I'm actually surprised that I haven't heard this question yet. The last few months it seems everyone has been budget conscious to the point of the ridiculous. It's been difficult to convince customers that somewhere out there, real hardware still exists. BAC is supported on VMWare but due to our field experiences we cannot recommend anything less than separate dedicated DPS and Gateway hardware. Even getting virtual servers allocated has been a struggle. It seems like many organizations, in their zeal to reap the benefits of virtualization, have forgotten that under the hood there has to be sufficient hardware to actually support the number of virtual machines, especially if all the vm's are going to operate at fully capacity.
What's perhaps really surprising to me is that companies continue to put full PCs on the desks of all of their employees rather than equipping them with ($400) netbooks or even just Blackberries or iPhones. So a $5,000 server for a core business process is out, but a $1,000 PC belongs on everyone's desk, even those employees who work remotely or who only need a machine for basic word processing and email tasks.
I have to admit, I don't understand the penny-wise pound-foolish thinking about physical hardware. Four weeks ago my laptop, a two-year old Mac Book Pro, suffered a hardware failure at 5:00pm on a Friday night. I knew that it would likely be at least a week before I could get it back from Apple - and a week's worth of lost productivity would easily be more than the cost of a new machine. I barely hesitated to drop the three grand for a new laptop (out of my own pocket) yet companies with a national footprint, who need that hardware to run mission critical systems, aren't able or willing to do the same. Certainly there is a difference between the hard drive in my laptop and RAID 5 network attached storage, but nonetheless disk is cheap by all accounts. Utility computing via "cloud" providers are driving costs down as well, and really creates a situation where the argument that "we can't get hardware for this project because we don't have budget" into a non-starter. There's really no good excuse for the view that "hardware" has to be treated as a precious resource.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
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1 comment:
Nice post. I too, from a business point of view don't completely understand the thinking when it comes to hardware. I have spent most of my IT career trying to justify the spending necessary to keep things running. Especially at smaller companies. Ok, I can kinda understand the smaller companies being more careful but still.
I also get things like disk space. Yes it cheep but the its the cost of management of that space that really eats money. People are expensive.
-John
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