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Capacity optimisation: licence cost avoidance use case


Johannesburg, 02 Nov 2018

The following is a typical use case where MentPro was approached by a customer to provide cost saving through a capacity optimisation and right-sizing exercise.

The following steps detail the use case:

* A customer requested an infrastructure capacity review of its Oracle environment (Unix - AIX).
* The licence model for the enterprise was based on a "per" CPU model, which totalled 58 databases spread over five IBM Power Systems.
* In order to optimise and realise cost avoidance through right-sizing, a comprehensive analysis of each Oracle partition was undertaken.
* By analysing and grouping peak usage patterns by interval (ie, online/offline), relevant Oracle partitions could now be pooled according to peak processing requirements.
* The customer could not immediately migrate partitions from one power system to another because of change schedule limitations. The option was taken to pool selected partitions on the current host.
* Configured CPU values per partition were adjusted accordingly (up or down) to align with peak processing requirements based on the right-sizing analysis and findings.
* CPU entitlement values were right-sized to allow guaranteed processing when required and release unused allocated CPUs into the pool for other partitions to use as required.
* The above methodology limits the number of the configured CPUs per licence within the pool by freeing up unused capacity within the pool while still providing sufficient processing capability.

Estimated licence cost avoidance in this case proved to be in excess of R15 000 000.

Licence cost avoidance

* Utilisation profiling

An AIX partition has been configured with two CPUs (entitlement) and a maximum value of four CPUs.

The partition has an average peak of 2.25 CPUs and has an average of 0.75 CPUs.

Oracle will be licensed based on the maximum value of four CPUs.

Scenario:

Licence cost avoidance

* Workload profiling

The above graphs show two partitions that have CPU peaks in two different intervals, being online and batch.

Licence cost avoidance

The first partition has been configured with four CPUs (entitlement) and a maximum value of six CPUs max.

The second partition has been configured with two CPUs (entitlement) and a maximum value of four CPUs max.

The first partition's online peak is four CPUs and the second partition's batch peak is 2.25 CPUs.

The solution:

These partitions can be configured to share CPU in a pool configuration of five CPUs.

This ensures the required throughput for processing, while reducing the amount of licences. In this case, five CPUs can potentially be reclaimed, IE, fit for purpose.

Value-added services

* IT infrastructure right-sizing
* Adjusting processing capacity up/down to optimise and streamline your IT environment to ultimately reduce opex and capex spend.
* An efficient IT environment allows for better planning and management of budget and infrastructure, to meet your business requirement.
* IT infrastructure replacement: fit for purpose.
* Analysing and assessing a potential client's IT infrastructure to quote for hardware replacements in accordance with what is required as opposed to market-related behavior.
* Proactively planning for future requirements based on historical utilisation trends and business demand. MentPro provides a dynamic solution in the form of capacity as a service (Cpaas) that can be scaled to suit the customers' long-term requirements.

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MentPro

MentPro is an established company specialising in a number of IT service management disciplines, including availability and capacity management. MentPro provides consulting services as well as a portfolio of managed services to its customers.

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