system administration class Objectives: 1. To practice conducting a financial feasibility cost benefit analysis for a server virtualization project. 2. To prepare an executive summary of the feasibility study. Project Two: The Current Scenario What you are going to do in this project is pretend that you are the system administrator for an organization that is attempting to determine if virtualization of its computing infrastructure would be beneficial to the organization from a financial perspective. As the system administrator you are in charge of conducting the cost/benefit analysis for the proposed virtualization project. This will include creating financial spreadsheets using a 5 year projection and writing a brief report summarizing your findings. The next few pages describe the current infrastructure of the organization and the proposed virtualization project. Lets call the organization the ITCorp. Currently ITCorp is running 5000 physical servers in its data center which support various applications and several different operating systems. These servers are configured into four different groups: Group 1 consists of 2500 mission critical servers. Group 1 servers consume 3500W of power each at full load (100% CPU utilization). The Group 1 servers average load is 25%. Group 2 consists of 1500 mission critical servers. Group 2 servers consume 3800W of power each at full load (100% CPU utilization). The Group 2 servers average load is 30%. Group 3 consists of 500 non-mission critical in-house application and file servers, each of which consumes 2800W of power at full load. The servers in this group run with an average load of 10% Group 4 consists of a pool of 500 redundant servers utilized as backup servers. The Group 4 servers are split into two subgroups of 250 servers each, call them Group 4A and Group 4B. Group 4A servers draw 3800W at full load and are used as backups for Group 1 and Group 2 servers. The Group 4B servers draw 2800W at full load and are used as backups for primarily Project Two Common Elements Some basic assumptions about ITCorp and the future as it pertains to your cost/benefit analysis: The cost of 1kwH of power is currently 15 cents. Assume that the cost of power will increase 2%/year over the duration of the study. When calculating power costs for the new servers, note that the loading of each server was already factored into the value produced by the power calculator. Assume that server maintenance costs will increase 4%/year over the duration of the study for all server maintenance agreements. The outside service contracts for security and storage will continue in the proposed scenario just as they are to continue in the current scenario. Assume that administrative costs on a virtual server are 60% of the administrative costs on a physical server. 1 administrative day is 10 hours long. 1 server day is 24 hours long. There are 365 days in one year. Project Two: Your Task Your first task for this project is to construct spreadsheets like the ones we discussed in class that will illustrate the current and proposed infrastructure costs for the ITCorp given this proposed virtualization project. You should create (1) a variables spreadsheet(s) that includes all the variables defined in the project, (2) a current infrastructure cost spreadsheet, (3) a virtualization projected cost spreadsheet, and (4) a summary spreadsheet that highlights the major costs and benefits of the project. IMPORTANT ! ! ! You must create your spreadsheet using variables to identify the various costs that are being tracked. In other words, dont hard code any numbers into the formulas in your spreadsheets. The following page illustrates one of the variables pages in my spreadsheet where I defined the variables used in current cost spreadsheets. You must include a similar page(s) in your spreadsheet B D Variables Used In This Spreadsheet 1 2 3 Hard Costs Value Variable Name Variable Description 4 5 6 7 8 9 TU 11 numServe Once your spreadsheets are completed, youll construct a 1 page executive summary report of your findings. This report should address the feasibility of the proposed project and its financial impact on the ITCorp. Normally, an executive summary summarizes a more complete accompanying report. You will not be preparing this more complete report in this case, you will only be preparing the executive summary. Note that an executive summary is different from an abstract. Abstracts tend to be most common in academic environments whereas executive summaries are primarily confined to business environments. An abstract is a brief summarizing statement which is read by people who are trying to decide whether or not to read the entire document. An executive summary is the document in miniature which can be read in place of the longer document. 1. A spreadsheet (similar to that we developed in the notes) with worksheets containing variable definitions, current cost infrastructure, proposed project cost infrastructure, and a summary worksheet. Feel free to use the example spreadsheet from the notes as a template or starting point for your project. 2. A one page executive summary of your findings with respect to the feasibility of this project for the ITCorp. This executive summary should give an extremely brief overview of the proposed project, a summary of your findings (spreadsheet analysis results), and a recommendation of whether the project should move forward or not.