In the downturn enterprises are looking for ways to reduce expenses – some eliminate staff others look for areas where usage costs are reduced. Areas where many successful companies focus are:

• Reduce power/cooling costs - IDC, the research firm, estimates that for every $1.00 spent on new servers today, an additional $0.50 is spent on power and cooling. In 2010, that ratio is expected to be $0.70 per $1.00 spent for new servers. Begin by turning off servers not being used and replacing older high power consumers and high heat producers with newer more efficient ones.
• Reduce complexity - Consolidate multiple operating systems onto fewer servers. This will reduce operational risk and operational costs that are linked to managing so many servers. Clustering will benefit by having the option of "failing over" workloads to virtual servers, reducing the operational costs of deploying standby physical server machines that run in a "passive" mode rather than an "active" mode. Taken together, these approaches improve the responsiveness of IT systems and of the people who access them across the business, ensuring high levels of availability and reducing business risk and operating expenses.
• Improve the management of  physical  and  virtual  servers - Reducing the total number of systems simplifies IT operations and impacts IT staffing requirements. Importantly, downtime is impacted by having fewer individual points of management.! Going  green  across  the  infrastructure. At the same time, business is being
• Go Green -  The process of IT transformation brings the opportunity to change the IT infrastructure, supporting "go green" initiatives by reallocating workloads to the sets of server and storage devices on which they can run most efficiently and reducing total server footprints through workload consolidation.

Regardless of the industry, the trend is clear: more businesses require highly available solutions. Not only is this expanding along industry lines, but we also see mid-sized companies requiring disaster tolerant solutions. Janco has found that 18% of all businesses polled say they cannot tolerate any application downtime.  More than 60% cannot tolerate four hours or less of application downtime. All told, more than 90% of companies surveyed reported that they cannot tolerate more than 24 hours of application unavailability.  

 

By Industry Janco found:

• Manufacturing: Economic and competitive pressures are driving companies to run as efficiently as possible. Just-in-time manufacturing processes that coordinate shipments from suppliers around the world demands 24 x 7 availability.
• Retail: The critical applications include credit card processing, cash transactions, point-of-sales data and enable inventory and distribution require applications that are always available.
• Distribution and Sales: Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on a global economy. Many have established key technology in “follow-the-sun” modes that require 24 x 7 availability.
• Health Care: With the digitization of medical images and patient records, retaining and ensuring availability of these applications and files is beyond mission-critical. There continues to be a pervasive use of technology in the health care field including the operating room which is driving this dependence.

CIOs and CTOs have many issues they must address when looking at overall performance of the IT function.  One of traditional ones is server monitoring.  Server monitoring spans three areas of operations: monitoring server operation (the running status); monitoring server traffic (both in and out); and monitoring the results of server use (keeping logs, statistics, and analysis). This encompasses monitoring physical hardware, server performance, services, and the network.

Issues with Server Monitoring:

• Determining what needs to be monitored
• No clear and holistic view of the data
• Too many - or too few  - "agents" for the job
• Too many manual tasks
• Too much complexity and hidden costs
• Hodgepodge of low-end tools

At the same time the role of the CIO and CTO is changing as more enterprises more towards a "Value Added" role for the Information Technology function.  Those changes are depicted in the detail job descriptions that have been created for all of the functions with IT -- especially for the CIO and CTO.

The 220 positions include all of the functions within the IT group.  The Job Descriptions have been updated to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley and the ITIL standard.  The job descriptions are all structured to focus on "Best Practices" as defined by the IT Productivity Center to meet the requirements of World Class Enterprises. They are ready to use and easily modified to meet your enterprise's unique requirements.

• Chief Information Officer (CIO)