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Lower TCO and Improved Business Value with Dell PowerEdge Servers and Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Comparing Scale-up using Proprietary UNIX servers versus Scale-out industry

standard solutions from Dell and Microsoft

Analyst: Thomas Pisello, author of IT Value Chain Management: Maximizing the ROI from IT Investments (Alinean Press – 2005)

April 2005

Page - 2 Copyright © 2001-2005 Alinean, Inc.

Introduction 4

The Bottom Line 5

TCO Analysis Methodology 6

TCO Categories 7

Dell PowerEdge with Windows Server 2003 TCO Analysis 9

The TCO Analysis Scenarios 9 Dell / Windows versus Sun Solaris 10 Dell / Windows versus IBM AIX 12 Dell / Windows versus HP 14

Dell / Windows Delivers Compelling Value for Performance and Optimized Utilization 16

Competitive Configurations – Performance / Value Analysis 18 Reducing IT Operations and Administration Costs 19 Facilities Costs 21 Change Costs 21 Availability and Downtime Costs 22 Security Management and Risks 24

Conclusions 25

About Alinean 27


Published by: Alinean Inc. • 13501 Ingenuity Dr. • Suite 212 • Orlando, FL 32826 USA Tel: 407-382-0005 • Fax: 407-382-0906 • Email: [email protected] • Web: www.alinean.com April 2005 © Copyright 2001 - 2005, Alinean, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.


Introduction Business demand for information technology (IT) continues to increase, outpacing many IT budgets. This continues the trend of IT managers having to “do more with less”.

With ongoing management and maintenance, migrations and upgrades to the existing IT systems consuming more than 90% of budgets, only 10% of investments are left for new business functions and innovation.1 Reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) on assets, particularly enterprise servers, can help to make IT operations more efficient, free precious budgets for IT investments and drive business value improvements and competitive advantage. To accomplish IT operations cost reductions, many organizations are exploring consolidations, migrations, and upgrades to their large proprietary UNIX symmetrical multi-processor (SMP) servers.

The organization has several choices for the consolidation and migration, including:

1. “Scale-up” the configurations to the latest mid-range RISC based UNIX proprietary hardware. The newer high performance systems using integrated virtualization features available with some of these operating system platforms can help intelligently allocate and distribute various application workloads across the processors and servers. This will maximize utilization and minimize the number of servers to manage, while providing adaptability to changing business needs. However, the steep initial investment in hardware, operating systems, management software, complexity of the configurations, higher support and maintenance contracts, and mission critical services contract requirements to achieve desired service levels are still costly when compared to industry standard alternatives.

2. “Scale-out” the installation using less expensive rack optimized IA-32 based industry standard

servers configured in a server farm, cluster or computing grid. This kind of commodity-based computing infrastructure costs less initially to deploy, and over-time to maintain, than traditional datacenter servers due to the flexibility and use of standard hardware components that can be easily added, moved and changed as business requirements evolve. To help optimize assets, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 can be utilized to further consolidate production server workloads through automated provisioning of data center resources.2 Applications and databases are being, or have already been, optimized for grid computing infrastructures providing additional consolidation features, greater asset optimization, higher performance and lower operating costs. In addition, system administrators’ familiarity with this type of infrastructure, Windows operating systems and integrated user and system management tools can be a significant factor in reducing the need to maintain more in-house administration, programming and support skill sets which also act to reduce operational costs.

1 Analysis of IT spending utilizing the Alinean Peer Comparison v4.0 database (July 2004). 2 At only $999 for support of up to 32 processors, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 offers an incredible virtualization utility with many of the features of virtualization integrated within UNIX platforms such as HP-UX 11i and IBM AIX 5.2L for minimal additional systems management software cost. Coupled with integrated systems and user / resource management tools such as Microsoft Operations Management (MOM) and Active Directory, Microsoft offers the most advanced set of management tools for little or no additional cost.

Standardizing and consolidating with Dell PowerEdge Servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 fulfills on the “Do more with less” strategy for specific workloads including database, web solution bundles, application hosting / re-hosting and retail branch office automation.


This white paper independently compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) for various enterprise applications hosted on select configurations of proprietary RISC based UNIX servers from SUN, IBM and HP versus hosting on industry standard Dell PowerEdge Xeon™ based IA-32 servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. The white paper compares the capital investments, change costs, annual recurring operating and capital expenditures, availability, security risks, and business value of these competitive solutions for several different workloads which can benefit from scale-out vs. scale-up architectures: database, web solution bundles, application hosting / re-hosting and retail branch office automation.

The Bottom Line

Comparing specific configurations for select workloads including database, web solution bundles, enterprise application hosting / re-hosting, and retail branch office automation will yield TCO savings of up to 77% or more for Dell PowerEdge servers running Windows Server 2003 when compared to alternative UNIX proprietary configurations. Cost savings were generated from good value versus performance, leading to fewer assets than would be expected to compete with the proprietary mid-range UNIX systems. With competitive virtualization utilizing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, further consolidation and asset utilization was available – and because server TCO

is highly correlated with asset proliferation, even though more servers are needed for the Dell / Windows solution, fewer were needed than expected to fulfill competitive performance requirements.

Server System Proposed JBB2000 Benchmarks Estimated List Price for the

Server Dell PowerEdge 2850, 3.6 GHz/1MB, 2 processors 78,339 $6,626 SUN Fire V880 1.2GHz/8MB, 8 processors 43,353 $78,195 IBM - eServer p5 570 1.65 GHz/36MB, 8 processors 378,844 $285,096 HP Server rp4440-8 1GHz, 8 processors 214,932 $84,584

Dell PowerEdge servers have higher system performance than might be expected to meet desired

workloads while not requiring many more systems in order to compete with low-mid range RISC servers. Only two to three Dell PowerEdge servers are needed to match JBB2000 performance metrics from

proprietary UNIX server solutions, delivering a 180% or higher value / performance advantage. Because scale-out solution TCO rises significantly with asset proliferation, particularly IT operations and

administration costs, the high performance of Dell PowerEdge servers directly leads to needing fewer assets to meet workload requirement. As a result, Dell PowerEdge servers significantly reduce TCO.

Source: Actual and extrapolated SPECjbb2000 Benchmark Results for various systems and configurations as of 8/20/2004. See www. spec.org for current results.

