When do Sweated Assets become Sweaty Liabilities?

Added by Mark Sweeney, about 1 month ago.

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Recently I have been able to attend a couple of "Green" IT events, one as a presenter and the other on a "Question Time" type panel, and one thing has struck me, namely times have changed but attitudes haven't. Let me elaborate. The Global Credit Crunch and High Energy Prices present two new game changing challenges on top of the traditional business and technology challenges. Times are tough, and more than likely going to get tougher as the consequences of the Credit Crunch start to work their way through the economy, into lower sales and next year's budgets. The natural temptation is to "batten down the hatches", sweat our assets and try to get through these rocky times as best we can. Sound common sense or frozen by fear?

The problem with sweating assets is that our existing infrastructure and ICT generally just keeps the business ticking over. Often such "assets" have been accumulated in an ad hoc way which doesn't encourage innovation, re-use or change.

The consideration point is three years. Assets greater than three years old typically:

Have a greater operational cost than remaining residual capital cost
Were not designed with power saving or other environmental considerations as a priority
Have been superseded by at least one generation of technology
Do not deliver optimal performance per kilowatt

In the case of servers, if you have a server estate of 500 or more physical servers and 60% are more than 3 years old, just on maintenance and reduced footprint alone we would estimate per annual savings of around £1m and a payback period of around 6 months. With disks, 1TB of useable, protected disk capacity would have required between 10 to 20 146GB disks. Now the same space can be provided with a pair of 1TB disks. So we can now provision larger capacity, smaller footprint solutions for less cost than just "sweating" the existing assets.

However the real benefit from smaller footprints is the options which become available around Disaster Recovery. We all know stories of Disaster Recovery disasters and consequences of "When DR goes bad". Small footprint data centres not only reduce the economics of DR, but more importantly make DR more consistent and increase the likelihood of success. It takes DR out of the realms of the uncertain and into the world of routine, administrative and managed. When you add up the current server, storage and DR costs and compare to the cost of moving to a resilient, small footprint data centre the case is justifiable. When you add the additional benefits to the business of lower operating costs, greater flexibility, and a working, proven DR capability the case becomes more than compelling.

However, the benefits of reduced footprint data centre, operational costs, reduced power consumption, heat output with lower cooling costs, the flexibility to re-use assets, and a cost-effective working DR, can not be realized if we stick with the same old sweating assets. The problem never gets better, only worse and those sweated assets become sweaty liabilities.