Virtualization

Identifying Targets for Virtualization and Allocating Virtual Costs

Whether its server virtualization, desktop, application, operating system, database or storage, virtualization technologies are taking the IT industry by storm as a way to reduce costs and improve flexibility and provisioning. Recent server virtualization projects have proven 6x to 12x reduction in physical servers and their associated costs (data center real estate, power, cooling and networking). That’s a potential 90% cost savings in infrastructure.

Now that you’ve identified a virtualization project, the problem becomes “How do I analyze the potential cost savings, the ROI and how do I sell that to management?” And after the project is completed, “How do I allocate the cost of the physical servers, the virtualization software and associated facilities to the virtual machines, services and/or desktops?”

Apptio helps customers answer the questions of where to apply virtualization technology for the highest ROI, how much to expect in savings and how to allocate shared virtualized infrastructure to an IT Service or Line of Business (LOB) accurately.

A Case Study: Justifying and Tracking Virtual Server Costs

A Midwest manufacturing firm wanted to consolidate servers using VMware knowing that they should be able to drastically reduce cost and free up data center space. However, they were struggling to accurately quantify how much they were going to save and how they would allocate the cost of physical servers and all their shared infrastructure to virtual servers moving forward.

With Apptio they were able to first create an accurate model of their cost per server fully loaded with network, support, software, administration and facilities costs. Using Apptio’s “What If” modeling capabilities, they then used these costs to create a project proposal model consolidating physical servers and adding virtual machine costs, including changes to physical and virtual support models, to create an accurate picture of the post-project costs. Using Apptio’s custom reports, they can show the two cost models side by side and calculate an ROI using real cost data for project justification efforts.

IT Cost Transparency: An Automated Solution for Tracking Virtualization Costs

Apptio is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that automates the tracking and allocation of IT costs enabling an accurate model of a fully-loaded IT Service cost. Apptio provides a business analytics engine to compare unit cost drivers and utilization levels across services, organizations or geographies to find new areas for virtualization or other cost reduction. To estimate ROI of new IT projects, Apptio has “What If” modeling capabilities to create apples-to-apples comparisons based off of real data. Unlike simple spreadsheets, Apptio has role-based access, time stamping of changes and roll-back change control to track how models, and therefore consolidation projects, have changed over time and roll-back any unwanted changes.

With Apptio, you can:

• Quantify an accurate Total Cost of Ownership for an IT Service, application or product.
• Identify new areas for cost reduction or consolidation
• Consistently allocate physical server, software or other infrastructure costs to virtual servers or LOBs
• Accurately calculate the ROI of new virtualization projects
• Automatically update the model greatly reducing time wasted reporting on IT costs

Getting Started with IT Cost Transparency

As more and more servers, storage and application are becoming virtualized, it is harder and more time consuming to track the cost associated with a service or line of business. Apptio has helped many companies such as Alaska Airlines, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City and NYK Systems Research Institute simplify the tracking of shared services costs and provide the insight to find and successfully propose new cost reduction projects. To get started today contact us for a few demo and on-site Proof of Concept. Or to learn more download our solution whitepaper or one of our customer case studies.