The result: lower hardware and software costs, lower IT operations and administration costs (with 13 servers to 1 full time equivalent (FTE) reach versus 5 servers to 1 FTE for proprietary UNIX platforms) and lower facilities costs. These cost savings were slightly offset by higher change costs (because the application required migration to Windows / IA-32 platform), higher security risk costs, higher planned downtime costs (more assets for the Dell / Windows configuration did require more adds, moves and changes), higher unplanned downtime costs (99.998% availability for most of the UNIX configuration

Dell PowerEdge Servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 can result in TCO savings of up to 77% or more versus proprietary RISC / UNIX configurations for enterprise workloads including database, web solution bundles, enterprise application hosting / re-hosting and retail branch office automation.


versus 99.995% availability for Dell / Windows), and slower time to solution (because of some application and procedure migration time and additional assets and infrastructure setup time, the Dell / Windows solution will take slightly longer to deploy – however Dell’s build to order, fast delivery, and setup / installation utilities and services helps to offset the migration time).

TCO Analysis Methodology With the current focus on fiscal responsibility and due diligence, CIOs and IT executives have indicated in ComputerWorld and CIO Insight surveys that more than 80% of current IT purchases require financial analysis for justification. This white paper analyzes the TCO of various enterprise database and application hosting strategies, configurations, and platforms in order to assess which might be the most cost effective and provide the greatest business benefits to a typical organization. The TCO analysis provided in this white paper can be used by IT decision makers to provide guidance and awareness into the factors that contribute to Dell PowerEdge servers running Windows Server 2003 being the platform of choice in certain scenarios and competitive situations for lowering costs, improving service levels and improving business competitive advantage. The analysis was conducted using TCO and ROI models developed by Alinean, the leading ROI consultancy, whose founders were the original developers of the Gartner TCO Manager and Analyst benchmarking tools. Alinean applied IT spending and TCO benchmarks modeled for over 30 different industries and over 15,000 companies from June of 2004. This baseline information was then used to model typical data center strategies and best practices of specific alternative server and operating system solutions. The calculations are performed using comparable competitive scenarios, with all calculations performed in US dollars, using list pricing for hardware and software investments, burdened labor rates for the defined industries and US suburban locations.

Typical Server TCO - 2004

Hardware7%

Software9%

IT Operations and Administration

52%

Facilities2%

Change Costs7%

Downtime23%

Typical Server TCO analysis highlights that most of the server expenses are for IT Operations and

Administration costs, followed by downtime. Hardware and software total less than 20% of the TCO combined, yet are often used as the basis of server purchase decision making, highlighting why it is

essential to analyze and make decisions based on the total cost of the asset over its useful life using TCO analysis.

Only two to three Dell PowerEdge servers are needed to match the independently certified benchmark performance metrics from proprietary UNIX server solutions, delivering a 180% or higher value / performance advantage.


The results are calculated and compared for the specified configurations and practices, business assumptions and migration / consolidation scenarios in order to determine relative total cost of ownership, business benefits and competitive advantages. As a result, the TCO analysis is highly dependent on:

1) Specific application type, industry, users and workload, current system and application configurations, current IT capability and maturity, and many other factors.

2) Hardware and software list prices at the time of the analysis for the specific system specifications,

and software licensing configurations and schemas. 3) Estimated business costs and practice assumptions utilized to model labor, facilities, and

downtime experiences and costs. The TCO model analyzes the lifecycle costs and benefits for several competitive operating system and server platform and application configurations over a five year analysis period, the typical useful life of business critical servers. The analysis quantifies all of the costs of a particular solution including the initial investment requirements, ongoing expenses, change costs, and downtime costs of each competitive solution – comparing and contrasting the costs for head-to-head assessments. Measuring the total costs over time assures that decisions are made not just on initial purchase price, but on total lifecycle costs. Because decisions should not be made on cost savings alone, the analysis includes an analysis of basic business benefits from the comparative solutions.

TCO Lifecycle Analysis calculates the total cost of owning the asset from initial planning and procurement through retirement.

TCO Categories Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) categories are used to collect cost of ownership metrics and place them in accounting categories to enable comparisons and analysis of various alternative solutions and improvements. The TCO categories are organized as follows:


TCO Chart of Accounts Category Description

Hardware Initial purchase price of servers, storage, networking devices, racks and cabling, spares, and associated hardware maintenance and support contracts.

Software Software licensing costs including operating system, applications, middleware, database, systems management, and associated software support and maintenance contracts.

IT Operations The labor or labor equivalents (outsourced / contract labor) cost for running the data center operations. Tasks include: service desk, performance and availability management, user administration, OS support, break-fix management, software deployment, application management (provisioning and scheduling), systems management, disk and file management, storage management, security management, and database management and administration.

IT Administration The labor or labor-equivalent (outsourced / contract labor) costs for strategic management and overhead tasks in running the data center including: vendor management, procurement, asset management, IT finance and chargeback, IT training, and user training course development.

Facilities Costs for data center floor-space, power consumption, and HVAC cooling.

Change Costs (Upgrade Labor and Services)

The labor costs and services for migrating the servers and applications / databases to the proposed server configurations including the servers, storage, applications, database, network and facilities. These costs include: installation, training, testing, data conversion and migration, systems setup and installation, porting applications and procedures, recompiling applications, loading OS, loading applications, and de-installation and retirement of existing assets.

Unplanned Downtime Unplanned downtime from hardware and software failures, data-loss, network outages, human error, capacity, accessibility, and response issues. The cost for unplanned downtime is typically measured as lost productivity for applications which support user functions, and lost business value and revenue for applications which support business transactions and key processes.

Planned Downtime Planned downtime to perform regular maintenance and upgrades including adds, moves and changes to hardware configurations, software configurations and patches and application updates and upgrades. The cost for planned downtime us usually a fraction of that for unplanned downtime, but can have some impact on productivity or


the business in 24 x 7 operations.

Security Risks Unplanned downtime caused by security incidents including the time to find and mitigate the issue and repair damaged systems or data. Risks include viruses, worm and Trojan attacks, network intrusions, internal incidents and denial of service. The cost for unplanned downtime from security incidents is typically measured as lost productivity for applications which support user functions, and lost business value and revenue for applications which support business transactions and key processes.

Time to Solution Time to solution deployment comparisons whereby the solution which is quicker to implement, particularly for new or improved applications, can help deliver productivity or business benefits more quickly. Future-proofing investments from change, avoiding future asset or labor costs because the existing system can adapt and absorb change quickly without additional investment.

Strategic Business Benefits Agility, flexibility, and adaptability to handle changing business demands and requirements can often result in additional revenue and business opportunities.

Dell PowerEdge with Windows Server 2003 TCO Analysis With any TCO analysis, the configuration of the current “As Is” environment is an important consideration in the analysis results. The “As Is” configuration establishes the opportunities for savings and change costs required for each of the proposed solutions. As well, the proposed solutions “To Be” environment is also critical in that it establishes the potential for consolidation, change costs, investments and savings. Slight changes in any of the assumptions in either environment can affect the results for either the Dell / Windows or proprietary UNIX TCO. These analyses are only valid for the prescribed opportunities and proposed solution sets. To determine personal opportunities for savings with Dell / Windows contact Dell or Alinean for a customized TCO / ROI analysis utilizing Alinean ROIAnalyst™ tools.

