As a software supplier, my focus is on capacity management (CM)software and justifying that it offers a quick enough return on investment. But many of the points I cover are equally applicable to justifying the discipline itself, irrespective of any software considerations.
So how can capacity management provide savings or cost benefits?
Here are the areas of potential savings I offered last time, with some additional thoughts:· Less outage due to capacity issues
Systems sometimes fail completely due to capacity issues, for example fatal contention caused by very high utilization. Downtime like this costs organizations money, just consider how much business is lost when a web site selling goods direct to the public is down. CM can help prevent some of this downtime. Find out what value your business puts on this downtime and estimate or measure how much CM activity reduces it. This is often the largest financial saving from CM as the value of downtime to many businesses is so high.
· Less time when service levels are poor
An area often overlooked by many people when justifying CM. It’s easy to see, perhaps even obtain, a figure for downtime. It’s much harder to get a financial value for the times when a system is still available, just running slower than is desirable, perhaps best called slowtime. For example, the web site might be available, but visitors quit and go to a competitor’s site because response times are poor. You need to think about slowtime relative to downtime, for example, if downtime costs your business $1m per hour, perhaps slowtime costs 10% of this?
· More productive capacity management staff
Usually a software related saving, but it could also be the benefit derived from better training or having external expert consulting. With the right software tools or advice to support them, your CM team can do more work. This can be hard to put a financial value against: what is the monetary value of the work you are not currently getting round to doing? What value could your labour bring your business if you had more time available? Usually this gets expressed as savings in salary, for example, by buying a product you need one less person in the CM team. However, people very rarely lose their job as a result of bringing in a new or better CM product. Their wages continue to get paid and they do more or different work.
· Fewer performance and capacity crises needing fixing
CM software or better CM processes benefit those outside the CM team as well. Done well, CM reduces crises caused by capacity issues. This means fewer ‘war rooms’ are needed, bringing teams together to respond to those crises. Again, this is not a direct cost saving as typically no one loses their job, they just get more time to do other work that should add value to the business. The easiest way to put a value on this is to view it as savings in wages equivalent to the percentage of their time saved, as for the CM team above.
· Deferring hardware purchase, including things such as accelerating virtualization
This is another area that vies for the title of greatest cost saving due to CM. Good CM means you can defer buying hardware. This could be buying fewer servers than anticipated or increasing virtualization density leading to fewer purchases and extends to server, disk, network kit and all aspects of hardware. Further saving accrues from the value of money over time. If you delay buying a server for six months, you will get more server power for your money (or the same power for less money) in three months’ time from now. This will hold true as long as price/performance of hardware keep increasing over time and there is no sign of Moore’s Law stopping yet. When considering hardware savings, remember to include maintenance, environmental (power,etc) and labour costs (installation and support) that would have been incurred had you bought that extra hardware.
· Consolidating capacity management software products
CM often starts out being done by project teams when new technology is introduced. Over time this means many larger organizations have implemented point solutions for CM for mainframe, distributed and virtual servers. Replacing these with one product can offer significant savings on software licenses and on-going maintenance.
On Friday I’ll consider the above with respect to whether or not they are ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ savings, including defining what I mean by ‘hard’ and ‘soft’!
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer
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