Right-Sizing Your IT Infrastructure

Failing to make sure your IT infrastructure is the right size for your business has a negative affect on profitability. Too little capacity and you suffer poor response, low productivity, and lost business. Too much capacity and you unnecessarily increase complexity, decrease manageability, and waste both time and money.

Since many licensing fees are tied to server size, software licensing costs alone can bring significant savings when equipment is accurately sized. 

Whether you are undergoing a hardware refresh, consolidating servers, or purchasing hardware for new application roll-outs, it is extremely valuable to have objective data for determining the right amount of capacity to purchase and the right hardware and software configuration to use to get the most benefit from your IT investment.

One should have the Ability to predict the outcome of potential future scenarios. Starting from a viable baseline from an existing system or from a pilot of a new system, a wide spectrum of what-if scenarios can be quickly evaluated using analytic modeling. Without having to reconfigure a single piece of hardware or software at the server, the following changes can be evaluated:

• Transaction intensity by workload (application, service or business unit)
• Number of users
• Reconfiguration of hardware
• Consolidation of applications running on separate physical servers

The point is Before you rush to outsource, offload and adopt dozens of different point solutions, however, consider this: It is still entirely possible to back yourself into a high-maintenance corner in the on-demand world by relying on a hodge-podge of point applications.

Interoperability still requires customization and maintenance. Whether the IT infrastructure resides in your closet or in the cloud, tying together a laundry list of different products creates massive expense and demands specialized skills -- despite what software vendors will tell you.

So look for "suites" of applications from a few vendors -- or if possible a single vendor -- that come pre-integrated.

Because every CEO's job is to run the business as a unified whole, this discipline to think of your business infrastructure as an integrated suite has to be instilled from the top.

A formal, regimented approach to system sizing will lead to greater predictability, less firefighting, and increased productivity.