Computer systems have always been
complex. The range of useful work
computers can do is extended by layering complexity on top of the basic
machine. Current “Cloud Computing”
capabilities are no exception.
Regardless of complexity, the costs of systems must be understood and
reported to enable business planning and management.
So what are these perspectives that need to
be understood, reported on and normalized to enable comparison and calculation
of unit costs? The business likes to
look at total costs, irrespective of how their service is provided. They are right to do this – what happens
under the covers to deliver that service shouldn’t be their concern. They just want to know that the service level
they require is being provided and what that costs per business transaction or
process.
On the systems side, it used to be
relatively simple. Internal systems were
the norm. We had to account for costs of
hardware, software, floor space, power, air conditioning, ancillary costs such
as insurance and of course, staff costs.
As applications and services became more interlinked and disparate in
implementation, it became ever harder to compare and calculate costs for a
particular service delivered to users.
Outsourcing and now the Cloud have added
yet more levels of complexity. On one
level it seems simple: we pay a cost for an outsourced provision (application,
hardware, complete data center or whatever).
In practice it becomes ever more difficult to isolate costs. Service provision from outside our
organization is often offered at different tiers of quality (Gold, Silver,
Bronze etc). These have different
service levels, and different levels of provision, for example base units of
provision and overage costs that vary and make direct comparison awkward.
Increasingly the model is to mix all of
these modes of service provision, for example hybrid Cloud implementations
featuring internal and external Cloud provision plus internal services all combined
to deliver what the user needs.
Each facet of systems use can be monitored
and accounted for in terms of resource utilization, and ultimately, dollar
costs. However, overly detailed data
quickly adds volume and cost, becomes unwieldy, and delays analysis and
reporting while overly simplified data weakens analysis and adversely impacts the
quality of decision support. The points
of monitor and level of detail for data to be collected is driven by considerations
of trade-offs between cost, utility, and performance and are highly detailed
and dynamic. Frequently, though, data
collection is minimalized and aggregated to a level which obscures the level of
detail needed to make some decisions.
For example, cpu metrics aggregated to 5 minute periods and suitable for
capacity planning are not very useful to understand cpu resource consumption
for individual transactions, a performance engineering concern.
A distinction perhaps needs to be made
between different types of costs. We
might need to move towards calculating regular on-going fixed costs for users,
supplemented by variable costs based on changing circumstances. To my mind this is a little like having the
running costs of your car covered by a general agreement (free servicing for 3
years) with those qualifying criteria any insurance business likes to slip in
(assumes no more than 20,000 miles per year average motoring, standard personal
use, does not include consumables such as tires, wiper blades). If we go outside the qualifying criteria, we have
to pay for individual issues to be fixed.
Cloud in particular lends itself to costing IT services based on a fixed
charge plus variable costs dependent on usage.
Going back to those complex systems - we
need to ensure we normalize our view of services across this complex modern IT
model, a fancy way of saying we must compare apples with apples. The key is being able to define a transaction
from a business perspective and relate it to the IT processing that underlies
that definition.
Application Transaction
Management tools such as the Sharepath software distributed by Metron enable
you to get this transaction visibility across diverse infrastructures, internal
and external.
Capacity Management data
capture and integration tools like Metron’s Athene then allow you to relate
underpinning resource metrics to those transactions, at least for systems where
you are able or allowed to measure those resources.
This brings us to a last key point about
external providers, outsourcers or Cloud providers. You need to ensure that they provide you with
that resource level data for their systems or the ability for you to access
your own systems and get that data. Once
you have the numbers, calculating costs per transaction is just math. Without the numbers, you can’t calculate the
cost.
Business increasingly wants to see the
costs of their services, so make sure you demand access to the information you need from your
suppliers, as well as from your own organization. Then you can put together a
comprehensive and realistic view of costs for services in today’s multi-tiered
internal and external application world.
GE Guentzel
Consultanthttp://www.metron-athene.com/