The TCO Analysis Scenarios The analyses were performed for a $750 million annual revenue retail company located in a suburban office location with 2,000 internal users.3 The legacy environment for the four workloads (database, web solution bundles, enterprise application hosting / re-hosting and retail branch office automation) considered a portfolio of 4 applications for each workload, with consolidation into a single virtualized server environment.4 For the user support, 75% concurrency support was required. The applications to migrate are primarily Java applications running in a legacy Tru64 UNIX environment.

3 The type of company, location and annual revenue are used in the model to calculate key financial metrics that relate to vertical industry, location and company size such as downtime risks/costs and salaries. 4 The 4 applications were modeled with 20% CPU utilization during normal usage, 60% during peak usage and 50% of applications having peak usage at same time


The proposed consolidation configurations utilize virtualization, with the Dell PowerEdge consolidation utilizing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to enable optimal workload management, agility and consolidation of assets. For the HP and SUN solutions, Oracle 9i was utilized for the database. IBM used the database configuration DB2, while the Microsoft configurations utilized Microsoft SQL 2000. This represents an almost $20,000 per processor advantage alone in initial capital cost avoidance with the Dell PowerEdge configuration.5 For hardware and software costs, list pricing was utilized. Discounts vary widely from vendor to vendor and company to company, making list price analysis the only method available for a research paper of this type.

Application Portfolio Scenarios

Applications in the

Portfolio

CPUs needed during Normal

Operations

CPUs needed during Peak

Operations

Percentage of Applications that Peak at

same Time of Day

CPUs without Virtualization

(Islands Scenario)

CPUs with Virtualization

CPU’s Saved

% CPUs Saved

Single application 1 2 8 100% 8 8 0 0% A few small applications 5 0.5 2 50% 10 7 3 30% Many medium applications 10 2 8 50% 80 50 30 38% A few applications where 2 peak at once 3 1 5 66% 15 11 4 27% Many small applications 10 0.25 0.75 40% 8 5 3 38% A few large applications 2 5 25 50% 50 30 20 40% Many applications, peak at different times 10 2 6 25% 60 30 30 50%

Using workload analysis, standard and virtualized environments were compared, showing where the

maximum consolidation savings could be achieved via partitions. The TCO savings and business benefits of Dell PowerEdge servers and Windows Server 2003 versus proprietary UNIX servers are summarized as follows:

Dell / Windows versus Sun Solaris The TCO was compared between Dell PowerEdge 2850, 3.6 GHz / 1MB, 2 processor servers and Windows Server 2003 versus Sun Fire V880 1.2GHz / 8MB, 8 processor servers and Sun Solaris 9. The TCO savings for Dell PowerEdge Server for the prescribed configurations results in $12.5 million in three year savings from Sun Solaris running on proprietary RISC Sun Fire V880 servers, a 76.9% total savings. Because the Dell / Windows configuration achieved high performance and utilized virtualization for further consolidation, only 21 servers were needed, compared to 22 total for the Sun Fire V880 configuration.6 The higher value / performance from the Dell / Windows configuration for handling the specified workload, results in over $11.1 million in three year savings alone just from the hardware and software savings including capital cost avoidance and savings in ongoing support and maintenance contracts. Although the number of servers to manage are nearly the same, a typical administrator can manage 13 Windows rack optimized servers, compared to 5 UNIX mid-range servers. More efficient management of servers and 5 More processors for the Dell/Windows configuration cuts into some of the savings, but the cost difference is significant. 6 Based on JBB2000 benchmarks, with servers configured for clustering for fault tolerance and virtualization of 4 applications with 20% CPU utilization during normal usage, 60% during peak usage and 50% of applications having peak usage at the same time. Non-production servers for disaster recovery were included.


ongoing increase in optimal usage of server assets provides labor savings in IT operations and administration, facilities and change cost savings, adding over $1.3 million in cumulative three year benefits. For mission critical applications, the direct reduction in capital and operating expenditures more than offsets the risks and soft cost impact of downtime. When comparing the Dell / Windows configuration to the Sun Solaris configuration, there is an increase in downtime and security losses. These indirect costs result from a prediction of increased downtime and security risks. However, in environments where downtime costs are $3 million or more per hour, these costs may be too extensive to be offset by reductions in capital and operating expenditures. TCO Comparison (cumulative 3 -

year) Sun Solaris Dell / Microsoft Windows Benefits Benefits %

IT Cost Reductions

Server Hardware $3,165,413 $986,733 $2,178,680 68.8%Server Software $10,105,124 $1,169,268 $8,935,856 88.4%IT Operations $1,183,401 $374,277 $809,124 68.4%IT Administration $277,241 $60,924 $166,317 73.2%Facilities $327,279 $49,803 $261,555 84.8%Change Costs $341,421 $226,708 $114,713 33.6%

Total $15,349,879 $2,867,713 $12,482,166 81.3% Business Operating Efficiency

Downtime - Business Hours $8,757 $22,665 ($13,908) -158.8%

Downtime - Non Business Hours $52,539 $52,026 $513 1.0%

Security Business Impact $116,931 $139,080 ($22,149) -18.9Total $178,227 $213,771 ($35,544) -19.9 Business Strategic Advantage

Time to Solution $294,225 $573,306 ($279,081) -94.9Total $294,225 $573,306 ($279,081) -94.9 Total $15,822,331 $3,654,790 $12,167,541 76.9


Dell / Windows versus IBM AIX The TCO was compared between Dell PowerEdge 2850, 3.6 GHz / 1MB, 2 processor servers and Windows Server 2003 versus IBM eServer p5 570 1.65 GHz / 36MB, 8 processor servers running IBM AIX 5L v5.2. The TCO savings for the Dell / Windows PowerEdge Server for the prescribed configurations results in $5.0 million in three year savings from IBM running on proprietary RISC eServer p5 servers, a 57.8% total savings. To handle the prescribed workload, the Dell / Microsoft configuration needs 21 servers, compared to only 7 servers for the IBM configuration.7 However, each IBM server is over 31 times more expensive than each Dell server, leading to combined hardware and software savings of over $4.9 million in initial costs and ongoing support and maintenance costs over the three year analysis. Although there are more Dell / Windows servers to manage when compared to the IBM configuration, industry metrics indicate that a single typical administrator can manage 13 Windows rack optimized servers, compared to 5 UNIX mid-range servers. When Windows servers were lower performing, it would often take 3 to 4 times the number of servers to equal a single UNIX mid-range server, providing management cost advantage to UNIX. However, recent gains by Dell and Microsoft in performance, manageability and virtualization, it typically takes only 2 times more assets or less to equal typical mid-range RISC based UNIX performance. This therefore reduces the asset proliferation issues of “scale-out” strategies, such as that proposed in the Dell / Windows configuration, making it the economical choice for most enterprise workloads. As a result, the Dell / Windows configuration can lead to ongoing IT operations and administration and change cost savings of almost another $85 thousand over three years. The Dell / Windows configuration gives back some of the savings in time to solution benefits, accounting for the fact that with the Dell / Windows configuration more assets will need to be setup and deployed. An

