Reference no: EM133088036

Project 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 HostNickel given this proposed virtualization project.

- You should create (1) a constants and shared variables spreadsheet, (2) a variables spreadsheet that includes all the variables defined in the project, (3) a current infrastructure cost spreadsheet, (4) a virtualization project cost spreadsheet, and (5) a summary spreadsheet that highlights the major costs and benefits of the project.

You must create your spreadsheet using variables to identify the various costs that are being tracked. In other words, don't hard code any numbers into the formulas in your spreadsheets.

• Once your spreadsheets are completed, you'll 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 HostNickel.
• 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.

• If you have never prepared an executive summary before (if you did project 1, you've have now done so), the following links might be useful: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 spreadsheet template on WebCourses as starting point for your project.

2. A one page executive summary of your findings with respect to the feasibility of this project for the HostNickel. 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.

Project Two: Overview
• As explained in the notes, a feasibility analysis such as this requires that you be able to compare the way the organization is currently operating with the proposed changes to the operation.
• The first step in the analysis is to completely determine the costs associated with the current operational technique.
• For this project, we will restrict the analysis to only a server virtualization project. This means that we need to develop a complete cost picture of the current server infrastructure to compare to a proposed server infrastructure cost.
• The next few pages describe the current infrastructure of the organization and the proposed virtualization project. Let's call the organization the HostNickel (we're not as big as HostDime!).

• 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 server 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 maintenance contacts on the current physical servers are as follows:
- Group I (3500W) servers: 81500.00/server/year
- Group 2 (4500W) servers: $1750.00/server/year
- Group 3 (2800W) servers: $1000.00/server/year
- Group 4A (3800W) servers: SI 100.00/server/year
- Group 4B (3300W) servers: $750.00/server/year
Assume that server maintenance costs will increase 3%/year over the duration of the study for all server maintenance agreements.

The Current Scenario
• Currently HostNickel is running 2000 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 750 mission critical servers. Group 1 servers consume 3500W of power each at full load (100% CPU utilization). The Group 1 servers average load is 15%.
- Group 2 consists of 800 mission critical servers. Group 2 servers consume 4500W of power each at full load (100% CPU utilization). The Group 2 servers average load is 22%.
- Group 3 consists of 75 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 375 redundant servers utilized as backup servers. The Group 4 servers are split into two subgroups, call them Group 4A with 200 servers and Group 4B with 175 servers. Group 4A servers draw 3800W at full load and are used as backups for Group I and Group 2 servers. The Group 4B servers draw 3300W at full load and are used as backups for primarily Group I and Group 3 servers. Group 4A and 413 servers run at average I% load.

• Server administration efforts also vary across the server groups as follows:
- Group 1 (3500W) servers: 2.5 administrative weeks/server/year
- Group 2 (4500W) servers: 3.5 administrative weeks/server/year
- Group 3 (2800W) servers: 1.5 administrative weeks/server/year
- Group 4A (3800W) servers: 2 administrative weeks/server/year
- Group 4B (3300W) servers: 1 administrative week/server/year
• Administrative costs are currently $75/administrative hour.

Assume that administrative costs will increase at the rate of 2%/year over the duration of the study.

• An administrative day is 10 hours long. An administrative week is 7 da s lon:. A server da is 24 hours lon

The Proposed Scenario
• The virtualization project proposed for the HostNickel would reduce its current number of physical servers from 2000 to 200 (an overall 10:1 consolidation ratio). The proposed reduction in physical servers and the resulting number of virtual servers per server group will be based on the following table:

• Sun Server X8-8 servers have been selected to host the virtualized environments. This is one of Sun's latest and leading edge x86 servers. This is a 5 rack unit (5U) server that supports installations of 24 cores/socket. Up to 6TB of memory is available.