Slashdot Mirror
Helping IT Save Money ... and Jobs?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work in a small, overworked and understaffed IT department at a profitable business. We recently got the news that we needed to cut costs. While every penny counts, simply turning off the computers at night and saving pennies on processor cycles isn't exactly a noticeable savings. I'm curious what measures other Slashdot readers have taken to save money within their IT departments."
Automate anything that can be, use reliable products that once set up don't need to be touched for months or years, etc. Get programmers the right tools so they don't have to spend months trying to manually find every memory leak.
Of course, then you find yourself out of a job.
I know, I know... call him a Troll. Actually, I saved my company upwards of $15,000 a year by not renewing software and support contracts for our Nokia firewalls and instead replacing them with Smoothwall (a Linux firewall). I was even able to install Smoothwall onto the old Nokia IP350 hardware.
I also avoided upgrade costs to XP for about 10 of our 50 systems. This last year, we upgraded all from Win2K to XP. However, 10 of the systems were only used by temps, contractors, and consultants and only for web browsing, webmail, etc. So we installed FC3 on them saved the almost $200 each on XP upgrade licenses.
Oh, and I save the whole company countless amounts of money when I installed Firefox and set it as the default browser. Pop-ups went away, re-installs resulting from spyware went away, etc. It saved my time (not having to do re-installs and system restores) and end-user times (not having their system unusable while I fixed them).
We saved a lot of money by renegotiating bandwidth contracts with our ISPs. Moving file servers to Linux and getting rid of the "MS Tax" was also a plus...
Depending on your political clout, it sounds like it might be time to start cutting services (evening/weekend tech support, high-speed internet, etc).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Small business with 50 employees:
I fired three of the four IT people, kept the person who knew *NIX and could actually work with my other employees, replaced Wintel machines with Macs running OS X and saved myself almost $350k in the first year and $400k the following year.
Difference went back into the business in terms of reinvestment and profit sharing.
I read Bastard Operator from Hell for Ideas.
It is available at theregister.com
My company recently merged 3 production servers and 2 test servers
You might also be able to move users onto a thin client setup (like LTSP.)
Also, consider using free alternatives to licensed products, like OpenOffice.org. (Bleedin' obvious around here, but I haven't seen anybody mention it yet.)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
http://tinyurl.com/47c8e/
read up here
Canada: Safe, secure and 'near-shore'
It's about as close as you can get, and its low risk and relatively low prices make Canada a favorite destination for "near-shore" outsourcing.
The Philippines: Low cost, but higher risk
The second most popular outsourcing destination after India, the Philippines has a highly skilled, English-proficient workforce and low cost.
Mexico: It's Close; It's Cheap
Just a short plane ride from the U.S., Mexico boasts a well-educated workforce and lower prices. But the lure of jobs in the U.S. keeps turnover at outsourcers high.
Ireland: Comfort and Convenience at a Higher Cost
Its government is eager to offer tax benefits and grants to companies willing to bring IT work here, making Ireland an increasingly popular destination for software maintenance and development work.
China: Low-level work at lower-than-average cost
Low cost is driving some users to outsource IT work to China, where low-level programming resources can be found at bargain rates.
Singapore: Small but powerful
This small Asian locality has economic stability and a highly trained workforce on its side. But those strengths come at a price.
Vietnam: Nascent capabilities but low cost
A "country in progress," Vietnam offers low labor costs but faces some communications and modernization challenges.
Malaysia
An emerging outsourcing player, Malaysia has invested heavily in a high-tech corridor to lure international business. But a sluggish economy and small workforce have slowed the country's momentum.
Brazil
Brazil is well known for the bossa nova, string bikinis and Amazon forests. Less well known is that, by many measures, it?s one of the world?s major countries. It ranks fifth in both geographic size and population (180 million people) and has the world?s eighth-largest economy.
Russia and Eastern Europe
Its IT workforce is low-cost and highly trained, but Russia's abundant scientific talent remains largely untapped because of government bureacracy and image problems.
Selecting the Right Offshore Vehicle
Opinion: Columnist Bart Perkins says there are different types of offshore outsourcing vendors, and it's wise to pick the type that fits your company culture, requirements and risk profile.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
When you're looking at this sort of thing, you have to make sure you know the difference between eliminating things that represent sunk cost and eliminating things that are not sunk costs yet. It's the latter that you care about; you only care about the former to the extent that they're firmly attached to the latter.
Fembots here talks about saving three SQL Server 2000 licenses; well, you don't get to cash those licenses back in or resell them, so that's a rather empty gesture, although he/she'll avoid any renewals that might be associated with the three licenses.