7 Based on JBB2000 benchmarks, with servers configured for clustering for fault tolerance and virtualization of 4 applications with 20% CPU utilization during normal usage, 60% during peak usage and 50% of applications having peak usage at same time. Non-production servers for disaster recovery were included.


application that requires complex migration or porting efforts can lose many of the proposed IT capital and operational savings and require additional scrutiny. With the exception of completely custom applications, enterprise applications are available with optimized support for Windows and IA-32 architectures. For custom applications Microsoft provides tools (Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX 3.0) that create an integrated UNIX subsystem that runs on top of the Windows operating system, providing a supporting technology that allows a Windows server to essentially replace a UNIX system without requiring significant revision of the surrounding environment and other systems. For mission critical applications, the direct reduction in capital and operating expenditures more than offsets the risks and soft cost impact of downtime. When comparing the Dell / Windows configuration to the IBM AIX configuration, there is an increase in downtime and security losses. These indirect costs result from a prediction of more downtime and increased security risks. However, in environments where downtime costs are $1 million or more per hour, these costs may be too extensive to be offset by reductions in capital and operating expenditures. TCO Comparison (cumulative 3

- year) IBM AIX Dell / Microsoft Windows Benefits Benefits %

IT Cost Reductions

Server Hardware $2,536,078 $986,733 $1,576,345 61.5%Server Software $4,584,373 $1,169,268 $3,415,105 74.5%IT Operations $395,520 $374,277 $21,243 5.4%IT Administration $67,878 $60,924 $6,954 10.2%Facilities $47,637 $49,803 ($2,133) -4.5%Change Costs $283,336 $226,708 $56,628 20.0%


Downtime - Business Hours $8,757 $22,665 ($13,908) -158.8%Downtime - Non Business Hours $44, 814 $52,026 ($7,212) -16.1%Security Business Impact $116,931 $139,080 ($22,149) -18.9%

Total $170,502 $213,771 ($43,269) -25.4% Business Strategic Advantage

Time to Solution $543,018 $573,306 ($30,288) -5.6%Total $543,018 $573,306 ($30,288) -5.6% Total $8,655,342 $3,654,790 $5,000,552 57.8%


Dell / Windows versus HP The TCO was compared between Dell PowerEdge 2850, 3.6 GHz / 1MB, 2 processor servers and Windows Server 2003 versus HP Server rp4440-8 1GHz, 8 processor servers running HP-UX 11i. The TCO savings for Dell PowerEdge Server for the prescribed configurations results in $4.8 million in three year savings from HP-UX 11i running on proprietary RISC based rp4440-8 servers, a 56.6% total savings. To handle the prescribed workload, the Dell / Microsoft configuration needs 21 servers, compared to only 10 for the HP configuration.8 However, each HP RISC server, as specified, is 12 times more expensive than each Dell server, leading to combined hardware and software savings of $5.0 million in initial costs and ongoing support and maintenance costs over the three year analysis. 9 Although there are more Dell / Windows servers to manage when compared to the HP configuration, industry metrics indicate that a single typical administrator can manage 15 Windows rack optimized servers, compared to 5 UNIX mid-range servers. When Windows servers were lower performing, it would often take 3 to 4 times the number of servers to equal a single UNIX mid-range server, providing management cost advantage to UNIX. However, recent gains by Dell and Microsoft in performance, manageability and virtualization, it typically takes only 2 times more assets or less to equal typical mid-range RISC based UNIX performance. This therefore reduces the asset proliferation issues of “scale-out” strategies, such as that proposed in the Dell / Windows configuration, making it the economical choice for most enterprise workloads. As a result, the Dell / Windows configuration can lead to ongoing IT operations and administration and facilities savings of an additional $235 thousand over three years. The Dell / Windows configuration gives back some of the savings in change costs and time to solution benefits, accounting for the fact that with the Dell / Windows configuration more assets need to be setup 8 Based on JBB2000 benchmarks, with servers configured for clustering for fault tolerance and virtualization of 4 applications with 20% CPU utilization during normal usage, 60% during peak usage and 50% of applications having peak usage at same time. Non-production servers for disaster recovery were included. 9 HP-UX 11i offers the option of hosting on Itanium based servers, particularly the HP Integrity servers. This offers an option of maintaining UNIX but migrating from proprietary RISC solutions. This option is typically more cost-effective than proprietary UNIX configurations and should be considered in any migration plan as an alternative solution. Although not within scope of this analysis, Dell / Windows offers a similar advantage in the 12-20% TCO savings range over this Itanium configuration.


and deployed and higher application and procedures migration costs exist. An application that requires complex migration or porting efforts can lose many of the proposed IT capital and operational savings and require additional scrutiny. With the exception of completely custom applications, enterprise applications are available with optimized support for Windows and IA-32 architectures. For custom applications Microsoft provides tools (Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX 3.0) that create an integrated UNIX subsystem that runs on top of the Windows operating system, providing a supporting technology that allows a Windows server to essentially replace a UNIX system without requiring significant revision of the surrounding environment and other systems. For most mission critical applications, the direct reduction in capital and operating expenditures typically offsets the risks and soft cost impact of downtime. When comparing the Dell / Windows configuration to the HP configuration, there is an increase in downtime and security losses. These indirect costs result from a prediction of more downtime and increased security risks when compared with the HP configuration. However in environments where downtime costs are $500 thousand or more per hour, the Dell / Windows savings can be consumed by these indirect costs over a typical three year analysis period. Therefore, for certain enterprise applications such as supply chain or retail management, the TCO savings need to be carefully weighed against risks to assure benefit realization is not consumed by ongoing availability or security issues. TCO Comparison (cumulative

3 - year) HP-UX 11i Dell / Microsoft Windows Benefits Benefits %

IT Cost Reductions

Server Hardware $1,950,848 $986,733 $964,115 49.4%Server Software $5,220,856 $1,169,268 $4,051,588 77.6%IT Operations $537,108 $374,277 $162,831 30.3%IT Administration $100,338 $60,924 $39,414 39.3%Facilities $82,416 $49,803 $32,613 39.6%Change Costs $83,204 $226,708 ($143,504) -172.5%


Downtime - Business Hours $8,757 $22,665 ($13,908) -158.8%

Downtime - Non Business Hours $46,359 $52,026 ($5,667) -12.2%

Security Business Impact $116,931 $139,080 ($22,149) -18.9%Total $172,047 $213,771 ($41,724) -24.3% Business Strategic Advantage

Time to Solution $268,264 $573,306 ($305,042) -113.7%Total $268,264 $573,306 ($305,042) -113.7% Total $8,415,081 $3,654,790 $4,760,291 56.6%


Dell / Windows Delivers Compelling Value for Performance and Optimized Utilization

The Dell / Windows solution provides high performance for low cost. Combined with best practice consolidation strategies, utilization can be optimized leading to fewer assets needed to meet workload requirements.

