there are new technologies that can help reduce the costs in running the data center. In many cases, the cost-effective changes can be planned out over numerous months in order to coincide with budget requests.