Paradoxical Economics of Enterprises #

Use of Expensive Software Stacks #

Mid-to-large scale enterprises typically operate many resource pools, with a range of software stacks and costs, that provide differentiated features and service levels to hosted applications. This results in pools with very different cost structures.

The Paradox #

When hardware cost is a fraction of a pool's total cost, right-sizing economics change and become paradoxical, such that:

The Counter-Intuitive Effect #

The higher a pool's cost structure ratio (i.e., Kratio) the more important it is to shape hardware assignment; simply, there are more costs that can be displace. The Kratio therefore acts as a coefficient to the relative gain in hardware performance when determining its economic value.

For example, a modest 20% gain in hardware performance for a pool with a Kratio of 10.0 is economically equivalent to a 50% gain for a pool with a Kratio of 2.0. The ideal uptake rate of better hardware, as well as its duration of use (i.e., hardware economic-life), will therefore vary over time and from one pool to another.

Being able to prospectively differentiate economic value among different resource pools and hardware models — from new, leading-edge hardware to existing inventory — is essential information in order to deploy hardware to its highest economic utility over its service life and thereby minimize total cost. Zypr enables this by:

• Identifying and evaluating the many combinatorial ways by which a pool's resource compositional mix may evolve over time.
• Distinguishing hardware retirements from inter-pool reassignments and pool recomposition (i.e., distinguishing hardware economic-life versus its service-life).
• Accomplishing both at the lowest total cost with respect to the unique infrastructure economics of enterprise IT.