Optimizing The Branch Part 3: Three Models For Consolidation

I've put together another video blog this time getting into the detail on the various models I see for branch office server and infrastructure consolidation, based on the findings of my recent TechRadar. 

Forrester IT Operations Blog Branch Office Consolidation

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What Do Green IT, The Economic Crisis, And Best Selling Author, Thomas Friedman, All Have In Common? Poor Accounting.

Consider the following questions posed by Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, and more recently, Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America:

“Was it an accident that Citibank, Iceland’s banks, and the ice banks of Antarctica all melted at the same time?”

“Was it an accident that Bear Sterns and the polar bears both faced extinction at the same time?”

In Friedman’s eyes, no, the recent economic and environmental woes are not accidental or coincidental. He explains that what the “great recession represents, if that what we can call this economic moment, is that both the market and Mother Nature hit wall at same time.” How? Because, according to Friedman, we’ve been using the same accounting system in both worlds that has massively under-priced risk, privatized gains, and socialized losses:

• In the financial world, credit default swaps were sold without having adequate collateral behind them, gains were privatized to the financial institutions that sold them, and losses were socialized onto tax payers when the credits actually defaulted.


• In nature, we’ve under-priced the risk of rising CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, privatized the gains from emitting carbon to the institutions that emitted them, and socialized the losses by “charging them all on our kids Visa cards” (i.e. negatively impacting the world for generations to come).

Check out Friedman’s recent interview on his upcoming revision to “Hot, Flat And Crowded” with environmental news and commentary hub, Grist.org:

What should IT leadership takeaway from this?

In short, connect Friedman’s notion of a poor accounting system — that has caused financial and environment woes — to how you account for your own IT.

In a time when wringing out every unnecessary cost counts more than ever, the majority of us are still guilty of not accounting for IT’s true cost of ownership. According to Forrester’s findings, only 4% of North American and European firms pay for the energy-related operating expenses of IT, not to mention the energy-related carbon emissions. And as a result, opportunities for cost- and carbon-thrifty behavior are being overlooked. While the financial benefits might flow to someone else’s bottom-line (e.g. facilities, real estate), your overall organization will profit.

Viewing your IT through a “green” lens can help expose many of these hidden costs — financial and environment — that IT incurs but are paid for by someone else. IT leadership should take advantage of the challenging economic environment to employ guerrilla-style cost-savings tactics today that will lay the groundwork for a culture of responsibility to eliminate unnecessary spend into the future.

To help IT leadership get off on the right foot, my recent research — No Capex, No Problem: Eight "Guerrilla" Tactics To Reduce Facilities Costs Without Capital Investment — highlights a number of low-cost tactics to reduce the financial and environmental impacts of operating IT. Here is a sampling of a few of these tactics:

• Power down idle but energy-drawing PCs and monitors. The problem: In short, idle computing wastes money. This is when PCs and monitors are drawing energy but no useful work is being performed, such as nights, weekends, holidays, and workday breaks. Assuming a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday, five days a week, an unmanaged PC will spend just more than 75% of its time in this idle, energy-wasting state. And the energy costs add up. Consider an organization with 2,500 desktop PCs, each drawing 89 watts, and 2,500 monitors, each drawing 30 watts. With zero power management, Forrester estimates that this will cost approximately $246,537 per year. But by instituting PC power management policies, such as putting monitors into standby after 15 minutes and PCs into hibernate after 45 minutes, this organization can save $177,357 per year. Washington Mutual, General Electric, and Dell boast savings of $3 million, $2.5 million, and $1.8 million per year, respectively, by simply turning off their PCs when not in use.


• Enforce duplex printing. The associated costs of printing — including equipment, ink, copying, printing, faxing, postage, storage, disposal, and recycling — have been estimated to be as high as 31 times the cost of the paper itself. And despite the introduction of technologies to encourage the "paperless" office, demand for office copy and printing paper has increased. For example, it's estimated that the introduction of email into the office environment has increased paper consumption by 40%.


• Optimize temperature and humidity in the data center. According to the industry consortium The Green Grid, only 30% of a typical data center's energy consumption goes to powering its IT equipment, with the lion's share going to chillers (33%), computer room air conditioners (CRAC) (9%), and humidifiers (3%). And in many cases, these environmental systems are not optimized. Cooling is a prime example, with most data centers being too cold — operating cold aisles at 65° to 68°F (18° to 20°C) — even though manufacturers of IT equipment have set the allowable high-end temperature at 80.6°F (27°C).

