Dell’s CIO: Virtualisation Saved Us £100 Million

Standardisation is key

To reach that goal, Dell standardised on to server images, across the whole company, in all 90 countries. “In our whole $54 million organisation, we use only two images. One for online, and one for transactions.” If any Dell division wants to set up a new server. They get one of these (virtual) machines.

At the same time, older kit is being phased out – the company now has no mainframes or other vendors’ Unix boxes – and Johnson says more than 97 percent of its servers are x86 machines. It only has a couple of high-reliability Tandem mainframes (the Tandem brand is an old IT one, now owned by HP), and “Solaris and IBM servers have all gone away,” he said.

“Ruthless standardisation on the platform and software level has enabled us to get the environment the same,” he said “Now we can simplify through consolidation.”

This helps cut energy use, alongside moves like containing the hot aisle in the data centres, and managing hot air. “Even in Texas we have fresh air cooling 150 days a year, and 40 percent of our power comes from renewable sources,” said Johnson. Reducing the energy cost is important, he says, because “power is the largest single cost in my data centres – it is probably even more than staff costs within the data centre, though we don’t break those out.”

Some hardware replacements can pay for themselves in one year of power savings, he says, which makes the hardware budget radically different – and was made possible because he actually gets the electricity bill in a cross-charge from the facilities department, “along with window cleaning and potted plants.”

And virtualisation also cuts the people costs: “I get a server from the factory, burn an image on it and drop it into a VMware cluster. We monitor it and when it breaks we send someone in”. With only two images, fixing problems is very easy, he points out: “I can now swap out servers much faster with less impact, fewer engineering hours and less downtime.”

Getting rid of Shadow IT

To get rid of older systems, the company reduced its application inventory by 25 percent per year for three years. Three years ago it had around 8000 applications – a “Shadow IT” problem that had sprung up when the company allowed departments to get their own technology – and the IT department lost control.

“Shadow IT is any spending on tech services that is not within the control of the IT organisation,” said Johnson. It includes printers bought with the stationery budget, and business units managing and designing their own reports.

For Dell, getting rid of Shadow IT means globalisation – but it’s not just a matter of squashing the departments. “Innovation can come form both sides of the house, and we don’t want to stifle that,” he said. For instance, users may find quick and easy ways to use cloud apps such as Google Docs.