MANTRA 10: Resizing your IT

Needs change and as your business grows or transforms itself, you need to evolve your IT to match it. One of the key issues in resizing your IT (frequently called up-scaling) is foreseeing and planning for such a change. Both over and under estimation of future needs can create problems. Therefore, you might find that as time passes, you may even want to pull back a little bit. For instance, that new data center you built may now be too big or completely unnecessary if you have found alternatives or your business has changed. 

What of consolidation?



Everyone out there is now talking of 'consolidation'. Instead of having multiple servers and large investments scattered all over the place, centralizing it gives you both better manageability and controls costs. You not only save on equipment that are no longer necessary, but also on IT staff, who can be pruned and centralized. If you're going in for consolidation, you're again resizing your IT.

Not all plug-n-play!



Do note though that it is not a matter of simple re-arrangement of hardware. Other factors (like your software) may change too, along with overheads of management and support. Is your old support team geared to support the reconfigured deployment? Do you need new software to manage this setup? For instance, if you built yourself a cluster-server using old PCs that were around, you now need a cluster-class OS to run it. And to take true advantage of it, you need cluster-aware software or your needs must involve the ability to involve the cluster compute. Normal applications don't need such power, although software can be used to distribute the load on a cluster making it finish faster.

Capacity planning



Don't be over-cautious with your future estimation. You need to sit with your business people and understand their vision and direction for your company's future. Then, your estimation must take the demands of that into account. Also, you need to be continuously aware of where your business market is heading and plan a little in advance to react to those changes - if there is a boom and your company starts hiring more people or gets a dozen new clients suddenly, your IT must be strong enough to handle that. Or, if there's a depression and you're losing people and clients, the load of your IT expenditure on the company finances must be low enough not to cause problems.

Software



What about scaling your software as well? When you go from a few PCs to a complete office network, details like what numbers of what kinds of servers to have, take on importance. Along with this decision lies selecting what software to run on them. Even one scale of a network to another can necessitate reselection of software. In one simple case, introducing a domain into a previously workgroup or peer network is a complicated process.

The choices



Choices like if you need to buy a rack or a blade server? Or are your needs satisfied with a tower? Do you need just a server room or a full datacenter or, can you re-locate your servers with someone else? the same goes for the IT staff as well-where you can have your own staff or outsource your IT operation in bits or as a whole to an outside agency. Each need has its own specific answer and your need has to be well defined before its solution can be found.