Saving Money

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All managers seem to be under constant pressure to cut costs where possible, do more with less, and generally to conjure up huge savings out of thin air. Consider a new system manager eager to make a good impression . It might be easy to impose too-severe cost cutting and put the department in jeopardy ”and it might not become apparent until it is too late.

In a large company, saving, say, $20,000 might be considered fairly trivial when taken as part of the overall expenditure, which could amount to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. However, the system manager can put the savings to good use so that he actually manages to do more without requesting additional funds. For example, more research on new products could be carried out, which might benefit the business by doing the job more efficiently . Or, perhaps additional disk upgrades could be purchased or additional training could be provided for members of staff. As any manager is no doubt aware, when the budget is under-utilized, it is generally acknowledged that less will be available for the following year ”and that could be in addition to any budget cuts that have already been planned!

Maintenance Contracts

When a new system manager takes up this position, it is a good idea to examine the maintenance contracts that are in place, particularly for a large computing environment. There are significant advantages to doing this:

• Familiarization ”The maintenance agreement provides detailed information on the systems and offers an ideal way for the system manager to become familiar with the equipment and software under his control.

• Opportunity for savings or consolidation ”Various projects might have delivered Sun systems that were purchased from a number of resellers or third-party suppliers ”often the package includes a maintenance agreement for the system supplied. During this exercise, there might be an opportunity to consolidate these systems under a single support agreement, providing the potential for negotiating a better deal with the maintenance provider. Examining the support agreements in place could also highlight possible duplication, where coverage is being provided twice by separate suppliers, or a system that is no longer in production might still be fully supported!

• Assessment of cover ”During an exercise of this kind, the system manager could discover that a critical system is not covered by any maintenance agreement, or that the current agreement is grossly insufficient for the role being carried out by the system. There undoubtedly would be severe repercussions if a system failed and was not covered by any maintenance agreement ”the system manager would bear the brunt of the criticism, too, even though he might know nothing about it. This scenario could occur quite easily, for example, if a major new system was delivered as part of a project; it is likely that the project manager would take responsibility for the first year of maintenance, prior to handing it over to the system manager as an operational system. In this case, the renewal of the agreement could be easily overlooked, and this exercise would identify the anomaly.

Genuine Support or Middleman

Some third-party companies offering support for Sun systems require customers to contact their own response centers instead of the Sun response center when reporting a fault. In some cases, the third party may not be able to solve the problem, necessitating a call to Sun for a solution. Beware that this can seriously affect your response receive due to the added delay.

Hardware and Operating Systems

The support and maintenance of the hardware and operating system software are normally part of the same contract with the same vendor (such as Sun Microsystems), who provides support and maintenance packages depending on the level of support required. The system manager should review the agreements in place to see if any circumstances have changed or if any systems have an inappropriate level of support attached to them.

As an example, consider a large organization running a 24x7 computer operation with, say, 20 servers and 400 workstations. The previous system manager might have automatically taken support and maintenance agreements on a 24x7 basis for all the systems and associated workstations. The level of support might be entirely inappropriate if only 150 workstations are actually used on a 24- hour basis, mainly because the heaviest usage occurs during normal business hours when there are extra sales staff, marketing staff, and administration support staff. Additionally, the marketing server and several application servers might not be needed all the time. In this case, the opportunity for significant savings exists if the system manager asks a simple question:

"What do we actually need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?"

The answer could be that the 250 workstations and 5 servers are not even used out of normal business hours, so their support and maintenance level could be adjusted accordingly .

Sun Microsystems provides a program of support called "SunSpectrum" that is designed to provide comprehensive hardware and software support for all kinds of customers. There are four major options ”the main distinguishing features are described here:

• Platinum ”This option is the full, mission-critical support plan, providing 24x7 onsite hardware service as well as a 2-hour response time. A business requiring a faster response can also have a site resident engineer. This option includes full 24x7 telephone support to the Sun response center, with mission-critical escalation and assistance with planning software releases and patch management. The platinum support agreement provides the highest level of support for hardware and software.

• Gold ”This option provides support for business-critical systems where 24x7 continuous cover is not required. The default is 8 “8 (12-hour coverage) Monday through Friday, although this can be extended if required. The response time for this option is four hours ”again, it can be enhanced if a faster response is needed. The gold option provides 24x7 telephone support to the Sun response center with priority response.

