Stretching your network budget: Consolidate

By Neal Weinberg
Network World, 08/16/99

Raymond Neff, vice president of IS at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, has slashed about a million dollars from his $21 million operating budget by analyzing his ongoing expenses, challenging his primary vendor and consolidating 80 servers into an existing mainframe and two support servers.

Before Neff went on his cost-cutting binge, the university had a standard setup: Large administrative and academic departments each had their own NetWare servers, while smaller departments shared a server. The servers provided backup storage of desktop files and controlled printing functions.

There were 15 network administrators keeping the 80 servers humming and the 6,000 faculty members and administrators happy. Neff says there was just one problem: "It was ruinously expensive.''

He calculated that maintenance costs were $250 per end user, per year. Neff decided that something had to change, and it was up to his primary vendor to come up with a solution.

"I challenged IBM to propose something where we could get some degree of consolidation,'' Neff says. IBM responded with a plan to store the files from those 6,000 desktops on an existing mainframe, rather than on the distributed servers. "The concept is that you're taking data files off the desktop systems and storing them for backup purposes and archival purposes on the mainframe,'' Neff says.

Newer files are queued on disks and older files are moved onto tape. If an end user requests a file, the system tracks down what disk or tape the file is on, makes a copy and sends it to the desktop, Neff says. And that's all done automatically through a robotic tape library system that's also a budget stretcher.

The bottom line: Through a combination of attrition and network managers who were retrained and promoted to other jobs, Neff was able to eliminate all but two net administrator positions and reduce his operating cost per end user from $250 to $40.

The 80 small servers have been reused or recycled. End users may have to wait up to 5 minutes for a print job, but they enjoy the reliability of the system and the peace of mind from knowing their files are safely backed up.

Neff says consolidation is the way to go: "We see it as a tremendous labor savings. There are less things to break. And you run yourself ragged keeping 80 little boxes going.''

Similarly, Stephen King's server consolidation tale is anything but a horror story. King, enterprise integration manager at Convergys in Cincinnati, bought one Sun Enterprise10000 server, a data center box that scales to 64 processors. He used the Enterprise10000 to replace eight large NCR Unix servers that were running the company's main call center application and 13 Sun servers that were running Oracle applications.

King scrapped the NCR servers, thereby saving the more than $300,000 he was paying NCR per year for maintenance. And he was able to cut one Unix administrator position, resulting in an additional $100,000 in savings. By redeploying the Sun servers, King avoided having to buy additional servers to accommodate growth, and he even saves $14,000 per year in floor space and power by having a single box instead of 21 separate machines.

Of course, King did invest about $1.5 million in the new Enterprise10000 server and associated peripherals. But he figures the cost savings plus the cost avoidance pretty much equal his expenditures. The final twist is that the additional capacity from the new server has easily handled the growth of the company's call center from 600 to 1,200 agents. The way King tells the tale: "The consolidation paid for me to double my capacity.''

Joe Middleton is putting up some Hall of Fame numbers as vice president of system support at Bassett Healthcare, which has 21 health centers in upstate New York. At one time, Bassett had seven call centers and four separate networks, not to mention just about every LAN protocol under the sun. Network management costs were spiraling out of control, rising more than 12% per year.

Then Middleton stepped up to the plate. He consolidated the seven call centers into one facility in Cooperstown, N.Y., and consolidated the voice, data, video and facilities management networks into a single private frame relay network and standardized on IP.

Switching from 37 56K bit/sec leased lines to frame relay for data traffic was a key money saver. Creating a single call center allowed Middleton to reap significant savings in personnel costs and phone charges. And by running voice from his rural outposts over frame relay links, he is avoiding the high inter-local access and transport area rates he was paying to small private phone companies.

He estimates his total savings on voice and data at more than $600,000 per year - and he's not done. The next step is the leap from frame relay to a private ATM network. Middleton anticipates that moving from multiple T-1 frame relay links to a single ATM OC-3 will result in lower maintenance costs, improve operating efficiency and allow new video-based telemedicine applications that will save on travel costs.

More tips:

Standardize
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Negotiate
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Delegate
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Stretching your network budget: Consolidate

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