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Companies looking to cut their IT costs need to look beyond initial
outlays and take a hard look at their support costs.
CIOs and administrators, for instance, might not notice how much it costs
to support remote workers. Sending a technician to an offsite location
can get expensive, as can dealing with a remote worker repeatedly over
the phone or having equipment shipped back and forth between the remote
and centralized office. Desktop emulators and remote diagnostic tools
help, but don’t eliminate the problem.
One approach to reducing support is to switch to network-centric
computing. Rather than providing end users with complete workstations,
give them thin client devices.
From a hardware viewpoint, this eliminates all the disk drives sitting
under employees’ desks and moves them into the data center. You no longer
have to continually deploy all the software patches and virus signature
updates, run backups and virus scans or defragment the drives.
So far, this idea hasn’t really caught on, though, there have been some
major deployments. Hitachi Ltd., for example, announced this past May
that it was moving 16,000 of its employees to thin clients as a means of
improving security.
The overall market for thin clients, however, according to IDC, an
industry analyst firm based in Framingham, Mass., is only about 3 percent
of the number of standard corporate workstations.
Eliminating Server Costs
Even without switching to thin clients, companies still can reduce their
remote support load by eliminating local file and print servers.
Bergen, the second largest city in Norway, took this very same approach.
While IT administrators for the city still use fat clients for its 50,000
users, they have replaced 100 servers in its schools with a set of blade
servers in the data center.
”The process has been very smooth, even better than we expected,” says
Chief Technology Officer Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal.
The City of Bergen has a population of 250,000. The city’s IT staff
services municipal government employees, eGov applications for its
citizens and an educational network for 32,000 students and 4,000
teachers. It also supports 10,500 PCs — 7,000 for city employees and
3,500 for students. The city network links 450 locations — 125 of them
via 100Mbps or 1Gbps fibre, and the rest via 1Mbps to 2Mbps ADSL
connections. It also hosts services for some of the smaller communities
in the region that don’t have their own IT departments.
The educational network had at least one file/print/communications server
running Windows NT at each of the city’s 100 schools, and a central team
of server specialists visited any location experiencing server problems
— a frequent occurrence. Designed and implemented in 1996, the aging
network simply became too expensive to maintain.
”Disk, fan and power supply failures were common and system corruption
by viruses and other problems meant engineers were faced with an
ever-increasing workload,” says Tuftedal. ”We had an amazing range of
software versions and disk images, and a constant demand for human
intervention.”
Rather than install new hardware on the same architecture, the city
seized the opportunity to design something better. Tuftedal said he had
four goals for the project: reducing high server costs caused by the high
number of decentralized servers; improve security; simplify
administration of clients and servers; and improve the user environment.
The job involved more than just replacing the servers, though. The city
also decided to migrate to a Linux operating system.
”The city parliament decided in 2001 to consider using Linux and open
source software for all new projects,” Tuftedal explains. ”We have
found Linux to be viable as an enterprise operating system in every
way.”
The particular advantages, he says, are greater freedom of choice, lower
costs because of vendor independence and ease of management.
”It has a multi-user architecture from top to bottom, whereas Windows
has its roots as a single-user operating system,” says Tuftedal. ”Linux
has higher stability, less downtime, scales better and has better
security.”
The remote servers themselves were replaced with 20 IBM HS20 blade
servers. They chose IBM blades because they were the only ones available
which had the full-server architecture on the blades. According to
Tuftedal, other vendors were using a mobile PC architecture for their
blades. To further simplify support, he ordered the blades without hard
drives.
”The servers themselves have no moving parts at all,” he says. ”All
the things that typically fail in servers — the fans, the disks, the
power units — are components for the whole blade enclosure, they are
redundant, and you can change parts on the fly.”
Since they don’t have their own hard drives, they boot off the IBM
TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server SAN, and all storage resides on
the SAN. They have a 1GB Ethernet connection to the SAN and can switch to
Fibre Channel if they need a faster connection. But even with Ethernet,
he says, they can get the data faster than if they had onboard SCSI
disks.
Beating Expectations
Bergen’s IT professionals began switching the schools’ system to the new
datacenter servers last fall, migrating one location per day. By the end
of the year, it had migrated all the schools which had fibre connections.
The ones with ADSL took a bit longer since those required the use of thin
clients because of a lack of bandwidth. The new blade servers host file,
print, email, DNS, DHCP, a Samba server, OpenLDAP and Web services. They
also can accommodate up to 6,000 concurrent users.
With the new system in place, users can log in on any computer at any
school and always have their own desktop settings. The new system also
has beaten the financial goals initially set out for it.
”When we made the designs for our school network we did two models —
one using Microsoft and one using Linux,” says Tuftedal. ”In our design
and test phase, we saw a 30 percent hardware savings on the same blades,
running the same jobs. In practice, those figures have been fulfilled and
even bettered.”
And that doesn’t include the cost of sending out IT staff on freezing
winter days, when the sun doesn’t show its face till nearly 10 a.m. and
is gone by mid-afternoon.
