As virtual data centers continue to scale out, companies must transform the way they track, monitor, manage, and ‘charge’ for IT resources. IT costing and chargeback is not a new discipline by any means, but what is new is the agility and rate of speed in which resources can be provisioned, decommissioned, or reallocated in a virtual data center. While most organizations have some level of monitoring resource utilization, this approach rarely effects how resources are actually used or consumed. Why? If I am not paying for it, I probably don’t understand the real cost of deploying it, managing it, and supporting it. (It’s virtual – its practically free, isn’t?)
Perhaps the fundamental paradigm shift that needs to take place in IT is evolving from just monitoring consumption to actually curbing consumption? In order to change how resources are requested and consumed why don’t we start with the cost associated with it? In doing so, this will undoubtedly drive end users to balance their business needs with their checking accounts. Whether this morphs itself into an exchange of tokens, monopoly money, wooden Euros, or actual greenback dollars, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is educating the consumers that IT resources that they are indeed not free, and incenting them to act and consume responsibly. I can assure you that the number of dormant virtual assets no longer being used will decrease, while the savvy end users quickly reallocate precious dollars (resources) to more critical workloads and projects.
Moving to the private cloud is on everyone’s mind, but without integrated IT costing and chargeback, virtual sprawl will once again rear its head. Want to convince your CEO/CFO that virtualization and private cloud management is right for your organization? Present them with a solution that will meet their financial expectations once you hit more strategic phases of your virtualization deployments.
VMworld hopefully opened up the eyes of attendees to the fact that accounting for chargeback and IT costing eliminates VM sprawl by doing the following:
- Simplifies and automates the task of calculating Virtual Infrastructure costs and who is consuming what
- Identifies idle or underutilized resources, excess capacity, or resource abuse (very expensive and overprovisioned Virtual Machines)
- Creates cost transparency, teaching end users that VMs are not free
- Integrates support, operating and capital costs for VMs
If we connected with you at VMworld (and we connected with a lot of you in beautiful Copenhagen), we hope we demonstrated the benefits you will see in your IT role, as well as in your infrastructure, if these two features are a part of your end-to-end virtualization management solution. If you didn’t get to meet up with us at the show, please contact us for a demo.
