Newsletters

IT organizations everywhere deal with architectural policies, purchase decisions, and evolving technologies and infrastructure strategies. When you really get down to it, all of that serves to support strategic business operations in the most efficient manner possible. It’s about bringing value to the business.

However, lured by the deceptive ease of simply buying more hardware, many IT organizations continue to overprovision as a method of ensuring services levels are met. Intentional overprovisioning is a sign of trouble, a sign of immature capacity planning processes.

Understanding the popularity of overprovisioning
Some reasons for overprovisioning are obvious, others not so much:

	1.	Overprovisioning is easy, as long as you have budget.
	2.	Capacity planning required for accurate provisioning is perceived to be too difficult; staff lacks skills or understanding.
	3.	Tools and data are not available to perform accurate provisioning.
	4.	Relationship between business unit managers and IT is lacking.

Achieving Value
While the idea behind overprovisioning may be to provision now for what the demand may be 5 years into the future, in reality, hardware is refreshed every 2-3 years. Add to that the cost of managing all of those unused resources, the unnecessary complexity, and the inflated application licensing fees due to price structures based on server size. Clearly, there is a dark side to overprovisioning.

The onset of consolidation and virtualization has helped decrease the tendency of organizations to overprovision. Capacity planning tools help IT organizations benchmark server performance and project trends in demand to understand when capacity will become insufficient.

Fortune 100 company NCR used capacity planning software to save nearly $500,000 in unnecessary purchases which would have lead to overprovisioning.

Implement a consolidation strategy
According to a Network World article, the average utilization rate in 2005 was a wasteful 20 percent.

In light of changing business practices, economic demands, and security concerns, many companies are re-evaluating their IT infrastructures. Server consolidation encompasses a range of activities, from physical consolidation and centralization of a company’s IT servers to the integration of data and applications. Achieving the benefits of consolidation means overcoming a number of obstacles, which include the risks of inadequate planning, provisioning and execution.

Creating a consolidation plan
Consolidation has been proven to decrease costs, increase utilization and decrease complexity in the IT environment. Below are five steps to use when planning a consolidation strategy:

• Identify current server utilization and application characteristics to uncover consolidation candidates
• Determine optimal servers/applications for consolidation and develop a plan for consolidation
• Validate consolidation strategy
• Track consolidation performance
• Support ongoing consolidation management