By Doug Washburn
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European Outlook for 2009 - Ethernet Services & Unified Communications

I recently published two documents on the outlook for Ethernet services and unified communications in Europe for 2009. I wanted to take this opportunity to call out several important takeaways from these documents:

The adoption of carrier Ethernet services in Europe will accelerate rapidly in 2009, driven by the low cost per bit, simplicity, and flexibility of these services. Service provider MPLS traffic and revenues will also grow in 2009, but will be outpaced by Ethernet traffic and revenue growth. Most providers' infrastructure will continue to offer legacy Ethernet services delivered over SDH/SONET networks while demand persists, but these legacy services will eventually be entirely replaced by VPLS-based services.

What does this mean for I&O professionals? Our clients tell us that they are moving to VPLS-based E-LAN services because any-to-any Ethernet networks are easy to configure and manage and the costs are lower than equivalent MPLS VPNs. They also don’t need any additional expertise in the complexities of IP routing like autonomous systems, border gateway protocols, and open shortest path first. All they need is Ethernet expertise -- which they need anyway in order to LAN. VPLS technology also enables users to deploy hub-and-spoke networks today and then to migrate them to any-to-any topologies when it suits them. You should look at service providers that:

• Can meet your plans to use VPLS-based services.

• Can support your SDH point-to-point circuits requirements.

• Offer hybrid networks or have firm plans for them.

For more detailed information on this topic, read The Recession Will Accelerate European Ethernet Services Adoption!

With the recession upon us, IT spending forecasts for Europe have been revised down significantly. To minimize cash outlay, and to leverage service providers' and systems integrators' professional services expertise, we suggest that firms take a fresh look at rapidly maturing managed and hosted UC services. However, Forrester recommends that companies always start by quantifying the potential savings from UC with a business case, and then as a second step consider the use of managed and hosted UC services to reduce capital expenditure (capex) and to simplify UC deployments.

UC is a core enabling technology to help enterprises reduce costs, improve productivity, transform business processes, and innovate -- all of which will improve competitiveness. Although some firms are delaying UC projects or slowing down rollout, many believe that UC is key to their future success and are sticking with their plans. Forrester suggests that as part of their review of 2009 plans, infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams should:

• Ensure that their firm makes UC part of its strategic IT plans.

• Consider buying UC as a managed service.

• Look at buying UC as a hosted service.

• Don't wait until OCS can do everything.

For more detailed information on this topic, read The 2009 Outlook For Unified Communications In Europe!

By Phil Sayer

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Planning to Upgrade Your IVR? Consider the Choices Between Premise Based and Network Based Solutions.

According to the recent Forrester Enterprise And SMB Networks And Telecommunications Survey, North America And Europe, Q1 2009, 32% of the 279 network and telecommunications managers surveyed indicated they planned to upgrade their IVR in the next 12 months. Before a decision is made, companies need to consider their options for upgrading their IVR and compare the differences between premise based and network based voice portals. Voice portals are standard based platforms that support multiple speech or touch tone applications. Forrester’s survey indicates 22% of companies plan to add speech applications this year to improve automation of customer transactions and provide better customer service.

Look For the Solution That Best Fits Your Business

Network based services provide a means to support advanced applications from a carrier’s network. The benefits of network based services are flexible OPEX pricing and faster time to deploy new services. Forrester’s Wave on network based IVR/voice portals provides an in-depth look at major vendors offering these services and insight into their value added solutions. Premise based solutions also support advanced VXML speech applications on native-SIP platforms. These standards-based platforms support innovative multimodal applications and provide Web service for integration with third-party cloud services. Organizations that want greater control over their application find premise based solutions better suited for their business. Forrester’s Wave on premise based IVR/voice portals has a new line up leading vendors in this area.

By Elizabeth Herrell

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Your Thoughts: How Mature Are Cloud Computing Services?

Enterprise IT infrastructure & operations professionals have many cloud computing technologies to choose from today, and new solutions seem to appear all the time. What are all these technologies? How do you categorize them? Which are mature and which need a lot of work?

Forrester is kicking off a TechRadar on the topic and wants your input. A Forrester TechRadar attempts to provide clarity about the types of technologies in a given category and plot their maturity today and the pace at which it is improving, as well as the level of business value this type of technology will bring to enterprise IT.

Forrester defines cloud computing as: a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via the Internet in a pay-per-use and self-service way. As a starting point, we have excluded Software as a Service (as Liz Herbert did a great TechRadar on SaaS already) and have carved up the rest of the cloud services into the technology categories below. Do we have them right? Are we missing any? If you have experience with any of the products in these categories (or others we didn’t mention) we want to hear your thoughts about them. How ready do you think these services are for enterprise consumption? Are they maturing quickly or is this area a wait and see?

Drop us a comment below or contact me directly at jstaten@forrester.com or on Twitter at Staten7. And thanks for your contributions to Forrester research.