There are three types of server consolidation which can be considered to help optimize asset utilization and lower TCO, with each successive option providing additional utilization and savings:

1. Logical consolidation is the simplest form of server consolidation. It involves the consistent application of policies, procedures and best practices across infrastructures, including the use of consistent deployment, change management and monitoring methodologies and tools. Logical consolidation provides more standardization, control and consistency, and should be implemented and reviewed on a regular basis across IT organizations in order for the process to be effective and result in utilization improvements and savings.

2. Physical consolidation involves centralizing and consolidating the location of servers. By reducing the number of physical locations for servers, organizations can greatly simplify the day-to-day management and operations of these devices, and more quickly implement adds, moves and changes in order to reconfigure and redeploy to meet changing workloads and demands. In fact, physical consolidation is often a prerequisite, or at least a good starting point, for all the consolidation types.

3. Workload consolidation involves moving the same application from a variety of servers and storage devices to fewer and newer more powerful servers. Combining workloads onto fewer and newer servers that had previously been deployed remotely and / or on older generation servers can provide improved manageability, performance and utilization, improve standardization and move, add and change costs. Workload consolidation has proven very effective for a number of applications, including file / print and messaging / e-mail.


4. Application consolidation involves the aggregation of distinct applications onto a single server. New server virtualization technologies enable this by partitioning the server into virtual workspaces for each application. Extensions of this technology now enable the movement of these virtual machines across clustered physical systems, essentially removing physical limits to the number of virtual machines that can be supported. Virtualization is utilized within this analysis for all configurations as it provides the lowest cost, highest agility solution.

Through consolidation and virtualization, organizations can dramatically improve utilization today. At the same time, clusters for key applications must be considered for additional utilization through availability.

When building consolidation plans, and considering scale-out architectures using rack-optimized IA-32 servers versus small to mid range RISC based UNIX configurations, the issue many organizations have with the IA-32 solution is that it is perceived to take too many servers to match performance and workload demands when compared with the larger UNIX configurations. When asset proliferation in scale-out creates 4 to 5 times the number of servers as with the larger UNIX configurations, labor costs to manage the assets and unique facilities issues with cooling and noise tip the advantage to UNIX. Dell PowerEdge servers offer performance that eliminates the issues of asset proliferation in most scale-out configurations, in many instances having superior performance over some of the older smaller RISC based UNIX platforms, and at worst requiring two servers to match mid-range RISC server performance, but at 1/5th the price per server.

Server Configuration JBB2000 Benchmark

Performance Dell PowerEdge 2850 BEA WebLogic JRockit 1.4.2_04 32-bit JVM (Build

ari-31788-20040616-1132-win-ia32) 78,339

Dell PowerEdge 1850 BEA WebLogic JRockit 1.4.2_04 32-bit JVM (Build ari-31788-20040616-1132-win-ia32)

78,302

Dell PowerEdge 2650 WebLogic JRockit 1.4.2_03 32-bit JVM (Build 20031212-1647-win-ia32)

72,701

Dell PowerEdge 2650 WebLogic JRockit 1.4.2_03 32-bit JVM (build 20040128-1527-linux-ia32)

69,106

Dell PowerEdge 2650 BEA WebLogic JRockit 32-bit JVM (Build 1.4.1 SDK Developer Release)

63,094


61,096


60,802

Source: SPECjbb2000 Benchmark Results for dual Intel processor systems as of 8/20/2004. See www.

spec.org for current results.


Competitive Configurations – Performance / Value Analysis

Server Type

Number of Production

Servers Needed

JBB2000 Benchmarks

List Price per

System Total Cost

Annual Hardware

Support and Maintenance Spares

Dell PowerEdge 2850, 3.6 GHz 1MB, 2 processors 21 78,339 $6,626 $139,146 Included $6,957 SUN Fire V880 1.2GHz, 8MB, 8 processors

22 43,353 $78,195 $1,720,290 $168,589 $34,406

IBM - eServer p5 570 1.65 GHz/ 36MB, 8 processors 7 285,707

$205,624 $1,439,368 $92,120

Included

HP Server rp4440-8 1GHz, 8 processors 10 214,932 $84,584 $845,840 $82,046

Included

The value of Dell / Windows continues with the needed software investment, costing 80% less than proprietary UNIX configurations. The Microsoft Windows solutions include:

1. Windows Server 2003 - Enterprise Edition: Support for up to eight processors at a price point of $3,999, including 25 CALs. New to Windows Server 2003 are eight-node clustering (compared with four-way clustering in Windows 2000 Advanced Server) and a new 64-bit version of the product in addition to the 32-bit Version (IA-32 modeled in this analysis). Windows Server 2003 includes user, systems, clustering, availability and enterprise management tools which reduce the need for additional software to support manageability and availability.

2. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 – Enterprise Edition: Enterprise Edition includes the

complete set of SQL Server data management and analysis features and is uniquely characterized by several features that make it the most scalable and available edition of SQL Server 2000. It has been benchmarked to scale to the performance levels required to support the largest Web sites, Enterprise Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems and Data Warehousing systems. Its support for failover clustering also makes it ideal for any mission critical line-of-business application. Additionally, this edition includes several advanced analysis features that are not included in SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition including advanced analysis features for OLAP, comprehensive analysis services, distributed partition views, VI SAN, web enabled analysis and high availability. At $19,999 per processor licensing, versus $40,000 for Oracle, MS SQL represents great value for performance.

3. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005: Virtual Server 2005 enables administrators to achieve

increased operational efficiency in server consolidation scenarios, and legacy line-of-business application re-hosting. A complete virtual machine solution, Virtual Server 2005 features robust storage, networking, and management features in an easy-to-use package that includes a simple, seven-step installation and a convenient Web-based management console. Virtual Server 2005 provides hardware benefits through virtual machine isolation, while resource management enables multiple workloads to coexist on fewer servers. In addition, organizations benefit from increased administrator productivity throughout the phases of the IT life cycle. At only $999 per server, Virtual Server represents a cost effective enhancement to further increase server utilization and consolidation.

