Information Technology is integral to most modern businesses, from small one-person businesses using an accounts package and a website, through to complex integrated ecommerce and ERP systems for large enterprises. We all rely on IT, from performing our own jobs to buying food in supermarkets.
Powering this technology-led world are vast data centres filled, wall to wall, with servers. However, our research on datasets from some of our largest customers, companies that are household names, discovered an alarming reality; these data centres are so under-utilised that the facts are incredible.
In our sample set, which we believe to be typical, we found that many data centres are only 2% utilised. At peak.
Not on average, which would be bad enough, but at peak.
One of our clients had 10,500 servers, but the peak workload could be processed using only 44 servers.
Imagine asking your Finance Director for £100m to build a new 20-storey office then only ever using one floor, but fitting out all the other floors with lights, furniture, PCs (with licences), heating, etc.
How did we get here?
Simple: inadequate governance.
When 'IT' meant a large expensive IBM mainframe the cost of every clock cycle was known. Not only did IBM charge you by the processing power you had installed, so did the Independent Software Vendors. Adding one CPU could cost £millions in annual licence fees.
IT was only seen as a cost back then, and this cost had to be justified. Companies with large processing estates, such as banks, would have had 20-50 people just to optimise code and capacity usage.
The move to distributed computing changed that irrevocably. Servers were now cheap.
"It only costs £5,000" or "it's only a cloud server" became the norm.
The reduction of the individual unit cost brought the authorisation level down; as it slipped below the Finance Director's threshold servers began to proliferate. Now many large companies' data centres are full. But full of under-utilised servers. And servers rarely get decommissioned even when nobody is using the application any more. The service lifecycle has no end. Servers are upgraded by their thousand in hardware refresh cycles or, worse, data centre migrations.
- This includes unused servers, because the service lifecycle has no end.
- It includes already under-utilised servers being upgraded to faster servers and become even lower utilised.
It includes like-for-like upgrades on servers that could be consolidated.
Why no consolidation during such upgrades?
Because of lack of governance.
Nobody has overall ownership (or knowledge) of the whole enterprise. Each application team approaches the problem individually and thinks it too complicated, so it gets ignored. And ignoring this problem is costly.
We've calculated that in 2015 the world spent at least $18bn on unnecessary servers with the top 3 manufacturers alone. And that's just hardware costs. Add in power, cooling, licences and maintenance and the Total Cost of Ownership becomes even more frightening.
This wasted cost in isolation is shocking but it spreads to manufacturing, transportation, and maintenance of unneeded hardware along with significant environmental impacts of all that power and cooling. This hardly plays well with the Social Responsibility obligations of corporate boards.
So how do we fix this expensive problem?
Governance; pure and simple.
Yes, it costs money. But its return on investment is significant.
At Capacitas we often help customers reduce this cost with one-off interventions, but it requires a permanent behavioural change to stop the problem rapidly accumulating again afterwards.
This requires:
- suitable monitoring of the server estate
- staff and expertise that is often not present in today’s IT departments
- most importantly: an integrated capacity and performance governance process with authority to force change
If you are concerned about your enterprise's wasted assets then you should investigate it further. We have published our methodology in this whitepaper.
Alternatively, we have developed our diagnostic tooling that can quickly and accurately measure utilisation from your own installed monitoring systems. We can then propose an approach to immediately reduce server counts in a one-off exercise, and a long-term governance solution to ensure this wastage doesn't recur.
Governance is enforcing quality, and as Philip Crosby said quality is free.
So don’t ignore the problem any longer: invest in governance: it is free.
