IT ROI calculations

I have been trying to research ways companies track ROI associated with various IT projects, and  I have to admit, I'm becoming frustrated. There doesn't seem to be a standard  out there for any part of the business  world in which IT is involved. 

I suppose this goes back to the unique nature of IT as a part of business. Remember, a long time ago I wrote about how all the geeky guys with pocket protectors got stuck in the closet when they first entered corporate America and never came out? I get the feeling that problem persists! As I have studied page after page of white papers and reports, it seems that IT staff are rarely called upon to make a solid business argument for their choices. Even when a company is in trouble, IT is the last group they consult to streamline operations.  (Or so it seemed to me as I read one story after another on the subject.) I have also noticed that some companies do have ROI calculators on their web sites; but these tend to be slanted in such a way to convince the user to purchase a certain product no matter what. As a DCC staffer I'm honor-bound not to recommend that type of tool, because we promise our customers that we are brand neutral. Frankly, I am looking for a real ROI tool, not a glorified sales tool, because sometimes "no, don't buy this product" is the right answer.

In my opinion, today's marketplace requires IT agility. It requires IT efficiency to compete on costs, and it also requires IT accountability for data integrity, uptime, and efficiency. Why, after all, would we expect any less from our IT team than we do of our accounting team? If the accounting team took 6-8 weeks to launch a new check to pay a bill, surely the company would drop everything and reorganize until that problem was solved, right?

At any rate, all frustrations aside, I'm working on a comprehensive IT project ROI worksheet, which I hope will help. I am writing mostly about virtualization in my worksheet, since that's one of the more difficult things to assess, but I think it could be useful for lots of different IT projects if you change a word or two. If you're interested in my ROI worksheet, just hop over to our main web site  (http://www.dcc-online.com) and sign up for our e-Newsletter. I will have the project completed in time for our July e-News mailing.

Vista Dilemmas & Tips

While I haven't made the change at work, I decided to install MS Vista Premium on my brand-new home-built PC this week.

If you have used Vista before, you might be familiar with the most irritating problem I had with it. Every time I try to run anything, Vista pops up a little window asking me if I really want to do that. There's no option to click "Always Trust this program", and no way to add exceptions or relax the rules. Absolutely everything I try to do triggers this really annoying response. Granted, it's one click to get rid of the window each time, but the incessant nagging really gets on my nerves.

I think it's nice that they stepped up security, but this feature needs to have an exception list like a firewall, so that I can permanently authorize third-party apps to run on my system.

In the meantime, I found a way to turn it off.* Open the control panel, and click in the search box. Type in: "User Account" and hit enter.  Click "Turn User Account Control On or Off". Remove the checkmark by clicking it, then OK your choice. You'll need to reboot, and that will be the end of the nagging. Your computer will be slightly less secure, but you will be less likely to throw things at the screen, so I think all in all you're better off. You'll still get a little annoying red shield with an "x" on it down by your system clock, but you can get rid of that easily enough if you turn off security notifications.

The rest of my Vista experience has been pretty good, all things considered. As expected, I had to download new drivers for most of my hardware, even though it is all  brand new. The good news is that all of the new drivers, once loaded, seem to work very well.

The big hurdle for this process was my motherboard's onboard wireless card. It was not recognized by Vista at all, and Vista would not allow me to use the Asus install disk. I ended up using my laptop to download a new version from ASUS, sneakernetted that to my new PC, and loaded it up from there. Voila! The card was recognized.

The next tale of woe involves Windows Defender, which consistently disables some of my ASUS software during the boot sequence. This means every time I turn on the PC, I have a broken wireless connection to fix. This is a rather long and involved process, since for some reason Vista keeps losing my WEP key for an unknown reason. I'm also still learning where things are, and the wireless controls have become much more complicated. I really miss XP's "Repair this connection" feature, which automated the old DOS "ip config/release and /renew" functions. I haven't decided yet whether to consider disabling Windows Defender. Again, I wish Microsoft had made the security tools in a sensible way so users could more easily control which programs are allowed to run on their computers.  