With the Dell / Windows configuration, operating system licensing costs are 1/3rd to 1/6th the cost of the proprietary UNIX solutions. For database licensing, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 licensing is 1/2 the cost of


the competitive licenses per processor ($40,000 for Oracle versus $19,999 for MS SQL), and because of Dell PowerEdge performance, the Dell configuration requires 2/3 to 1/4 the processors as the proprietary RISC solutions, delivering striking savings opportunities.

Server Type

Operating System Cost10

Database Cost

Application Licensing

Systems Management11

Disaster Recovery12

Annual Support and Maintenance

Contracts Dell / Windows $135,057 $359,982 $126,000 $117,327 $31,500 $133,134 Sun Solaris $554,400 $4,480,000 $672,000 $426,514 $37,500 $1,311,570 IBM AIX $430,556 $1,696,000 $252,000 $135,709 $313,320 $585,596 HP-UX11i $758,880 $1,920,000 $336,000 $193,870 $52,320 $653,262

Reducing IT Operations and Administration Costs In most IT organizations over 90% of the labor is dedicated to administration, adds, moves, changes and support operations, leaving scant resources available for innovation. Redundancy, industry-standard components and enterprise-class quality have delivered higher uptime and lower management costs for hardware, but the software portion of the solution, the drivers, BIOS and other components account for the majority of the time spent managing systems. In fact, many administrators spend up to three quarters of their time focusing on change management throughout their data center. This is time that could be better spent focusing on projects that can drive higher productivity for the company. Reducing the ongoing management and moves, adds and change costs is important to enable IT organizations to deliver competitive advantage and improve efficiency and effectiveness. Driving the desire to consolidate data center operations is the resultant re-allocation of resources which can occur if administrative tasks can be automated or eliminated and productivity can be improved. In multiple studies, data center labor expenditures are correlated with complexity and asset proliferation. Simplifying the computing environment through standardization and manageability, and reducing asset count through application consolidation and improved value / performance can help IT do more with less. Some of the ways that Dell and Windows help to reduce management costs include:

1. Simplifying BIOS and Driver Management - The PowerEdge 1850, PowerEdge 2800 and 2850 were designed around a common system board, which means that they share all the same BIOS and drivers. Customers can develop a single system image that can be shared across all three of these systems, dramatically reducing the amount of time spent managing the changing software components - develop one image and deploy on the platform of your choice. In addition, the PowerEdge 1800, while not identical to the other three, shares many of the same components and drivers, extending the commonality in many areas, helping lower the TCO for this system as well.

2. Managing Change - In addition to driving commonality in the systems, Dell is moving to a "block release" strategy where updates are scheduled on a regular basis and deployed together, where consolidation can aid the efficiency of the update. Also, through the Dell ImageWatch program, customers can be kept abreast of changes that are likely to impact their system images as well as understand product and peripheral transitions. All of these changes are designed to assist in the

10 Includes cost for the operating system foundation, user licenses, and mission critical software to support virtualization, file systems, user, systems and storage management, high availability / clustering, and web middleware. 11 Software to manage enterprise systems and storage, connecting individual systems management and other tools into an enterprise platform for server manageability. Product options include Tivoli, HP Open View and CA UniCenter. 12 Data mirroring and backup software licensing


task of simplifying the complexity of systems management for customers by making the process more seamless and predictable.

3. Systems Management - Together with the new manageability features of Dell OpenManage 4, the standard Baseboard Management Controller in all of the latest PowerEdge servers and the optional manageability that is provided with the optional Dell Remote Assistant Card, these features make newest generation of PowerEdge servers the most manageable PowerEdge servers ever. Dell OpenManage 4 is an enabling technology that allows PowerEdge system software such as bios, firmware, or driver updates to be distributed via industry patch management applications such as Altiris Patch Manager or Microsoft SMS 2000. Dell’s OpenManage 4 provides an inventory of Dell PowerEdge servers as well as a list of the latest Dell system software updates to ensure the latest updates are applied. Beyond Dell’s own manageability solutions, further reduction in management costs and improved availability result from integration with third-party systems management tools, reduction in separate tool requirements and standards-based instrumentation that supports group and enterprise server monitoring help.

4. Application, User and Operating System Management – Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 provide integrated, no additional cost tools to help make user, applications and systems management easier including automated change and configuration management, security patch management, asset management, streamlining and automating operating systems management tasks, monitoring clusters, servers, computers, applications and groups, and reporting and compliance management.

IT Operations consists of day to day management of the systems, applications, users, security, availability and performance, including the following tasks: service desk, performance and availability management, user administration, OS support, break-fix management, software deployment, application management (provisioning and scheduling), systems management, disk and file management, storage management, security management, database management and administration. For Dell / Windows compared to the proprietary UNIX RISC solutions, IT operations costs compare as follows:

Server Type Average Number of Servers

per IT Operations FTE

Annual Cost for IT Operations for Prescribed

Configurations Dell / Windows 13.64 $124,759 SUN Solaris 5.49 $394,467 IBM AIX 5.47 $131,840 HP-UX11i 5.49 $124,759 IT Administration consists of the non-technical focused proactive management of IT, including: vendor management, procurement, asset management, IT finance and chargeback, IT training and user training. For Dell / Windows compared to the proprietary UNIX RISC solutions, IT Administration costs compare as follows:

Server Type Average Number of Servers per IT Administration FTE

Annual Cost for IT Administration for

Prescribed Configurations Dell / Windows 116.67 $20,308 SUN Solaris 28.57 $75,747 IBM AIX 30.43 $22,626 HP-UX11i 29.41 $33,446


Facilities Costs Facilities costs include the power consumption and cooling watts per server, along with the actual floor space required for each server. Power costs were computed at $0.09 per kWatt hour of power. Floor space was calculated at an annual rate of $62.50 per square foot of data center space.

