This paper looks at the particular challenges in public sector IT – the need to find efficiency savings at the same time as offering better service to citizens – and discusses the particular circumstances in which blade computing will be right for the public sector IT manager.
May 2006BUSINESS INSIGHTS Contacts: Elaine Axby Blade Computing and the Quocirca Ltd Tel +44 20 8874 7442 Elaine.axby@quocirca.com Public Sector A new paradigm for the future Clive Longbottom Quocirca Ltd Blade computing is becoming a more important part of the IT Director's arsenal. Whilst Tel +44 118 948 3360 often seen as a way of providing 'servers in a different form factor', blade computing in fact Clive.longbottom@quocirca.com offers significant benefits in flexibility and responsiveness to business needs as well as big savings in power, cooling and floor space. This paper looks at the particular challenges in public sector IT - the need to find efficiency savings at the same time as offering better service to citizens - and discusses the particular circumstances in which blade computing will be right for the public sector IT manager. . Public sector IT departments are no different from their private sector counterparts in being set up in 'silos' of different hardware, operating systems, applications and storage. This leads to inefficiency in usage - Quocirca research has shown CPU usage as low at 10% and storage utilisation only at 30%. The cost of managing this diversity only adds to the burden in an environment where significant efficiency gains are required to meet government targets . Blade computing offers significant benefits to the hard-pressed government IT manager: it consolidates infrastructure, reducing on-going management overheads; it gives potentially big savings in heat, power and floorspace; 'plug and play' installation of new hardware enables applications to be deployed or scaled up quickly; it allows quick and cost-effective means of providing processing power for complex data analysis and applications can be re-provisioned quickly to respond to urgent requests which require intensive data analysis . Pressure on public sector IT is more acute than ever: the range of applications is vast, the problem of 'silos' is as great if not more so than in the private sector, re- organisations are constant, the pressure on IT to contribute to savings and deliver improved services is immense and finally, the public service is about to be directly REPORT NOTE: targeted to contribute towards the reduction of greenhouse emissions. This report has been written . The move to a 'shared services' agenda - functions such as HR, Finance and IT independently by Quocirca being run by one body on behalf of others - means that datacentres are going to Ltd to address certain issues become bigger and will need to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to their found in today's public various clients. sector organisations. The . In this environment, blade computing offers many potential benefits to the public report draws on Quocirca's extensive knowledge of the sector IT manager. The cost savings will of course be of interest to all across the technology and business public sector, including those who have outsourced IT and other business arenas, and provides advice processes who should be looking to share a part of the cost savings that their on the approach that suppliers will be benefiting from. organisations should take to . In terms of benefits other than cost, particular areas of interest will be those where create a more effective and fast and flexible application implementation will bring about business efficiencies, efficient environment for those where data has to be available across organisations, where high levels of future growth. compute power are needed quickly and cost-effectively. Those organisations considering offering shared services to others will find the benefits of blade computing of even more interest.
A business report commissioned by IBM www.quocirca.com
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1 Introduction to blade computing
1.1 Data centre background and the problems today Traditionally, IT has developed along the lines of a number of silos with a wide range of legacy systems that have built up over time. Applications will frequently have been built on different hardware, which in turn will run different operating systems and access a wide range of data sources. A typical IT installation will have a diverse mixture of hardware, many of which reproduce the same functionality of hardware elsewhere in the infrastructure. Quocirca research has shown that CPU ut... [download for more]