My boot time is still a bit longer than I would like, but other than that, I don't have any complaints yet. I'll let you  know how things go as I upgrade components along the way. Here's what I've got so far:

Antec 9000 Case

ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard

AMD Opteron (Second-Generation) 1220 (2.8 Ghz) dual-core processor with 2MB L2 cache

2 GB (2X1GB) Wintec AMPX SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

2X Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

My old ATI Radeon GPU that keeps overheating in this rig.  :-(

Vista Premium 64-bit edition

I think my next upgrade will be a new GPU. My new PC has been designed to be very quiet, and I don't want to add a GPU cooler to make more of a ruckus. I'm considering two quieter PCI-E cards with the SLI bridge.

*Caviat:  You probably shouldn't disable UAC if you're concerned about security very much; but this is just my home PC, which doesn't have any critical data on it. It's behind a firewall with address translation, and I run pretty agressive antivirus, antimalware, and antispyware regimens.  

Home again

After a busy week, the DCC team is back. We had a great time meeting new people and getting reacquainted with long-time friends. Our booth was very popular due to an accident of fortune: Our theme for our exhibit was "knock one out of the park",  and this week the Tigers pitched their first Comerica Park no-hitter! We must have given away 250 DCC baseballs. To sum up, here are some photos:

A Dynamic Road Trip

Cindy Hupfel, Wendy Tate, and Eric Haener are hitting the road this week. The three of them will be representing Dynamic Computer at Detroit's ITEC conference Wednesday and Thursday. While attending ITEC, DCC will exhibit in booth #412 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM Wednesday and 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM Thursday. On Wednesday Cindy and Wendy will give  a presentation on virtualization from 11:30-12:15. If you're in Detroit, stop by Cobo Hall and say hello! You can get in free of charge by choosing 'dynvip' in their online registration menu.

Also, on Friday the 15th Cindy, Wendy and Eric will be attending the MI-HIMSS summer conference at the St. John Golf Center in Plymouth. MI-HIMSS, for the uninitiated, is the Michigan Chapter of the Health Information & Management Systems Society. This event will be a day-long conference focusing on the impact and utilization of various types of technology on healthcare IT. Topics at the HIMSS event will be thin-clients, Internet2, the integration of PACS into EMRs and that sort of thing. DCC is a sponsor of the HIMSS event and will have an exhibit and participate in the conference sessions. This will be a nice way for everyone to unwind after ITEC!

Happy Birthday Carrie and Cindy

It's a big week for us at Dynamic, as we celebrate Cindy Hupfel and Carrie Winters' birthdays! Happy birthday, guys!

Sneak peek at our new White Paper

As part of the work we do for our customers, DCC has started a series of white papers. Our goal is to answer a lot of the questions lurking behind the scenes of our clients' IT shops.  As the writing-addicted member of the staff, naturally I'm involved in putting this document together. I love to write papers, because inevitably I find something in my research that is simply not what I'd have expected to find.

For instance, right now I'm writing about data center energy efficiency. In the interest of writing a thorough, well-researched paper,  I'm  fact-checking everything, even things that seem to be common sense. A larger capacity hard drive, for instance, consumes more energy than a smaller one of the same type. That makes sense, right? The manufacturers' specifications for those drives lists their wattage requirements, and sure enough, the greater capacity drives require more watts to spin and idle.

Ergo, to be more energy efficient, stick with smaller drives... or so I would have thought. Then, consider that I'm writing about a data center, which has a large array of disks. From a space perspective, it's more efficient to have larger drives, so I decided to examine the cost of using that extra energy compared with the square footage consumed by using more drives with a smaller capacity.

It turns out that if you look at it in terms of watts per gigabyte, larger drives are the way to go. Here's a sampling of my results:

Drive	Energy Required	Watts/GB
Samsung SATA 120 GB (7200 RPM)	Seek: 9.5 W Idle: 7.7 W Standby: 0.9 W	.07 w/GB .06 w/GB .007 w/GB
Seagate SATA750 GB (7200 RPM)	Seek: 12.6 W Idle: 9.3W Standby: 0.8 W	.016 w/GB .012 w/GB. .001 w/GB
Hitachi Deskstar SATA 1TB (7200 RPM)	Seek: 13.6 W Idle: 9 W Standby: 0.9 W	.013 w/GB .008 w/GB .0008 w/GB

 These are, of course, based upon the seek, idle, and standby times provided on the manufacturer spec sheets, and they are averages. Still, it seems pretty clear to me that in an array scenario when you're trying to squeeze the most possible storage out of your available space and wattage, larger drives are better.