Server Type


Servers Needed

Cooling (watts per

server) Power (watts per server)

Floor Space (sq feet per

server)

Total Annual Facilities

Cost13 Dell / Windows 21 280 700 0.32 $16,601 SUN Solaris 22 2,989 3,000 4.00 $109,093 IBM AIX 7 1,384 1,400 1.27 $15,879 HP -UX 11i 10 1,044 2,400 0.63 $27,472

Change Costs When considering a migration, there are several elements that can drive higher costs for Windows IA-32 based configurations versus a UNIX migration: Application Compatibility Out of the box, Windows Server 2003 is not able to directly support applications developed for UNIX. However, Microsoft offers an add-on technology called Windows Services for UNIX that provides a high level of support for UNIX applications being deployed aboard the Windows platform. The Windows Services for UNIX product can vastly simplify the process of migrating an application from UNIX to Windows Server 2003. If customers wish to deploy a native Windows version of their commercial applications, they need to evaluate each application to determine its portability and availability aboard Windows Server 2003. If custom applications, which are internally written and supported applications, are being considered for a move to Windows, the customer can take several approaches to accomplishing that task. One approach is to perform a native port of that custom code from UNIX application programming interfaces (APIs) to Win32 APIs. This approach, while the most comprehensive and the method that would maximize performance, will require the application development team to analyze, rewrite, and / or modify the existing code to a certain degree. However, provided that the application was written in a major development language, such as C or C++, and provided that the appropriate programmer skill sets are available, the modification effort can take a matter of weeks. Depending on the age of the application and its long-term significance to the organization, a full port may not be the optimal solution. Beyond the applications, many of the supporting products, such as Oracle database, DB2 database, and system management tools, from the major vendors are available for Windows, making it possible to move the basic infrastructure as well as the packaged applications. Middleware Availability Like the application itself, services that are used by an application, including infrastructure such as transaction processing capabilities, application serving, storage, or other resource virtualization software and distributed file systems must be available and compatible with the application products on Windows. Training and Skills The skills that your IT department has will dictate the ease of a movement from UNIX to Windows. In many cases, UNIX support personnel may already be familiar with Windows environments, and it may only be necessary to get training on best practices in a Windows environment. For others, Microsoft and its partners are providing tools and other resources for UNIX administrators to increase their knowledge of supporting Windows environments. Skills with management tools currently being used, such as Tivoli, Unicenter TNG, or OpenView, will be easily transportable.

13 Includes total cost for facilities, including non-production servers for disaster recovery.


Server Type


Servers Needed

Setup and Installation Project

Management Person Hours

Internal Labor Costs

Professional Services

Total Change Costs

Dell / Windows 21 1835.8 $96,068 $130,640 $226,708 SUN Solaris 22 1300.3 $68,044 $273,377 $341,421 BM AIX 7 1926.8 $105,568 $177,768 $283,336 HP -UX 11i 10 676.3 $35,390 $47,814 $83,204

Availability and Downtime Costs In mission critical environments even the smallest of downtime can cause serious financial consequences.

Downtime Losses by Application

Business Losses per minute of

downtime Multiple (Application Portfolio) $40,000 Financial / Trading $40,000 On-line Transaction Processing $10,000 Supply Chain Management (SCM) $10,000 Financial Management (ERP) $10,000 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) $8,000 Web Server (E-Commerce and E-Business) $8,000 Human Capital Management (HCM) $1,000 Portal $5,000 Business Intelligence $5,000 Data Warehouse $5,000 Technical and Scientific $3,000

Windows Services for UNIX 3.0, more than just supports the UNIX application running aboard a Windows SOE. It also provides supporting technology that allows a Windows server to essentially replace a UNIXsystem without requiring significant revision of the surrounding environment and other systems. Features include:

Shared Network Resources Windows Services for UNIX allows sharing of network file system (NFS) files between Windows and UNIX client and server systems. Client and Server for NFS This client technology allows Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP clients to mount exported file systems directly from UNIX NFS servers as if they were regular Windows shares, and it allows UNIX servers to access data stored on a Windows server. Gateway for NFS Shares UNIX NFS exports as Windows-based shared directories, allowing any Windows client access without installing NFS client software. Support for Script Porting The Windows Services for UNIX environment provides tools and resources to simplify the process of porting existing UNIX scripts for re-hosting in the Windows environment. Windows Services for UNIX 2.0 provides over 60 of the most popular UNIX utilities and a Korn Shell to give UNIX users and administrators their familiar set of tools and shell environment.


Downtime Losses by Application

Business Losses per minute of

downtime Engineering and Development $3,000 Messaging $1,000 Infrastructure $700 Other $5,000

In mission critical environments, an hour of downtime can cost millions. Figures here are for typical

enterprise applications, with research by Alinean and Standish Group. A more reliable and conservative way of measuring the impact of downtime is to estimate the company revenue or productivity tied to the

application. Downtime has many causes and percentages for the causes are fairly evenly divided between hardware, software, network, human error and natural disasters. Having the right mission critical systems, fault and disaster tolerant configurations and practices, training and skills, proactive policies and procedures, monitoring and management tools can help eliminate many of these issues. But it takes a comprehensive program of improving people, processes and technology to make an impact.

Hardware Failure26%

Network Failure21%

Human Error15%

Natural Disasters14%

Software Failure24%

Unplanned downtime has many causes, requiring a focus on all aspects of the computing environment, mitigation of risks from natural disasters, as well as processes, procedures and training to mitigate against human error. Because of the distributed nature of such issues, achieving higher availability becomes cost

prohibitive for most IT budgets.

Availability (System and Data) Dell / Windows Proprietary UNIX

Clustering 99.995% 99.998% Load Balancing / N+1 Failover 99.900% 99.995% Normal Configuration 99.000% 99.900%

Business profitability is highly dependent upon system availability. The analyses in this white paper are based upon 24 x 7 x 52 operation, with 20% of annual revenue dependent on application availability, resulting in $17,170 per hour in downtime costs during business hours.


Server Type Availability Unplanned Downtime

Hours per Year

Annual Unplanned

Downtime Costs Dell / Windows 99.995% 0.44 $7,555 Proprietary UNIX 99.998% 0.17 $2,919 The level at which downtime becomes material and offsets capital and operational expenditures is north of $500,000 per downtime hour for HP-UX11i, and north of $1 million per hour for Sun and IBM. If the application and organization fits this profile, then availability management becomes a significant decision factor in the analysis, where small differences can make a huge impact and risk.

Security Management and Risks For a high availability environment, security risks are a grave threat with more than 76,000 incidents in the first six months of 2003 alone.14 Computer security has become one of the highest priorities for IT managers. External threats such as viruses, worms, Trojans, denial of service, and network intrusions threaten organizations with denied access, damaged data, and theft. When a security incident occurs, it can have a multitude of impacts and costs to the organization, these include:

1. Respond and resolve labor costs for IT staff 2. Lost productivity awaiting resolution to network, data, application, or computer system access 3. Lost business transactions 4. Brand damage 5. Fines and litigation

According to the US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) Vulnerability Notes Database searched in November of 2004, the operating systems in this comparison had the following frequency of security risks highlighted, warranting an alert or updated vulnerability notice by this organization for proactive resolution of a known threat in 2004:

• 105 for Microsoft • 14 for Sun Solaris • 2 for IBM AIX • 2 for HP-UX 11i

To meet the threat of growing security issues, Microsoft has enhanced efforts to make its operating system, application and customers more secure. The goal is to help customers reduce the risk associated with these malicious attacks and also to reduce the cost and complexity of managing the overall security threat. Microsoft’s effort encompasses the following new initiatives and investments:

1. Improved patch management and patching process for customers. 2. Solid educational materials backed by professional training for customers and partners in order to

help them implement appropriate security protections. 3. Development of security technologies to help protect customers from malicious attacks.

