Data Center Costs

One of the great challenges of being a CIO is that I am asked to anticipate demand and deploy the infrastructure and applications needed by stakeholders, while tightly controlling costs. This means that I am rewarded for meeting demands just in time, but penalized for under provisioning (not meeting demand) or over provisioning (spending too much).

Even in a world of virtualization and on demand computing, many IT products and services have a significant lead time to deploy. Creating a new data center, adding significant new power feeds and expanding cooling capacity are examples. To help understand the relationship of real estate, power, cooling, storage, network bandwidth and costs, we've created a web-based model which we're now sharing with the IT community. Feel free to access it here.

You'll see that this dashboard enables you to change costs per square foot, costs per kilowatt, total server/storage capacity and other variables to create a customized cost dashboard. At Harvard Medical School, we've used this dashboard during the budget process to achieve predictable budgeting. CFOs do not like surprises, so agreeing on a predictable cost model that directly relates demand, supply and cost, makes life for the CIO much easier.

I hope you find this useful!