Cloud computing technologies to be included in this report are:

Technology category	Subcategory	Examples (not exhaustive)
1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms		Amazon Web Services EC2, The Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid
2. Software Platform-as-a-Service		Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Force.com
3. Cloud Infrastructure Services		Infrastructure IT services delivered from the cloud
	3a. Storage-as-a-Service	Nirvanix, Amazon S3
	3b. Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service	SunGard Virtual Server Replication
	3c. Backup-as-a-Service	Iron Mountain LiveVault, i365 Evault, IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services
4. Cloud Application Services		Application services delivered from the cloud
	4a. Database-as-a-Service	Google BigTable, Amazon SimpleDB, MS SQL Data Services
	4b. Cloud billing services	Google Payment, Amazon DevPay, Zuora Zcommerce
	4c. Integration-as-a-Service	Amazon Simple Queuing Service, Boomi, CastIron, Informatica, Linxster, Online MQ, OpSource Connect, Pervasive
	4d. Business Process Management-as-a-Service	Appian Anywhere, Intensil, Skemma
5. Cloud Management Software		Appistry, CloudSwitch, Elastra, RightScale
6. Cloud Labs		Citrix C3 Lab, Electric Cloud, SkyTap, Surgient Cloud
7. Desktop-as-a-Service		Desktone, MokaFive, Simtone, ThinkGrid

By James Staten

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Green Storage Has Limited ROI, But Supports Overall Efficiency

I care deeply about the environment, certainly more than I care personally about money, so it pains me to say that in most cases, making storage decisions based on power expenditure alone is not rational behavior. The world is driven by economics, and the stark reality is that the cost of power is only a drop in the bucket compared to the amount organizations spend on acquiring and managing their enterprise storage systems. Maybe someday a consumption tax or cap and trade system will tip the balance towards more responsible consumption of non-renewable resources, but in the meantime, the pricing of power (especially in the US) doesn’t give much economic incentive for good behavior. In fact, according to a report Forrester published recently, the amount of money typically spent on electricity to power and cool a TB of storage is only about 1% of the cost of buying that TB of storage (or about 4% of the annualized cost of buying that storage given that you only have to buy the TB once every 3-5 years but you power it every year). So, unfortunately for the environment, power cost itself doesn’t provide a very strong incentive for storage efficiency.

Fortunately though, the things that enterprises can do to reduce their power consumption costs are often the exact same things they can do to reduce the capital and operating expenses of their overall storage environment. Focusing on improving utilization (measured as the quantity of data written divided by the quantity of storage on hand) and increased usage of dense drives are the most straightforward and effective ways to reduce hardware acquisition costs as well as power consumption. There are many ways to achieve these objectives such as thin provisioning, reporting and reclamation to improve utilization, and tiering or wide striping to enable more use of dense drives. Whatever the motivation — economic, altruistic, or a combination of both — organizations that put significant focus on their utilization and dense drive ratios are likely to spend less money and be greener at the same time. And that’s good for everybody.

By Andrew Reichman

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IBM's CloudBurst Is A Credible Step Forward

About six months ago in this blog I accused IBM of “cloud-washing” its solutions and services when it launched its Project Blue Cloud marketing campaign. Its aim with this effort was to lure customer conversations about cloud computing in its direction so it could learn what enterprises wanted from this new technology. IBM has had some legitimate cloud deployments and proofs of concept since then, but just this week announced the first product fruits of that labor.

Under the banner of IBM Smart Business Services the company announced a hosted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that can be accessed multitenant, like a public cloud and CloudBurst, an IaaS in a box based on BladeCenter. All the elements of an IaaS implementation – the self-service portal, automated workload deployment and distribution, virtualization software, servers, networking, and storage are pre-packaged and tested and can be implemented in a single effort. While some degree of customization is inevitable, you can’t get up and running with an IBM internal cloud much easier than this. By the way, HP has a similar offering called Blade System Matrix.

What’s missing from these solutions today, however, is the capability that justifies IBM’s name for the product – the ability to extend this internal cloud to a hosted or public cloud resource when needed; a technique known as cloud bursting. Few enterprises can justify an internal cloud composed of thousands of servers, so when your developers need that kind of capacity, the best answer is to bridge the internal cloud to a public or hosted cloud offering. IBM will initially provide bursting to its own cloud service but plans to extend this capability to its service provider partners.

Forrester thinks enterprise interest in solutions that cloud burst is a safe assumption but a bit ahead of its time, as most enterprises aren’t yet in a position to easily leverage these cloud options.  This is why IBM’s strategy of focusing on internal cloud first is a smart one.

By James Staten

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