| Even the rosiest of economic predictions seem to be | | | | recurring costs. You will sacrifice a measure of fault |
| hyping us into a complete state of panic. Fortunately, | | | | tolerance and you will force your remaining servers |
| my brothers and sisters in the Information | | | | to work harder. However, tough times call for tough |
| Technology field have survived plenty of tumultuous | | | | measures and if you are forced to tighten your |
| times. I offer you two surefire ideas to help reduce | | | | budgets yet again, this is a useful tactic to employ. |
| costs: server consolidation and expense quantification. | | | | Quantify |
| Consolidation | | | | There are too many business processes, |
| Depending on your server architecture, you may | | | | departments and personnel that serve no real |
| have several redundant servers. Unfortunately, these | | | | purpose. Perhaps they were originally created to |
| devices also incur costs even after their initial | | | | serve some arcane purpose that is no longer required |
| purchase. By eliminating these costs you can further | | | | but no one has thought to "close the loop" and |
| tighten the IT belt. Just remember, there are | | | | repurpose them. |
| redundancy trade-offs but you can't have everything. | | | | I remember one client who had a Records |
| Hard times call for hard measures. | | | | Department with three very lovely ladies, none of |
| Costs of Servers | | | | whom could tell you what their job required. Basically |
| | | | they came to work every day and filled the day |
| 1. Electrical: not just the power they use to keep | | | | chatting or browsing the internet. They were always |
| themselves running but also the additional cooling | | | | eager to help me with whatever research projects or |
| demand from server heat output. While this is | | | | other tasks needed doing, but it amazed me how |
| negligible on a per unit basis, if you have multiple | | | | they always had free time to help. Within a few |
| redundant systems, the totals can escalate rapidly. | | | | weeks time, I had the company close the Records |
| 2. Labor: no matter how many automated services | | | | Department and transfer all three ladies into |
| you have running, it is always wise to have a human | | | | departments where there was real work to be done. |
| check over all your servers periodically to ensure | | | | Hard times are upon us, we must quantify every |
| proper working order. More servers means more | | | | expenditure. That means you must create a solid |
| human time that could be spent on more profitable | | | | business case for every expense. |
| work. | | | | - Does it make sense? |
| 3. Licenses: all your servers need software licenses | | | | - Is it necessary? |
| and these add to total costs of the device. | | | | - What functions are performed for the cost? |
| 4. Hardware: obviously the server equipment itself | | | | - Can it be done cheaper? |
| costs something and you will need to upgrade | | | | - Can it be done better by someone else? |
| replace the device eventually. | | | | - Can we outsource it? |
| By consolidating your servers and eliminating | | | | And, if you cannot quantify the benefits of the |
| redundancy you will save on capital, opportunity and | | | | expense, then it should be cut. Period. |