10 Laws of Information Technology

1. Never lose data
2. Centralize when you can, distribute when you have to
3. Standardize when you can, customize when you have to
4. Simple is better than complex
5. Spend as little as possible to solve problem or achieve a goal
6. 100% utilization of IT assets always yield the lowest cost
7. Always have a “plan B”
8. If it CAN break, it WILL break
9. Volume Changes Everything
10. Do Not Be Married To Your Technology

Business 101 says that you should fully utilize all your resources whether they be people, buildings, or information technology.   Everyone is looking to be more productive and to do more with less.  One way to do that is to make sure the resources you are buying are maximized.  When a resource is fully utilized, you need fewer of them—and this leads to the lowest cost.  The same business concept plays out over and over again in the IT world.  Let me outline some strategies for doing that.

1. Telecom circuits – There are many changes happening in the area of wide area networks (WAN) to facilitate consolidation and maximizing your circuit usage.  In the old days, we had a dedicated circuit for just about every service.  One for phone/voice (TDM/PRI), an internet connection, a point-to-point T1, a fully-meshed MPLS, a frame-relay network and the list goes on.  What if I had only one wire connecting an office to the corporate network “cloud”?  This one wire could carry all the required traffic such as voice, video, data, and internet.  Now that all these network providers have standardized on IP as the transport protocol, it is becoming possible to run everything on one circuit.  Practically what this means that instead of buying 4 circuits that add up to 100mb of bandwidth with four separate ports, rates, and billing, I am able to buy one circuit of 50-60mb of bandwidth because I can share the same pipe.  Or I can buy the same bandwidth (100mb) from one provider to get a quantity discount and more bandwidth.  More bandwidth for the same money allows me to do things that were not possible before—so you can decide whether to lower your IT spend or increase innovation.  It is harder to estimate capacity and spikes on low-bandwidth circuits and you have more margins for error on larger circuits.  So instead of having 4 circuits that are running at 50% capacity, you can run one circuit at 80-90% capacity, thus maximizing your circuit utilization.
2. Data storage – we used to have our databases and files stored on disks that resided inside the physical server.  If you wanted to stand up an email server, you estimated how many mailboxes you’ll need, allocate a set amount of space per user, and then maybe give it 20-30% more for growth.  What happened was you have all this data spread out all over the place.  One server may have gobs of storage available because you guessed wrong on the capacity needed.  Or another server ran into a wall because it ran out of disk.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have ONE pot of data that would be managed and easily expanded?  That way you could allocate more storage to an application/server as needed.  And if you allocated too much, you could take it back and allocate it to another application that needed it without having to go buy more.  Using modern SAN and virtualization technologies allowed IT professionals to do just this.  Rather than have fragmented disks all over the place, we are able to logically place them into one store so that we drive our disk utilization towards 100% and that yields fewer disks we need to buy.
3. Servers – The same concept applies to servers.  Using the same email application, in addition to the disk storage, there are certain memory and processors requirements that must be met in order for the application to run efficiently.  The app will come with a “recommended” hardware config but we never buy that one—it is generally too small for the app to run flawlessly.  So we have to buy lots of processors and memory.  What if we buy too much?  Too little?  Same problem as disks—we have all these processors purchased and scattered all over the place.  If we gave an app 8-cores and find out that it is only using 3-4 cores consistently, we have severely underutilized HW.  Conversely, what if we give it 2-cores and it chugs and needs to be rebooted weekly.  In the old days, the only way to give the server more processing power was to buy new hardware, rebuild the server, and move the app.  Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to have one big pool of processors and memory that we can add/take away as needed?  That is exactly what we can do with virtualized servers.  And if we can give resources on the fly, we can also move the server to use other resources should we lose some part of virtual infrastructure.  This allows us to achieve a level of business continuity and disaster recovery that could never be achieved with physical servers.
4. Workstations – Now that I’ve got my back-end 100% utilized and redundant, wouldn’t it be nice to achieve the same benefits for our desktops and workstations?  That technology is coming along nicely as well.  There are three main strategies for doing this: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Terminal Server/Remote Access, and Terminal Workstation/Remote Access.  At Little, we’ve deployed the last one.  There are tons of vendors in each space and they technology just keeps getting better.  It is now possible to put a high-end engineering (or gamer) workstation in a virtualized cloud.  Think about it, most of the time your desktop is WAY underutilized.  Even if you sitting at the screen typing, you are using very little computing power that is available to you.  Now we can “pool” our desktop computing power so that an individual user can have access to a high-end workstation only when they need it.  When they are not using it, other people or application can use that capacity.  And that drives up your workstation utilization to 100%, thus requiring fewer workstations that you need to buy.
5. IT staff – OK all our IT infrastructure is now 100% utilized.  What about your people?  If you were fortunate enough to get 100% utilization of your IT assets BEFORE you hired IT staff, then you are probably in good shape on head count.  What happens if you have IT staff to support an underutilized IT infrastructure?  You are paying more than you need to support your IT.  What happens if you have 10 IT staff, switch to 100% utilized infrastructure, then realize you only need 6 IT staff to manage this new infrastructure?  You have some decisions to make—either redeploy those resources into other parts of the business to increase innovation, promote them into a new role, keep people on payroll that are 60% utilized, or terminate their position.  In 2010, there’s another alternative—move your IT to a private cloud.  This is taking the 100% utilization to the next level—100% utilization of your IT staff.  Firms that take a look at this modern technology and say “what if I built my IT staff and infrastructure from scratch” using this new technology?  They could very well save 30-40% of their IT spend and then decide how best to spend that savings.

6.       Business Continuity – I think you get the point.  When you adopt strategies to create one logical pool of any IT assets, you can effectively drive the utilization of those assets towards 100%.  That will save you a ton of money.  Then with that money you saved, you can afford to buy more redundancy.  If you have a server HW failure, no problem, the technology automatically transfers the application to another running server.  Users never detect that the server when down all while IT is fixing the broken server in the background.  This played out beautifully one day here at Little.  It was the day before Thanksgiving and we lost one of our production vmware servers.  Seems we had a short in the motherboard, caught fire, and the server was hard down.  Since we had redundant server hardware and the data was stored remotely on the SAN, users just logged out and back in and they kept on trucking.  IT went home to eat turkey and we fixed the server after the holidays.