Some costs are per-user: desktop operating system licenses, desktop app software licenses, desktop machines, MS client access licenses. If your company has expansion plans, get rid of those costs by using Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. and inexpensive beige-box semi-disposable PCs instead of paying so much just for the letters D, E, L, and L. If you're real good at setting up application servers under Linux, you can use junkers (down to P/90) as desktop systems and your users won't know the difference. If this is a company in trouble and being able to scale up operations is one way the biz managers could solve the problem, DON'T sabotage the effort by adding on so much of your own expansion costs.
If you needed DBMS software, you were being irresponsible with your company's money if you didn't evaluate PostgreSQL to see if it would do what you needed and went with MS SQL Server or Oracle just on the basis of the name.
If I were your IT manager, I'd already be doing these things, but I'm not, so what I think you should do is listen carefully to any discusions about how the line-of-business managers might want to fix things and do your damndest to help them succeed.
I agree with this. While nice for the users (only have to memorize one password) and nice for the net admins (only one auth server to fix when you can't get authenticated), it's horrible for almost everything else. If teh main LDAP goes down and there's no HOT failover(warm standbys suck), then your users will not be able to log in. Also, once a password is compromised, ALL of your servers are at risk...not just the LDAP server. LDAP and other centrally controlled authentication needs to be planned very well and the security needs to be HIGH. Make sure your users call you the SECOND that they think someone is doing something wrong or the SECOND that they forget their password or realize that it's in the wrong hands. Better yet, if you must go LDAP, get some RSA keyfobs and the RSA security package setup. This will inctrase security while reducing the overhead of multiple log ins.
Gorkman
The scope of your project was one where you could do that. That's not going to work for things like say an Oracle database replacement, or a world-class monitoring solution.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Some other advantages the OP didn't point out by merging multiple servers into one. * centralised management which translates to time saving and time is money. * energy saving. * you can sell the old servers on ebay if you don't need them and you company allows. * and as the OP noted, cost saving on software licenses (unless your are already using Linux or some free alternatives). note that although you have to fork out money to buy a more powerful server to do the job of three, it will save you in the long run. Off the top of my head, some other ways to cut cost are * buy CRT monitor instead of LCD * buy AMD CPUs instead of Intel ones * use IM instead of phones * when calling overseas, use international phone cards which are IP based instead of going through your telco. * educate your users about virus, spyware etc, teach them how to do simple things by themselves. There are always some lazy ones who prefer you to do things for them. Usually these are the managers who probably rationalise by thinking they have better things to do with their time. * run a terminal server instead of having a workstation for everyone. (e.g. Linux Terminal Server Project, www.tlsp.org) * justify every expenditure, make sure the money you spend will increase productivity. This is very important, if you gotta spend, you gotta spend, you gotta give people the right tools for the job to increase productivity, by saving a couple of hundred bucks, you might be losing thousands of dollars in man hours and productivity.
Although you can't get money back on the extra server licenses, it does save you the cost of ongoing licensing and support for the retired machines, as well as the rack costs of the machines (if they're hosted remotely). You can also consolidate them into the two most recent boxes, and thus avoid the possibility of the older machines dying sometime soon.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Don't let inkjet printers in the office AT ALL. They are a constant headache and steal more in support costs than ink.
While we're talking about printing, check some of the software to see what's being printed, and how.
Where I worked, the software package by default printed a light grey background along with whatever actual data was being printed. Changing the background to white was a seemingly trivial change, but since the organization prints reams worth of paper every day, the drop in toner use/cost was extremely noticible.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Is the company making every penny count? No, they're actually wasting money by working inefficiently. They wasted a lot of my time, then tried to buy a workstation I didn't need. But the numbers look good.
At a previous job, the IT budget was on a permanent freeze. In the three years I was with the company, we had only made one major investment in IT, and that was at the beginning of my tenure. Now, we were an Application Service Provider, so our lifeblood was in our servers and how fast we could crunch numbers.
Did I mention that the major investment in servers, all the servers were bought off of eBay and other second-hand vendors?
So I'm dealing with four year old servers, with outdated hardware this is just slowing down more and more, while we are getting more and more customers, and larger customers. I tried explaining to the Powers that there is a fixed number of cpu-hours, and it takes X hours to process customer Y on our current hardware. We were operating at something in excess of 90% capacity. I gave several pleas to free up some money to acquire some faster, more robust servers, thereby reducing X, allowing us to handle more Y.
But as IT is commonly held as a cost center, I got the usual "we don't have the money". I left the company eventually, but heard they hit a hard brick wall as the production environment was saturated almost 24 hours a day- the couldn't bring in any more customers. Sort of ironic that a company can get killed by its own success.
And you can too. All that TCO talk is garbage. $15,000/year in licensing cost is one thing we saved.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
A K6-2/350 is about 7 or 8 years old - but nice try. Seven years ago we were looking at 500Mhz stuff in that realm. In 1999 (6 years ago, in case you can't count), we had Athlon CPUs which (IIRC) started at 550MHz. In 2000 (that's 5 years ago, btw), we had 1+ GHz CPUs from both Intel and AMD.
