• Evaluate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Before making a server purchase, a CIO should evaluate the TCO over the period of 5 years and include parameters like cost of services, software license, manpower requirement, floor space, electricity consumption, software upgrades cost of maintenance, backup and management-related costs, hardware upgrade costs, and definitely look at what are the various applications operating environments the server supports.

• Server Redeployment: Redeployment and repositioning of servers is an equally important parameter like price and performance. CIOs often overlook investment protection as not a serious point of evaluation. CIOs should look at this very carefully and if required talk to some of the existing customers to get their opinion on the same.

• Modular Approach: The traditional approach of using a bigger/more powerful piece of hardware to address the issues of computing, disk, I/O, and availability bandwidths may no longer be the best approach. With the increasing maturity of clustering and niche-OS solutions, simpler and smaller blocks of hardware are able to deliver the performance and availability benchmarks at a much lower TCO. This modular out-of-box approach (as opposed to the monolithic approach) needs to be evaluated when designing solutions for future requirements.

• Technology Evolution: The server market is currently at a technology-life cycle saddle point. The next nine months will see the introduction of a new generation of standards, be it in CPUs, I/O interconnects, or disk subsystems. CIOs need to be on the ball, in so far as these changes are concerned.

The traditional association between high-availability/high-performance and RISC platforms is breaking down, and with the introduction of a new range of server models over the next six months (as well as new releases/flavors of operating environments), there would be an increasing fit between the mid-range/high-end ‘SIAS < 25K’ platforms, and the requirements of an enterprise. CIOs need to be aware of this when contemplating fresh procurement.

l Benchmark Evaluation: CIOs prefer to evaluate the performance of the server by looking at a suite of benchmarks rather than just going by any one single benchmark. For example, customers today look at OLTP benchmarks like the TPC-C, data warehousing benchmarks like TPC-H, specs benchmark like the specjBB and SpecWeb. Most of the CIOs will like to refer to at least two or three benchmarks before making a decision on purchasing a server from a performance point of view.

l Vendor Choice: The CIO should look at the support level that he gets and the amount of SLAs that he can ask from the vendors in supporting these particular servers. In addition, the vendor should have the capability to provide both short term and long-term solutions to the organization and should have a large India presence and focus.

A direct interaction with a principal vendor for services and solution is preferred over a partner or agency providing the same. However, there is a cost difference in getting direct support services from the server vendor.

l Reliability and Redundancy: A fundamentally reliable platform, designed with self-diagnostic capabilities and redundant subsystems, tends towards a lower TCO. These features also allow the vendor to commit to higher SLA level slabs with only marginal increases in cost.

The fundamental design of the servers, aiming at better power management, has as its objective increasing system mean time between failure (MTBF). The enterprise server platforms are designed with redundant subsystems in key areas—memory (in the new range), disk, networking, power supply module, and cooling module.

The new range of servers will feature an e-Panel for system health monitoring and alerting as well as for pre-OS self-diagnostic capabilities. This hardware module will allow a remote/user-organization non-IT specialist to communicate hardware fault-analysis information to wherever it is the IT infrastructure administration is based.

l Server Management: Server vendors today provide many management tools, which help customers manage complex clusters of servers through a single console and through a single administrator. They should provide a single window for managing a number of servers to take their back-up, and to create users. Most of the management features that is required by the administrator are easy to use GUI-based, can be done and managed through multiple servers from a single console.

Vendors also provide remote dial-in management facility and management of the servers through the internet and through Intranet. It can be done through any PC in the entire office and need not be in the same premises as the server. So there is tremendous amount of flexibility and simplification done for server management and CIOs should look at fully utilizing these opportunities.

l Scalability: CIOs should look at a 2004 roadmap for server platforms with significant expandability headroom as well as incorporating new technologies that will boost I/O (PCI-Express I/O bus, network controllers with in-built TCP-offload-engine). This addresses the scale-up requirements of customers. They should also look at a 2004 roadmap for a Blade Server platform, for scale-out capability. In addition, an aggressive push of clustering technologies (IP Load Balancing) will supplement the scale-out options.

l Manageability: CIOs should look at a modular server management framework starting with a choice of hardware-specific components depending on the sophistication and SLA of the requirement. The framework should hook to enterprise management solutions, to allow the management of these servers to be integrated into the overall infrastructure management scheme of the enterprise.

l Availability: CIOs should always check for these.

1. High-availability sub-systems (memory, power supply modules, cooling modules, add-on controllers, etc.) in the relevant server models

2. Certified cluster configurations

3. Disaster data-recovery solutions through the storage consolidation solution