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 Centralized architectures can imply cost-tracking complexities
It's often been observed that IT has become the central nervous system of most organizations. It is, after all, the fundamental conduit by which business information flows, informs, and empowers the overall organizational mission.
Furthermore, centralization has become a more prevalent theme than at any time since the seventies, when mainframe computing was the de facto standard in business. With the rise of such successful design theories as service oriented architecture (SOA), enterprise-class IT is increasingly moving toward federated architectures, which deliver and redeliver core IT services across departments and divisions in proportion to the business need.
 As IT has become more centralized, however, certain challenges have risen in consequence. Among the foremost of these is cost-tracking. In a conventional distributed environment broken down by operational silos, cost-tracking is a relatively simple matter, since each silo has its own IT resources and the costs generated are associated with that silo as a result. As the walls between silos are increasingly pulled down, however, cost-tracking is becoming increasingly complex. By sharing basic IT services SOA-style, IT is also inadvertently obscuring which groups, and which projects, are generating which expenses.
Nowhere is this situation clearer than in today's datacenter. The typical enterprise-class datacenter houses well over a thousand servers; these in turn support different applications running on different operating systems, which in turn support different services designed to map the overall business needs of the organization. Given such a centralized architecture, it can be especially hard to isolate costs on a per-project or per-group basis. And complicating matters further is the fact that with the increasing popularity of virtualization, those physical servers are often running multiple logical servers—simultaneously and in parallel. This extra dimension of complexity makes cost-tracking even vaguer, a particular problem at a time when budget-challenged IT operations are chartered to improve overall efficiency through improved cost visibility. New solutions are required to solve this problem.
IBM delivers a solution for isolating and quantifying IT costs
With IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (TUAM), today's organizations can track and resolve IT costs with far greater granularity than ever before—across organizational, technological, and project domains. Furthermore, because it supports an exceptionally broad range of host environments, including many leading operating systems as well as VMWare's popular virtualization solution, TUAM will prove suitable for almost any infrastructure, giving the organization the key information required to create itemized chargebacks, improve costs visibility, and reduce overhead by generating accurate projections.
How does the solution work? TUAM pulls cost information using diverse and comprehensive data collectors. For instance, the enterprise data collector for databases covers leading solutions such as DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, and there are e-mail collectors for Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and SendMail. Furthermore, the broad range of operating systems supported by TUAM data collectors spans Windows, many flavors of UNIX (such as AIX, HP/UX, and Sun Solaris), various branches of Linux (Red Hat and Novell SUSE), and i5/OS.
Furthermore, the solution's flexibility and potential are maximized through the Data Collector Took Kit (included with the TUAM Enterprise Edition). This tool kit allows IT to develop custom collectors, in cases where they aren't already provided, delivering all the power of TUAM to a theoretically infinite range of applications and services.
Among other examples (PDF,127KB) of collectors which have been created, for example, are network collectors, to support Novell Web, NetworkVantage, and Netscout; telecom collectors, to support IBM WebSphere, routers and firewalls from many vendors, and PBX phone systems; storage collectors, to support myriad SANs (storage area networks), tape systems, and optical systems; and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, including those available from SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle Financials.
Fulfilling the promise of virtualization
One key selling point of TUAM: cost-tracking continues to work even when, through virtualization, wholly different applications and operating systems are deployed on the same physical host (server).
Cost-tracking information has historically been harder to obtain in a virtualized datacenter as a result of the higher level of shared physical assets. When IT deploys multiple logical servers on one physical machine, which in turn supports IT services delivered to many different organizational divisions and projects, cost-tracking is intrinsically more complex. Through its comprehensive data collectors, however, TUAM will work the same whether the collectors operate in a virtualized environment or not.
Such comprehensive functionality will be attractive to organizations which may have been resistant to making the leap to virtualization specifically because of the added management complexities implied. And once they have made the transition, by consolidating physical servers, organizations will have taken a major step toward reducing total cost of ownership for the datacenter. Fewer servers require less energy, and energy costs are typically the fastest-growing element of overall datacenter costs. Thus, TUAM can actually help not just track costs, but reduce them.
Undemanding administration and report generation
Once TUAM has been deployed, it is easily managed and its results are easily obtained. As of version 7.1, TUAM offers straightforward administration via an easy-to-use console accessible within any standard Web browser; furthermore, many new languages are supported in the interface, a key feature for enterprise-class organizations which have worldwide operations. And because it can automate many common daily functions, TUAM also delivers improved ROI. IT staff will no longer be required to collect cost information manually, and can instead focus on more challenging tasks requiring human intelligence and expertise, while at the same time minimizing the possibility of inadvertent human error in the information-collection process.
Once cost-tracking information is aggregated by the solution, it's analyzed, using a powerful rules-driven engine, and then presented in a tailored format. TUAM can generate more than 200 different types of reports, ensuring that organizations will be able to view cost information in a manner best suited to the immediate business needs. Not only do these reports reflect organizational costs associated with business units, divisions, departments, and projects, they also reflect operational costs associated with applications and IT projects. Managers can, in this way, drill down to the desired level of detail, pinpointing exactly which costs are being generated by which people using which technologies, in as much detail as they see fit.
The overall outcome for IT? Costs are more closely aligned with business objectives; costs are also reduced, as organizations can more easily visualize where and how money is being spent; virtualization strategies are empowered, and management complexities are diminished. TUAM, in short, helps transform IT into a more streamlined and effective instrument in the pursuit of business success.
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