If you don't believe me, look here.
On another note... I currently use two Pentium II 350MHz systems at work, exclusively. One runs linux, the other runs Win98. I have absolutely no problem being productive on it. It's combination of software (Win98, Office 97, and various other apps) are roughly as stable as Windows XP is with Office 2003. I don't program (maybe that's what you're talking about?) but I do a fair amount of SSH administration and things of that order.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
VMWare ESX server is a very effective tool for server consolidation. Particularly if you have many old legacy servers that you just can't get rid of.
Migrate them all to virtual machines within VMware and say bye-bye to replacement parts, expensive support contracts and pricy KVM-IP devices for outdated servers.
We removed about 65 old (PPro through P3) servers to virtual machines in VMware. In addition to the benefits I mentioned above, we also gained SIX 42U racks of free space, reduced cable clutter, and reduced server room power/cooling consumption.
Disclaimer: I don't work for VMware but I can't say enough good things about their server product.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Used the money to hire more salesdroids to "develop more business", and bought an entire floor of a hugeassed building, then crammed everyone into one tiny corner of it.
Meanwhile, the IT processing power remained at a constant while IT staffing actually was cut. Interesting times...
I think you brought up an excellent point. Service contracts are *rarely* worthwhile - yet many businesses seem to buy and renew them without even a second thought.
I used to work in I.T. for a place that was constantly complaining about a need to "cut costs" (and in an overall sense, they did - because several of their locations were being shut down as unprofitable, etc.). Unfortunately, we had such things as support contracts with Oracle for our main database that cost upwards of $30,000/yr. to renew - and I don't think we made any use of it except maybe 1 or 2 times in 5 years. (Both of those times, we reported problems which turned out to be small bugs, and "hotfixes" were mailed to us on CD-R disc -- but, these same fixes made it to future point release updates of the Oracle products anyway. I think we could have lived with the issues a little longer, or worked around them, without it costing us over $30K per year worth of problems!)
I also remember a fairly costly maintenance contract we kept up for all of our uninterrupted power supplies. Sure, it covered replacement of worn-out batteries - but at best, it was a "break even" deal over just buying replacement batteries when needed and swapping them out ourselves. If a UPS actually lasted longer than expected, the maintenance agreement instantly became a poor value.
Here are a few options that will save money over a long time.
c t needs without having 6 separate utilities. Reducing the number of utilities a company needs also reduces the system requirements for your staff and allows older machines to perform well.
For equipment and hardware issues, Do not turn off systems over night. The only time you age hardware is when you change it's state. That being said, having the machine "Restarted" at the end of a day will give you the benefits of a restart without the actual aging of your equipment. Add to this, keep a constant temperature in the office. A good insulation can go a long way in saving money. You would be surprised at how many hidden costs the liberal use of an air conditioner can have.
For support.
When you can have a support team also engage in other activities such as development and user education it is a winning combination. Give your support staff the ability to help work the common issues out of the system and you reduce the number of times this problem can hurl boulders at you. In essence you solve 3 very difficult to handle issues. The first solution is to provide the IT support staff a method to keep on the ball for the technologies you as a company use. This will reduce call or issue time and increase productivity. Having them institute training will also help you greatly. They have the ability to work with people individually and over a phone in a teacher-student kind of way already. Your just giving them the opportunity to reduce the chances of support need preemptively and allowing all staff to benefit from there abilities. This training will also increase the productivity of other non technical staff tremendously. Most companies use less than half the utilities of the software they spend allot of money on. Allowing your support members the ability to be part of the IT process and not the bumper of the IT process will increase their effectiveness.
Licenses: You can reduce the number of proprietary licenses. In many cases using an in house solution or open source solution for your needs will also have the added benefit of allowing you to tailor the application to your needs. Nothing reduces productivity/profit like being slave to an application that is not well built or has more features than you need.
Keep in mind what applications you use and why. Do not allow constant sweeping changes to your IT department by non IT personnel. This includes you very well meaning and intelligent company owners. Every time you change one aspect of your IT infrastructure that equates to at least 1 hour of extra support time per three people and 1 hour of downtime per 1 people. Every time you get a new sales jockey or developer, Make them use your tools and not you use there tools. Having 6 different applications that do the same thing is a terrible waste of resources. You could also reduce the number of applications used with the addition of training. A groupware client for instance can go a long way in managing your project/messaging/incident/sales/anti-virus/conta
There are allot of ways to reduce cost without loosing people. Get past the ego's and commercial induced projects and you will find a smooth running machine can keep your bottom line looking quite pretty indeed.