I would add two more things to the list:
-Optimization of the resources.
We had a problem with our training machines and the need to
upgrade their RAM. We had two options, buy more ram or free RAM from the
host OS to give it to the Virtual Machines. The second one was
"free" as it only involved my time, which at the end of the day I have
to use and nothing urgent was waiting. After one day of tuning and
testing the Linux hosts we were able to set the ramprint to half what it
was. Now we use the same procedure to minimize services in the Linux and
Windows virtual machines. Reducing the total ramprint of the
training system.
-Virtualization
I've seen that in a lot of papers and reports. Virtualization
seems the way to go to reduce costs. Less hardware, power, cooling,
etc..
We used that approach and I don't think we'll buy new physical
server for a while, we are virtualizing (with VMware Server, which is
free) the most of the servers we can. Tuning the servers we
virtualise, we can place more servers in the same physical one, making
it more cost effective.
We also try to use Linux as much as we can for OS. But I agree that free
licence doesn't mean cheaper solution.
Thanks,
Isaac
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Neil Neely
Sent: 22 January 2009 16:25
To: LOPSA Discuss List
Subject: [lopsa-discuss] Rotten Economy: How to save money (and your
job)
This economy is quite rotten these days (shocking news, I know) and
layoff's and pay cuts are the norm all over the place. We've been
trying to do everything we can to trim down costs to lean up to
weather the storm - and I'm sure many of the rest of you have at least
felt the impact of this if not been directly involved in it.
I'm starting this thread to encourage some sharing of idea's and
brainstorming on things folks here have tried / want to try to cut
expenses. At the end of the day I'd much rather cut an expense out of
the budget that we can live with than let another friend go - and I'd
much rather let a friend go then let the company fail. We've done
well at $work on this, but there is always room for improvement, so
I'm hoping to get some discussion going and see what comes of it.
Most of these idea's are low to no capital invested, but if you've got
idea's that use some capital but save a lot of money those would be
useful to share as well.
Cost saving ideas:
#1) Vendor management: Reduce costs for service X by either changing
provider or renegotiating the price for X from the current provider.
#2) Using open source instead of commercial: Things like using ClamAV
for your AV needs
#3) Finding things that have really high annual costs and seeing if
there is a different way to do them (get rid of it, go FOSS, etc)
#4) Shrinking something to control it's cost (i.e. you colo 1 full
rack and 2u of a second and are paying for 2 racks - find a way to
squeeze down those 2u and drop a rack)
#5) Dropping services completely that are expensive to provide (often
leads leads to layoffs)
#6) Cutting Power usage - using higher efficiency lighting
Unpleasant ideas:
#1) Merge teams to achieve efficiencies (Read: double the workload on
one team and lay off most of the other team)
#2) Fortnight's - work 9 days every 2 weeks with a 10% pay cut
#3) Pay cut's
#4) Layoff's
That is just a start - we've done some of those and not others, and if
the economy doesn't get better I'm sure more and more of the
unpleasant solutions are going to become necessary at more and more
places.
Thank you for your time,
Neil Neely
http://neil-neely.blogspot.com
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