Servers – Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time to Repair

When investigating the purchase of computer servers it is important to understand the terms “Mean Time Between Failure” (MTBF) and “Mean Time to Repair” (MTTR).  Here is a link to an outstanding article by George Spafford that expains the terms and gives good examples of each.

Understanding ‘Mean Time Between Failure’

May 14, 2004 by George Spafford in Datamation
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/article.php/3354191

ITIL – Staffing Ratios

ITIL Benchmarks

In a study or 125 companies in the United Kingdom,  researchers found that the “IT Heads in relation to the Number of Users” was a median of 6% for ITIL adopters and 5% for ITIL rejecters.

From the same study, training costs for ITIL adoption were on average £930 per IT head.

Source: ”The ITIL Experience – Has it been worth it?”, Noel Bruton, Bruton Consultancy, Spring 2004. See: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:HIwsdVqpREAJ:www.aaromba.com/assets/pdf/whitepapers/The-ITIL-Experience.pdf+ITIL+Experience+-+Has+it+been+worth+it%3F&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Benchmark: Ratio of Analysts to Programmers

According to Tim Bryce (Managing Director of M. Bryce & Associates),

If systems analysis is performed correctly, programmer productivity should improve as analysts should be providing good specifications for application assignments. In the absence of systems analysts, considerable time is lost by the programmer who has to second-guess what the end-user wants. Inevitably, this leads to rewriting software over and over again. Good data and processing specs, as provided by a systems analyst, will improve programmer productivity far better than any programming tool or technique. This means programmers are the beneficiaries of good systems analysis.

This brings up an interesting point, what should be the ratio of Systems Analysts to Programmers in a development organization? Frankly, I believe there should be twice as many analysts than programmers. By concentrating on the upfront work, programming is simplified.

Source: Bryce, Tim, “The Ratio of Analysts to Programmers”, Toolbox for IT, August 24, 2006.

Drupal Benchmarked on Amazon ec2

According to a benchmark test run by John Quinn &  Cailin Nelson,

Drupal systems perform very well on amazon ec2, even with a simple single machine deployment. The larger hardware types perform significantly better, producing up to 12,500 pages per minute. this could be increased significantly by clustering as outlined here.  The apc op-code cache increases performance by a factor of roughly 4x.  The average response times were good in all the tests. The slowest tests yielded average times of 1.5s. again, response times where significantly better on the better hardware and reduced further by the use of apc.

Amazon uses Xen based virtualization technology to implement ec2. The cloud makes provisioning a machine as easy as executing a simple script command. when you are through with the machine, you simply terminate it and pay only for the hours that you’ve used. ec2 provides three types of virtual hardware that you can instantiate.

Source: John & Cailin Blog, “lamp performance on the elastic compute cloud: benchmarking drupal on amazon ec2″, January 28, 2008.

IT Staff to User Ratio – Additional Numbers

A recent posting on the Spiceworks Community forum revels IT staff to user ratios ranging from 100:1 to 20:1 based upon different factors such as number of different locations, hardware and software diversity, proficiency of the users, hours for direct support, help desk availability, etc. The best posting came from Eric Osterholm. He reported:

“Awhile back I worked for a great Consulting Company called Collective Technologies (a spinoff from Pencom Systems); at it’s height, there were over 350 Consultants in the field. The topic of this ratio came up time and time again…

Based on what we saw at our client sites, the consensus was that a helpdesk (someone else doing servers and network) ratio was about 100:1 with proper automation technologies (imaging\patching\helpdesk\etc). For admins supporting servers and helpdesk, the ratio closed to 50:1. For those supporting everything, the numbers were all over the board… from 100:1 to 20:1. The one constant we saw was that the more mature shops adopted automation tools to make their current staff more efficient, reducing these ratios.”

The entire forum post can be found at: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/7870?query=ratio+of+users+it

IT Benchmark Spreadsheets

ServiceXen, an IT firm located in Atlanta, Georgia, has provided six (6) interactive spreadsheets to assist in IT benchmarking activities.  Each spreadsheet is a shared Zoho Sheet.  See below:

1. Data Center Security Audit
2. New Employee Cost Calculator
3. Server Buy vs. Lease Calculator
4. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
5. Virtualization Fit Tool

Metric for Server Evaluation: Space, Watts and Power

Sun Microsystems

SWaP (Space, Watts and Power) is the new standard for calculating server efficiency before you buy. This metric that allows you to calculate the impact of a server in your data center.

How SWaP Works

Server A Server B Server A Difference Performance 500 operations 500 operations Equal Space 2RU 4RU x2 smaller Power 300 Watts 800 Watts x2.7 less SWaP Rating 0.83 0.16 x5.2 more

In the example above, Server A and Server B produce equal performance, however Server A is half the size and less than half the power of Server B. Using the SWaP formula, it is revealed that Server A is over 5X more efficient than Server B–providing a huge impact to rack dense deployments in your data center.

Source: SWaP (Space, Watts and Performance) Metric, Sun Microsystems, 2008

In a report published by David Greenhill, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, (Space Watts and Power), he indicates that older model servers can consume 45 times the energy of  newer models.  In his case study the 1997 server used 13,456 watts / hr. compared to only 300 watts / hr. for the 2005 server.    But even 300 watts/hr. (0.3 Kw/hr.) add up quickly when you realize you’re typically running it 7/24/365.  In fact, each 300 w server uses about 2600 Kw per year.  Then you factor in the hundreds or even thousands of servers most large organizations are using and the air conditioning, UPS, lighting, etc. to house them, and you can start to see why less is definitely more.

Source: “Green IT Innovation – Data Center Efficiencies to Reduce Cabon Footprint – Part 1.”, Blog – Sharing Sustainability Innovation, December 19, 2008, http://globeforum.wordpress.com

Benchmark: Virtualization at Amazon

Amazon Virtualization

Virtualization Benchmark

Amazon sold storage to external customers for 15 cents/GB/month (estimated).

Bechtel’s internal storage costs were $3.75/GB/month.

WHAT BECHTEL LEARNED: Amazon could sell storage cheaply, Ramleth believes, because its servers were more highly utilized.

Source: CIO Magazine, Bechtel’s New Benchmarks, October 24, 2008.

IT Staffing Benchmarks

Staff Support

IT Staff Benchmarks

Level One – Basic helpdesk phone support
– 1:80 to 1:110
Level Two – Installation, configuration, and
desktop support
– 1:45 to 1:85
Level Three – Systems, communications,
high end support and design
– 1:250 to 1:400

There is no single answer

Depends on
– Staff expertise
– Technical proficiency of end users
– Number of servers
– Number of remote branches and distance
– Level of high tech systems deployed by the bank
Leave enough room for project resources!

Source: “The Business of IT: Running Your Bank’s IT Department Like a Business”, Brintech, February 17, 2005

RFID for IT Asset Tracking

RFID Tag

Odin Technologies, an RFID integrator and vendor in its latest IT asset tracking report shows, that only within the last six months, passive RFID technology has delivered increased performance on IT devices like servers, laptops, blades and other high-value IT assets, according to a report.

The study’s results showed that, with RFID tags, IT personnel could inventory a rack of 40 servers in 12 seconds or identify all IT equipment within a typical cubicle five times faster than manual methods with 100 percent accurate data entry.

Source: http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;187166024;pp;1