• Silver ”This basic level of support provides 8 “5 (business hours support) from Monday through Friday, with a four-hour response time. As with the other options, the coverage can be extended and the response time can be expedited. The silver option includes telephone support to the Sun response center during business hours. It is designed for businesses requiring basic hardware and software support, without the need for critical assistance.

• Bronze ”The bronze option is designed to accommodate businesses that carry out their own hardware repairs or those that have a system in a remote location not covered by Sun onsite service. Technical support is also available via the Sun response center.

All these SunSpectrum options provide software upgrades at no additional cost, as well as 24x7 online access to technical information and software patches through Sunsolve.

One further option for support complements the SunSpectrum program: the Sunclient support option. Basically, this option is designed for noncritical workstations or Javastations. Two alternatives exist within this support option: to opt for either next business day response or a central maintenance option in which the customer waits until there are five faulty workstations and then calls for an engineer. This option represents considerable savings and provides a realistic alternative for non “business-critical workstations. It allows a company to focus the highest level of support where it is needed.

Considerable savings can be had if workstations not required to be available all the time are downgraded to, for instance, the Sunclient level of support. It is important to note that even though there is a cost savings being made, there is no corresponding reduction in the service being provided ”it is merely removing unnecessary support.

A further aspect of maintenance agreements to consider is that when systems are replaced or upgraded, the corresponding support agreement is frequently not amended. The system manager might find that his department is still paying for systems that are no longer in production.

Finally, test and development systems need to be addressed. The required level of service would normally be less than that of the production systems because these systems are less critical to the operation. It is rare to find a test or training system on 24x7 maintenance cover because it would not be deemed business-critical. If support is required, it can usually wait until the next working day, making it a potential candidate for the Sunclient support option or, at best, the SunSpectrum silver support level.

Real-Life Example

At one site I was supporting a number of systems, both Sun systems and a non-Sun legacy system. A review of the support arrangements for the systems revealed the following:

• Three standalone Sun workstations were being supported by two different third-party suppliers at a total cost of about $7,000 per year. The large Sun servers were all supported under a Sun Microsystems gold maintenance contract.

• A standalone workstation with an attached multitape autoloader, being used for business-critical daily backups , was not present in any support agreement.

• The legacy system had previously been two systems, but one had been decommissioned and the serviceable components had been moved to the remaining system, resulting in a single, more powerful system. The support agreement itemized every component down to processor and memory board level ”it ran to five pages when printed. The decommissioned system had been removed from the support agreement, but there were several entries in the agreement for components that were no longer present in the system cabinet.

As a result of the review of the maintenance agreements, the following modifications were made:

• The three Sun workstations were incorporated into the main Sun support agreement but did not warrant the gold support. They were reduced to silver support, saving $5,000 per year.

• The standalone (backups) workstation was added to the main system support agreement at a cost of $2,500 per year because it was carrying out a businesscritical function.

• A revised list of components that were actually present in the legacy system cabinet was faxed to the supplier, resulting in a $12,000 reduction in cost per year.

A saving of $14,500 might be considered fairly small for a large company, but the whole exercise actually took only a few hours and demonstrates the potential savings when examining a much larger network. In addition, the potential loss that the business might have suffered as a result of failure of the standalone system running the critical backups ”and a subsequent lack of support ”could have been significantly greater.

Third-Party Applications

A large company might make use of several third-party products such as case tools, statistical packages, CAD applications, and so on. They all offer technical and maintenance support agreements, some of which can prove to be extremely costly.

The system manager must decide which of these are necessary and justified. With an existing product, the justification can be made by examining how many problems in the last year required a call to the product supplier's help desk ”and, more important, whether the call actually resolved the problem satisfactorily. The system manager ultimately must decide whether to have support available all the time or to pay for each separate instance that support is required. The latter option can be more cost-effective if a very small number of support calls were made. A large percentage of problems are often related to configuration and compatibility issues; the majority of these can be resolved by the system administrator(s), although the quality of the product documentation is also a factor to be taken into account.

A new system manager might discover that the previous manager always opted for the full technical support option, representing a significant cost but not always at the best value. For example, a thorough review of third-party application maintenance agreements could reveal that an agreement is still in place for a software product that is no longer in use. The maintenance agreements need regular reviews to ensure that the business is receiving the required level of service while providing value for money.

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