| After you understand the customer's needs, you must determine the project budget and the expected value and return. By understanding the future plans, you can prepare the scope of work with an eye to the company's projected growth. Some considerations will often include the following: Total cost of ownership Server cost does not end with purchase and delivery. Over its productive life, a server requires maintenance and upgrades. It must also be managed as part of an infra-structure. The total expense of components and services add up to the total cost of ownership. Performance Server system performance depends on a balanced design, where the computer bandwidth matches the memory bandwidth and the I/O bandwidth matches the demands of the software. If the memory system is dramatically slower than processor requests for instruction and data transfers, the processor becomes memory-starved and performance potential is wasted. A fast memory system on a slow processor shifts the bottleneck to the processor. Reliability Reliability is an important feature for all servers, affecting both total cost of ownership and performance. A reliable server is dependable and available almost all the time. A highly available server takes reliability to another level by incorporating fault-tolerant capabilities and features that enable the smooth replacement of failed components. A high-availability server is a class of server that must be able to run continuously. Certain reliability and high-availability baseline goals are desirable for each class of server. Capacity For many server applications, scalability and expandability become very important. Requirements related to components, such as RAM expansion capabilities and storage capacity, are considered to address scalability issues of a server. Ease of use and maintenance Two factors that strongly affect the total cost of ownership for servers are ease of use and ease of maintenance. Critical design criteria for these factors include the following: Mechanical components The server components must be durable and of high-quality. Thermal plan Sufficient airflow through the server is necessary to avoid deterioration of components or performance due to excessive heat. Service accessibility The server chassis and internals must be accessible with the least amount of tools and disruption as possible.
Third-party integration Industry-standard components must easily integrate into the system. Management Hardware and software components must allow for alert notification and resolution. Security Some businesses protect user data and control access to system components. The system designer must continually weigh cost against performance when working to meet security requirements and when supporting hardware design recommendations. Failure recovery Server components should be modular to allow for easy replacement in the event of a failure. Modular replacement is more cost effective than replacing an entire system or subsystem. System components should have a level of integration that enables rapid recovery after a failure.
14.4.1 Using Third-Party Business-Value Tools Two excellent tools are available to assist you in planning, determining business value, and return on investment/total cost of ownership (ROI/TCO). These tools are the Gartner IT HealthCheck TCO comparison tool and the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification framework. 14.4.1.1 GARTNER IT HEALTHCHECK The Gartner IT HealthCheck TCO comparison tool is used to input IT infrastructure data to determine TCO. Enter contact information, information about the distributed computing environment, and a selection of best practices implemented. Note The Gartner IT HealthCheck TCO comparison tool is available at http://ithealthcheck.gartner.com/site/welcome.asp?b=valid.
14.4.1.2 MICROSOFT RAPID ECONOMIC JUSTIFICATION FRAMEWORK The Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) framework is a conceptual overview of IT planning. The REJ is a five-step process to help IT professionals analyze and optimize the economic performance of IT investments, and appropriate optimal resources and capital for IT projects. Note Learn more about the REJ framework at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/ittasks/plan/sysplan/wwww.asp.
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