Use Cases
Global 2000 enterprises and IT-as-a-Service Providers
Business Capacity Management
- Server Consolidation/Virtualization: Server consolidation should ideally be done based on financial considerations. They key question is which servers (or groups of servers) should be consolidated to generate maximum cost savings while at the same time ensuring IT support requirements are met? This question can only be answered with a solid understanding of the economics of the entire IT operation, which SatoriAnalytics provides by aggregating, normalizing and analyzing capacity, usage and cost data across all servers (regardless of hardware/software configuration).
- Application Sizing: Deploying a new application requires planning of computing capacity before production roll-out. SatoriAnalytics provides capabilities for capacity planning based on demand simulations that allow organizations to estimate how much computing capacity will be required to run an application at a certain service level. This helps reduce the risk of failed or delayed production deployments by ensuring that the appropriate level of computing capacity is available for the application. Visibility to total application demand even if running in many simultaneous environments also enables consolidation simulations as well as a better understanding of application costs.
- Capacity Planning: Planning for the right amount of capacity is critical in order to maintain desired performance levels and cost efficiency in a virtual machine environment. The dynamic nature of a virtualized environment has turned capacity planning into a multi-dimensional analytical challenge, taking into account historical utilization, load profiles, “VM sprawl” issues, demand forecasts, etc. SatoriAnalytics provides the insight through one platform to solve the complexities of this great challenge to enable proactive capacity management.
IT Financial Management
- IT Chargeback: In a virtualized computing environment, where workloads and applications are dynamically re-allocated and executed where capacity is available, there is no longer a direct relationship between physical servers, applications and users. Traditional methods for cost allocation and IT chargeback no longer work and a new breed of solutions for financial management of IT is required. In addition to physical server charging SatoriAnalytics satisfies this virtual environment requirement with unique capabilities to dynamically monitor capacity allocation (e.g. how much capacity was allocated to a virtual instance or application at any point in time), usage of capacity (e.g. how much capacity was actually used by a virtual instance, individual user or application) and “production cost” of capacity (e.g. what is the total cost of ownership/operation of each physical server, virtual instance or application. With this sophisticated understanding of costs and usage, charging for consumption of computing resources occurs transparently whereby the costs for IT services are well understood and pricing can be optimized to satisfy business objectives.
- IT Budgeting: Given the ever increasing demand for IT resources, budgeting for IT has always been challenging; but in a virtualized environment it has become even more difficult. With SatoriAnalytics, both IT and business units have a common platform with historical data and simulation capabilities to make fact based budgeting decisions. With visibility into the historical costs of running each application and simulation capabilities for anticipated usage scenarios – be it expansion or cutbacks – the traditional guessing game of budgeting is over.
- Platform Standardization: By understanding detailed costs associated with the IT operation it is possible to gain insight into which platforms perform most cost effectively within given environments and for specific application loads. With this heightened awareness, standardization on the most cost efficient platforms for a given operation can lead to significant cost savings and operational simplification.
- Outsourcing Management: IT outsourcers typically price their services based on the number of servers they are managing. As a customer it is difficult to know how well your outsourcing provider is managing the infrastructure and if resources are being used efficiently. Are you overpaying for the services? Are servers well utilized? Are there opportunities for server consolidation and other efficiency initiatives? Do I really need 23 new servers for the new application I want to roll out? These are common questions for companies who are using IT outsourcing services, yet very few service providers are able to answer them satisfactorily. With SatoriAnalytics, the customer gains full visibility into capacity, utilization and operating costs of the server infrastructure across all platforms. With this insight the service provider can proactively managed to achieve greater efficiency and cost savings.
- Utility Charging: As providers move to an IT-as-a-Service model, utility pricing methods become the financial basis to bill a customer, i.e. based on the amount of consumed IT capacity rather than on the amount of IT capacity available (or servers managed). The SatoriAnalytics platform is provides the charging infrastructure for IT services sold as a utility and the flexibility to accommodate different pricing models.
- IT-as-a-Service: A requirement for successful implementation of IT-as-a-Service is the ability to express IT services in terms that customers, i.e. business users, can understand. A vital component to this is an economic infrastructure that allows for:
- Visibility: SatoriAnalytics provides monitoring of the computing inventory and real-time metering of IT services usage
- Cost control and efficiency: SatoriAnalytics allows for keeping track of and minimizing the “production cost” of IT services
- Charging: SatoriAnalytics provides a fair and easy to understand charging mechanism for IT services
More Information
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