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2.5 iSeries Best in TCO, Studies Show
by Chris Alan Miller , Contributor
IBM often touts the superb low cost of ownership that iSeries-i5 customers enjoy, but the
hard numbers are often out of focus. The i5 is efficient, powerful, requires little support, and can
even help manage other servers. No one argues with that, but how do you measure such such
benefits? Even more important, what happens when other operating systems and servers also
evolve and improve? Does the relative cost of ownership drop for the i5?
It turns out there is a little-known group in IBM dubbed the Scorpion Group — the members
aren’t sure where the name came from — that delivers studies to customers trying to get a
handle on how much they spend on IT per platform and individual system. Scorpion customers
typically have at least a couple hundred servers — which are easy to accumulate when your IT
environment includes Intel servers — including a mix of IBM and non-IBM solutions. Their
primary driver is to understand if other environments would be more cost-effective and easier to
manage. Because there is a lot of money on the line, they’re not interested in playing guessing
games.
"The things that upper management are most interested in are the annual operating cost
by platform and, of course, the total operating costs, and that includes the fully burdened rate
of staff to manage it," says Louise Hemond-Wilson, an IBM IT architecture consultant who
conducts Scorpion studies. "We spend a lot of time to understand the costs, and there’s a lot that
feeds into that — software maintenance, leasing, hardware costs, square footage, power and
cooling, staff. The annual operating cost is usually an eye opener, and we put that next to how
much work you are getting out of each platform."
To get hard numbers, the Scorpion group employs a financial expert and a technical expert to
ensure that both sides of the fence are properly represented. In addition to a rigorous methodology
that the group has honed to a fine art over the years, its members also use proprietary IBM
tools to capture and calculate cost and efficiency.
To get measurable data, the Scorpion group starts with information provided by the customer
that documents which servers are doing which workloads and how many staff members are
allocated to manage those workloads. The Scorpion group also uses benchmarked units of work
from Ideas International to compare how much work is done on a per-platform basis. Once you
know that, you can calculate how much it will cost you to move work to a particular platform to
optimize your spending and platform performance.
IBM collects customer data and then goes onsite for two to five days to verify the data and
make sure all the numbers reconcile. They identify what each individual server is doing, and
they figure out how many full-time people it takes to manage each server and the amount of
work they return to the company.
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