Data Center Consolidation

Data Centers – A Clear but Complex Cost Reduction Target

Data Centers are the single most concentrated, complex and strategic component of the IT environment, and therefore serve as clear targets when IT organizations are looking for ways to cut IT costs, tighten data security, meet regulatory requirements, and improve operational efficiencies.

For many organizations these data centers have evolved organically to meet the needs of different business units in a variety of locations over time or were added via acquisition. The result from a financial perspective is a very heterogeneous collection of geographically distributed computing centers with dramatically different cost structures. In addition, many organizations today are virtualizing the server farms in those data centers, creating larger pools of shared resources, making cost allocation even more complex.

Leveraging IT Cost Transparency to Drive Optimized Data Center Cost Efficiency

The cost structures of a data center, like the applications running within it, are complicated. The true operational costs of a server or application must include not only hardware depreciation and software costs, but also the floor space, power, cooling, network bandwidth and support costs for that particular data center. Furthermore, for a virtualized environment, the costs of the underlying physical infrastructure need to be appropriately allocated to individual virtual machines and their applications.

Apptio’s IT Cost Transparency solution enables an organization to easily model all the unit costs within a data center and IT as a whole, and assign the appropriate allocation to obtain a fully-loaded cost per IT Service or application. In this way, data center managers can understand and analyze the true operational costs and utilization levels of their data centers, including physical and virtual servers, and the impact of various server and data center consolidation scenarios to more effectively:

• Create a ranking of servers or data centers from high to low cost to identify which servers or data centers should be targets for consolidation and which data centers are operating most efficiently.
• Understand how existing data centers compare to each other and how they compare to proposed alternatives such as building a new data center or leasing new collocation space.
• Analyze how overall and unit costs (power, labor, bandwidth and other cost drivers) change as data center density increases through consolidation or server virtualization.

ROI and Ongoing Optimization

After the initial server or data center consolidation is complete, Apptio’s IT Cost Transparency solution also provides a valuable way to monitor the ongoing cost of operations of the new data center portfolio to calculate the ROI on the consolidation project.

The ability to effectively plan for a data center consolidation directly impacts the IT organization’s ability to perform the implementation on time and on budget. Leveraging Apptio’s automated IT Cost Transparency solution will dramatically increase the probability that the right consolidation happens, with a well defined and achievable ROI.

Leveraging IT Cost Transparency to Drive Data Center Consolidation at Motricity

Motricity is the industry's premier provider of mobile content infrastructure services that enable a variety of mobile content downloads and provide the portal, storefront, search, managed web, gateway and messaging functionality for leading carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Alltel.

Growing demand for their services and the recent acquisition of Infospace Mobility, resulted in a complex IT landscape of nine data centers and thousands of servers worldwide with many different costs associated with each service type across customers and locations.

Adopting the Apptio on-demand solution enabled Motricity to easily gain a detailed understanding of the true costs of each infrastructure service by product and customer across their data centers. Combining cost data with utilization data from their monitoring systems Motricity was also able to pinpoint high cost, low utilization target servers for consolidation across their datacenters and track costs and utilization over time to monitor the ROI of their consolidation efforts.

Benefits achieved:

• Rapidly establish visibility into the true costs of servers and IT services across data centers
• Combined cost and utilization data to identify server consolidation targets across data centers
• Track cost and utilization data over time to help quantify the ROI of data center consolidation

To ready the complete case study on Motricity, please visit our customers case studies page.

Getting Started with IT Cost Transparency

In today’s tough economic climate it has become even more important to reduce IT costs and improve operational efficiency. Many companies such as Alaska Airlines, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City and NYK Systems Research Institute are turning to Apptio to optimize cost reduction in IT. To get started today contact us for a Free Demo and on-site Proof of Concept. Or to learn more download our solution whitepaper or one of our analyst whitepapers from our resource library.