IBM has a new online tool to help IT and business managers model their own IT infrastructures against one based on IBM Power Systems to reveal the massive advantages a Power Systems-based architecture can bring. Called the IBM Smarter Computing Workload Simulator, the new online tool hit IBM’s Power System web site last month, but you might even see it show up on IBM’s home page sometime soon.
What is it? What’s it for?
The tool is designed to help drive IBM’s massive Smarter Computing initiative deeper into industries and down into the consciousness of business leaders who face tough IT challenges. The central premise is that your existing x86-based, commodity hardware-focused infrastructure is surprisingly inefficient compared to a Power Systems environment that can, as IBM says, “help you free up resources and speed up business innovation.”
The Workload Simulator site asks visitors to take a few minutes and model their data centers on Power Systems to help them redefine business performance. The tool, as it turns out, is a highly visual reworking on a complicated spreadsheet-based tool that IBM Business Partners tend to use as they sell IBM systems. It contains industry breakdowns and lush 3-D graphic representations of the results. IBM asks:
Are you interested in real savings?
Do you want to outpace competition?
Do you want to differentiate through high service levels?
Do you want to turn operational cost into business investment? Test drive your datacenter with Power servers. Use the IBM
Smarter Computing Workload Simulator to visualize your future datacenter. The simulator enables you to rapidly model—just three simple questions—your existing x86, Itanium, and/or SPARC infrastructure and run a simulation detailing the potential economic benefits of modernization with POWER7 processor-based Smarter Computing solutions. The simulation reports on the economic and consolidation benefits of an IBM Smarter Computing infrastructure with a detailed view of savings for hardware, software, facilities, labor and other cost factors based on Power Systems over a three-year period.
Inside the Tool
Once you download a quick plugin for your Web browser, the tool asks what industry you are in, such as banking, energy/utilities, government, retail, healthcare, communications, and wholesale. The tool then lets you model your own environment . . . or click through to an example of the results for a typical mid-size IT environment. And the results?
Total IT, Operating, and Strategic costs without IBM Power Systems come in at $11,215,901 over a three year period. With IBM, the costs plummet to just $3,196,825. If that kind of savings can’t grab the attention of a CIO or CFO, I’m not sure what will.
Meanwhile, it’s important to note that this sort of savings comes in over three years . . . and many SMBs are locked into a wicked cycle of buying a new x86 server for every new work- load they need, growing servers left and right and attempting to control it all with tacked on virtualization and bigger x86 boxes that still, despite the virtualization efforts, have CPUs that must remain woefully under-utilized.
What’s Going on Here?
Long-time IBM i-focused customers know that IBM i and predecessor systems all the way back to AS/400 have consistently produced compelling total cost of ownership metrics, despite typically higher cost of acquisitions. IBM hasn’t—in my view—done a particularly great job of marketing TCO around IBM i . . . or around Power Systems for that matter. So why this new tool? Why now? What’s changed to give Power Systems this sort of new exposure?
I reached out to Matt Collins, IBM Systems & Technology Group vice president of Marketing for Strategic Systems Initiatives, and Joe Doria, director of IBM Systems & Technology Group Global Competitive Marketing, for some answers.
“Our objective is to work with clients and help them see the benefits of technology and how it can produce better economics for them, one so they can be more efficient, and two, so they can reinvest in new projects,” Collins says.
IBM sees a lot of conventional wisdom in the market that holds that commodity technology can handle most any computing task, and while in many cases that’s true, it can’t do that efficiently or effectively.
“Ultimately we want to expose IT and business leaders to the potential benefits of an IT infrastructure that’s designed for data—all of the data that’s required, traditional, new forms of data so they can take advantage of all their information to generate insight to make better business decisions—that’s the first tenant of Smarter Computing,” Collins explains.
It’s Not All About the Money
No doubt, the cost savings associated with going to Power are significant. When I first looked at the example scenario noted above—$11.2 million reduced to $3.2 million—I thought surely I must be misreading the results. Was IBM audacious enough to claim $8 million in reduced costs for a typical medium-sized business in three years over commodity servers? So I asked the question. Are these real scenarios? Can customers really achieve this level of savings? Is this truly typical?
When IBM turned its extensive complex forms spreadsheet- based tool into the new customer-facing simulation tool, explains Doria, IBM based the results for the Workload Simulation Tool on several hundred scenarios. “These are all scenarios that IBM has done with clients,” he notes. “It gets you as close as possible to what the client could actually achieve in terms of savings.
“When you consolidate tens or hundreds of systems,” he adds, “You can dramatically reduce your software license costs, you can dramatically reduce your floor and energy costs, you can dramatically simplify your environment and at the same time, you build your capability around availability and being able to scale to new business opportunities that come your way—you’re solving two major problems at once. You’re simplifying and bringing more agility to your business. The numbers do pan out that way.”
So check out the tool, plus keep your eyes open for a longer report in the January issue of System iNEWS magazine.