Do not conceal the underlying IT architecture costs at heavy costs (1)

BKJIA April 21 Internet headlines: It is indeed an arduous task to build a solid storage policy for a complex server environment, at this time, there is nothing better than trying to make enterprises use your budget advice. Refer to the BKJIA article: Ignoring server integration-a major mistake in building a data center ). Updating a set of Storage Architecture or creating a new backup underlying architecture requires a lot of money, which usually means that you must be creative when presenting your point of view to the management. However, hiding the real cost required to operate the underlying architecture from the management layer is actually a dangerous game.

Importance of operating underlying architecture

Yes, sometimes acting is necessary. But on the other hand, some problems are that we are rarely able to do a good job in the education management layer, so that they cannot understand how the IT system lives and breathe, and how the actual operating costs are. Fuzzy processing is actually not in the long-term interests of anyone, especially when cloud computing gradually matures, it will soon become a feasible alternative to the enterprise's internal underlying architecture.

One of the reasons for this gap is that the management has failed to grasp the key relationship between costs and specific applications, as well as the actual technical requirements such as storage or other. I once and again saw that those huge, super-expensive task-critical applications are located in the same huge, super-expensive storage underlying architecture, but basically they are idling at a low load. At the same time, in other parts of the data center, a large number of cheap primary applications are burning storage resources, resulting in a workload many times larger than that of key systems.

The cause of this situation can generally be traced back to the budget process. When the management informs that the key application of a task is worth millions of dollars for purchase and implementation, few people will return to ask if they need to configure a matched underlying architecture for it, but in fact this is needed.

On the contrary, enterprises often purchase 5000 or 10000 USD applications at will, rather than considering their impact on the underlying architecture. For more information, see BKJIA article: 30 thousand RMB for LINUX server cluster construction ). However, if you do your homework to thoroughly test these small applications, you will often find that these "small" applications use more resources than "large" applications. Although the management often blinks at making requests such as a $0.75 million software project with a $0.1 million Storage Architecture, but if you want to apply for $10 thousand in storage for a $50 thousand software project, you will face endless resistance.

This is how the two-step budget budgetary two-step was invented. The IT department is trying to spend more money on the underlying architecture that is not needed for those large projects, and to meet the architecture requirements for small projects that are not approved. Refer to BKJIA related articles: Server procurement principles and cost relationships)

Do you want to ask if this is really a bad thing? The management believes that money is well spent, and the IT department also receives the required reliable resources. IT seems like the IT department is quietly helping the management and doing the right thing. IT looks like a win-win situation.