The net result of these efforts will make Microsoft software easier to configure, manage, and maintain, thus reducing the risk of a malicious attack. As a result of the security threats and current vulnerabilities, Microsoft is twice as likely to be affected by a virus attack, 7.5% more likely to be affected by a network or host intrusion event, and 20% more likely to be affected by a denial of service attack. 14 National Cyber Security Summit, December 3, 2003, Tom Ridge US Secretary of Homeland Security


Typical Security Incidents Dell Windows Proprietary UNIX Virus, Worm, Trojan Attacks 0.4 attacks per year 0.2 attacks per year Network / Host Intrusion 4.3 attacks per year 4.0 attacks per year Denial of Service 1.2 attacks per year 1.0 attacks per year

Based on the cost per business hour of downtime in our case study scenarios, the additional downtime costs is a modest $16,000 in TCO over the analysis period for Microsoft Windows. In more mission critical environments, the costs could be higher, and best practices should be implemented in order to effect a more secure environment and realize fewer security risks. These best practices include implementing technology such as:

1. Host IDS 2. IP filtering 3. IP security 4. Secure shell 5. OpenSSL 6. Security patch-check and management 7. Security hardening and lockdown 8. Virus protection

As well, people and process improvements should be made to help supplement the additional technology best practices. Security technology best practices in Windows Server 2003 include:

• Kerberos Authentication - Kerberos authentication for Windows Server 2003 is used to verify user or host identity. This page contains in-depth resources for planning and implementing Kerberos technologies.

• Network Access Protection - Network Access Protection is a policy enforcement platform built into the Windows operating system that allows IT professionals to set policy (for example, operating system and antivirus update policy), which restricts clients from accessing a network until the clients can prove policy compliance.

• Public Key Infrastructure - Microsoft Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for Windows Server 2003 provides an integrated public key infrastructure that enables you to secure and exchange information with strong security and easy administration across the Internet, extranets, intranets, and applications.

• Security Configuration Wizard - Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) allows you to quickly and easily configure Microsoft Windows servers based on your functional requirements—Web server, domain controller, or other—while simultaneously authoring security policies to minimize attack vulnerability.

Conclusions Dell PowerEdge Servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 can result in TCO savings of up to 60% or more versus proprietary RISC / UNIX configurations for enterprise workloads including database, web solution bundles, enterprise application hosting / re-hosting and retail branch office automation. Cost savings were generated from good value versus performance, leading to fewer assets than would be expected to compete with the proprietary mid-range UNIX systems. With competitive virtualization utilizing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, further consolidation and asset utilization was available – and because server TCO is highly correlated with asset proliferation, even though more servers are needed for the Dell / Windows solution, fewer were needed than expected to fulfill competitive performance requirements.


Making the Business Case for Dell /

Windows The Dell / Windows Advantage Price / Performance

Only two to three Dell PowerEdge servers are needed to match the independently certified benchmark performance metrics from proprietary UNIX server solutions, delivering a 180% or higher value / performance advantage.

Scalability and virtualization Whenever considering a scale out configuration, asset proliferation tends to hurt the business case. If the configuration has less than 3:1 assets, the advantage is typically to scale-out versus scale-up. Because of Dell’s superior price / performance, fewer assets are needed to support the required workload and application performance. Microsoft Virtual Server 2003 delivers enterprise class virtualization allowing multiple applications to be hosted on a single server, or cluster of servers.

IT Operations and Administration Some of the ways that Dell and Windows help to reduce management costs include improved server consolidation whereby fewer assets to manage means lower costs, and in providing integrated management practices and tools to help reduce costs, including: Simplifying BIOS and Driver Management More effectively Managing Change, Automating Systems Management with Dell OpenManage, Advanced Application, User and Operating System Management including Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003.

Mission Critical Environments Using a multi-tiered load balanced front end and clustering back end Dell / Windows server environments have proven their availability in mission critical environments. Management tools such as Dell OpenManage4 help to keep the servers optimized and available. Achieving 99.995% uptime (versus 99.998% for proprietary UNIX solutions) is typical in multi-tiered load balanced/clustered environments. In all but the most mission critical applications, other TCO savings offset the availability advantage of proprietary UNIX solutions.

Security Microsoft is still the target of many attacks, has more vulnerability notices issues, and releases more patches than proprietary UNIX solutions. However, Microsoft has enhanced efforts to make its operating system, application, and customers more secure. Where security is of the up-most concern best practices and training can help to eliminate security risks.


Making the Business Case for Dell / Windows The Dell / Windows Advantage

Application Availability, Customization, and Agility

The availability of off the shelf applications and the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET development environment and the .NET Framework for Dell / Windows provides a platform that can effectively meet current computing needs, and more effectively meet changing business requirements in the future. As a result of off the shelf application availability, change costs are low initially, and over time, change costs remain low because of quicker development environments and application enhancement availability. Using industry standard hardware from Dell, with build-to-order delivery, makes scaling the environment cost effective and quick – allowing the business to meet growing or changing demand.

About Alinean Since 1994, the Alinean team has been the pioneering builder of tools to help quantify and improve the ROI and TCO of IT investments. Alinean was named for the Spanish word for “Align”, matching the Alinean mission as the leading developer of analytical tools to help IT vendors, consultants and IT executives align IT investments with business strategies. The Alinean team has over a decade of experience in the practical development and application of ROI and TCO methodologies, models and tools to optimizing IT investment decision making. In 1994, the Alinean team formed Interpose, the original pioneers of ROI tools, developing analytical software for over 50 major IT vendors and consulting companies worldwide, and creating the industry standard TCO Manager and TCO Analyst software. Interpose was sold to Gartner in 1998, where the team continued their developments and marketing of ROI and TCO software tools. The original team reunited to form Alinean in 2001, once again becoming the leading pioneers and developers of ROI sales and analytical tools. Current customers include leading IT solution providers such as HP, IBM, Dell, Intel, Symantec, NetIQ, EMC, SAP, Oracle, SBC, and Microsoft, as well as leading consultancies and Global 1000 companies. Additional information about Alinean and helpful ROI educational resources can be found at http://www.alinean.com

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