Cloud Computing Saves Time, Money and Shortens Production Cycle

How do you get numerous promising new technologies into the hands of early adopters quickly and efficiently so that the most promising ones can be identified and fast-tracked? That’s the conundrum that IBM’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP) faced. To TAP leaders, the answer was obvious: cloud computing.

TAP’s role is to prototype and deploy new IBM technologies with 100,000 early adopters who will test-drive and provide feedback on new applications. Based on their feedback, IBM decides which of the myriad new technology applica­tions to move into production.
Getting 120 projects into the hands of as many as 100,000 early adopters, however, is neither an easy nor an inexpensive task. In the standard data center environment, deploying new IT technologies is labor-intensive, requiring months of scheduling to procure and build infrastructures. The typical IBM pilot team requires as long as three months to do so. With 120 projects a year to support, the IBM TAP program would have been required to purchase 488 additional servers to meet its goals. Not only would that have a required a ma­jor capital outlay, but the challenges of manual infrastructure deployment would have been prohibitive.
Cloud computing offered TAP as a means to dramatically reduce the time required to provision physical and virtual servers, use only those IT resources when they were required and reduce the hardware and labor necessary to do the job. Moreover, cloud computing represents a major leap in IBM’s vision for the newly emerging dynamic IT infrastructure and a smarter planet. With cloud computing, TAP could rely on automated provisioning, monitoring and virtualization to increase the flexibility of the infrastructure and consolidate to a smaller number of more fully utilized physical servers. Installation and configu­ration time for TAP solutions shrank by 75 percent with cloud computing.
Once implemented, cloud computing delivered on its promise of dramatic efficiencies. For instance, with cloud computing the TAP team reduced the amount of time required to procure and build an infrastructure from weeks to hours, greatly increasing productivity and enabling IBM to move promising applications to production sooner. Cloud also made a considerable, positive impact on TAP’s budget. Instead of 488 new servers that manual deployment would have required, TAP only needed to procure 55 new servers to support its plan. That translated into annual hardware savings of $1.3 million and power savings of more than $69,600.
The cloud computing savings associated with administration costs were even
more significant. In the cloud computing environment, the number of admin­istrators required shrank from 15 to two, yielding estimated annual savings of $1.9 million. Just as important, the labor savings associated with cloud computing enabled IBM to deploy those valuable personnel for work on other high-value projects.
Indeed, when IBM tells customers that cloud computing can improve efficiency and flexibility of your data center and significantly slash operating costs, IBM is speaking from first-hand experience.
To learn more about cloud computing, visit our web site:
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/
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