Quelle: CIO, Asia

For Hong Kong-based ISP PCCW Ltd, there is no better way to staunch the flow of total cost of ownership dollars from an IT budget than through standardisation. A standardised environment costs less to install and maintain than a heterogeneous one. According to Chan Wing Wa, managing director of PCCW's technical services subsidiary Cascade Ltd, the ISP has derived huge benefits from a ruthless standardisation project. "We foresaw the rapid growth of our Netvigator.com business - our current growth rate is 20 percent - and we wanted to embark on a server consolidation strategy that standardises platforms to lower total cost of ownership," he says. PCCW needed a more reliable and scalable platform to support its business strategy of developing its value-added services, which includes Netpass (that provides single sign-on), NetAlbum (video streaming and photo sharing) and NetBanner(portal personalisation), in addition to existing ISP services.

PCCW incurred annual maintenance costs of hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars for its more than 300 Sun servers, which include lower-end models (e.g. Workgroup Ultra Enterprise 2 and Enterprise450/420), midrange machines (e.g. Enterprise 3000/6500) and higher-end ones (E10k). These were acquired over a period of five years since PCCW began operations in 1998.

Last year, the ISP made a bold decision to consolidate its 300 servers comprising about 10 Sun models that run five versions of Sun's operating systems, into just 20 machines of two models - Sun Fire 6800and V880 - that run one operating system, Solaris 8.

The project has paid dividends. With standardisation of hardware and software, PCCW has reaped savings of 35 percent in floor space - which in Hong Kong can translate to a substantial reduction in rental fees - and 15 percent in manpower costs.

Thanks to standardised hardware and software configurations, systems are also more reliable. For instance, the mean time between failure of the new platform (Sun Fire 6800) is 45,000 hours, an improvement over the 25,000 hours of the old platform. The time taken to deploy new applications has also decreased by five times. "If deploying an application took us five days in the past, it will take us only one day today," says Louie Man Tat, senior vice president, Network Development, Cascade Ltd. "It also facilitates us in another way: In designing and deploying new applications for our 500 key customers, we don't have to consider how to port these applications to five different types of operating systems and hardware to maintain our services seamlessly. This gives us greater flexibility and efficiency."