The customer

An outsourcing provider who has been using the SMT tools since the early 1990’s recently implemented a full IT Business Intelligence solution. Yearly benchmarks have repeatedly placed this installation among the most efficient in its class (a recurring credit to the SMT tools, according to the local IT management). Nevertheless, new lessons were learned – and substantial savings gained – from the new information made available through IT Business Intelligence.

The questions

As ITBI translates technical data into information easily perceived at management level it was straight forward to answer the question from one of the business managers invited to the company’s very first ITBI presentation: “Which is our single most expensive system?”

As the graph shows, the most expensive system was no business application but TSM, which is a tool that centralises and administrates backups of decentralised data (from the server farm) using the mainframe environment. The next question was, of course: “Why?”

The answer

The answer was quite simple. Years before, when the company installed its first production servers, it had been a natural decision to handle their minimal backup requirements using the trusted mainframe platform. Through the following years the installation grew to more than 1000 servers and TSM backups ended up unable to finish within night shift and using hundreds of MIPS even during online peak.

The solution

TSM is a well known technical system within the organisation. The installation is repeatedly certified as being very efficient. Nevertheless, when the right information was made available to the right people, it took only a quick decision to move TSM to a couple of UNIX servers immediately.

The savings

Even counting in the remaining activity of moving old backups to the new platform, this outsourcing provider saved 1.5 M € per year (year after year) through this one ITBI-supported decision. Just like that.