Bankrolling IT Infrastructure

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Bankrolling IT Infrastructure

8/27/2006

By John Moore

Spending more on technology deployment than on ongoing maintenance and upgrades? Time to even the score and save hard-won dollars overall.

EVERY INVESTMENT in IT infrastructure presents a classic double whammy: An organization has to budget for the initial deployment and maintain funding to keep the technology working. Neither task is easy for university administrators, given funding constraints and plenty of competition for the available dollars. But schools hoping to stretch their budgets as far as possible have some techniques at their disposal. Try these tactics for making every dollar count in such infrastructure areas as storage, wireless, and network servers.

Think Strategically

Looking at the big picture can yield benefits when it comes to IT infrastructure investment. That’s particularly the case with storage, frequently overlooked as an expenditure that should be carefully managed. Organizations often tack on storage as a matter of course whenever they purchase servers. As a result, the storage outlay flies under the investment-management radar.

The University of New Hampshire, however, has devised a storage strategy that involves consolidating storage into a centralized service. Tom Franke, assistant VP and CIO at the school, says the approach “will let us look more comprehensively at our storage needs,” which in turn will help UNH get more out of its infrastructure investment. Server-attached storage, the university’s previous approach, typically limits the full utilization of storage resources. That’s because storage bound to one server can’t be used by other servers. A centralized, sharedstorage service, however, unlocks storage from individual servers and promotes improved utilization. Indeed, Franke cites higher utilization as one of the goals of UNH’s storage strategy.

Due to its distributed nature, server-attached storage also tends to drive up support costs. UNH commissioned GlassHouse Technologies, a storage consultant, to study its storage environment, and discovered that the school’s support costs per unit of storage were “on the expensive side,” says Franke. He hopes that the centralization strategy will help make UNH’s storage infrastructure more efficient, though he notes that the university’s IT group was a fairly lean shop to begin with. How much money UNH will save has yet to be determined; Franke says it will take about a year for the school’s storage vision to be fully realized.

Consider Ease of Deployment

In some cases, the technology itself may free up dollars to invest in its deployment.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges (NY) sought to establish a wireless infrastructure for student and faculty internet and e-mail access. Mike Ruiz, network and systems engineer at HWS, found that many wireless solutions required considerable preparation: site surveys, capacity planning, and user-density forecasting. “There’s a huge up-front time investment,” he says.

Then HWS tested wireless gear from Meru Networks. The technology coordinates across a wireless installation’s access points, thus eliminating the task of making sure access points and channels don’t overlap. By choosing a technology that helped streamline the process, HWS completed the first phase of its wireless rollout in less than half the time originally slotted for it. And, says Ruiz, “we discovered that by not having to do multi-day surveys, we reduced the cost.” As a consequence, he says, the school had more money than anticipated to roll out new locations.