How 'vendor bias' is killing your IT budget

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Looks good, but does this system work?

If you're in IT, the problem is all around you. And it's so much a part of the air you breathe that you may not even notice it.

A lot of money is getting wasted - as much 30 to 50% of your IT infrastructure budget. But this waste isn't caused by people throwing money around on purpose. Instead, the blame lies with an outdated way of thinking.

But now the pressure is on. Competition is coming from the cloud, and budgets are examined closely.

It's time to fix the bloat. First, look out for these common mistakes. Then get control of your IT infrastructure.

1. Stop buying more infrastructure than you'll ever need.

Chances are, your data center is "overprovisioned," the term experts use for having more firepower than you'll ever need.

Overprovisioning happens organically: Each part of the corporate IT supply chain rounds up from the number it's been given by the other group in the chain because everyone wants to make sure the planned system will be able to withstand heavy usage and growth.

In the end, it's common for data centers to have more than 10 times the power than was planned for in the first place. Instinctively, this sounds like it might not be a bad thing - how is too much power and capacity ever a negative? That's how it's always been done, right?

A major downside is that your system is now needlessly complex, which can lead to more problems. Also, there's the obvious budgetary pressure from having more equipment to purchase and maintain.

2. Be aware of vendor bias.

Vendors usually have good intentions, but they still have a natural bias toward their own products. That can mean they're unlikely to recommend a competitor's product (often because they're unfamiliar with other products). They may also genuinely feel their own solutions will solve all your problems.

Well-meaning or not, vendors simply don't have an objective view of what's possible beyond their limited scope of performance. In the worst case, trusting a vendor can be like asking the fox to design and build a better hen-house.

John Gentry, VP of marketing and alliances at IT performance management company Virtual Instruments, has seen this kind of problem countless times during his 20 years in the IT field. He's even seen multi-million-dollar data centers rendered inoperable because of too much trust. What happens if the system doesn't work at all? You spend even more money trying to solve your problems "In any new system, there's at least a bottleneck or two," Gentry says. "You can never right-size every aspect of a system based solely on theory."

You need the ability to check your system, every step of the way.

3. Keep your eye on the bigger picture.

Let's say your brand-new data center has a performance issue and you report the problem to your vendor. Gentry says they'll conduct investigations and offer advice based on what they know about their own products.

Vendors aren't malicious, but they tend to not look at the problem objectively - and ask where the problem really lies. New hardware isn't always the answer. Gentry says, "We've found too many data centers with too much technology - and utilizing it at less than 10%."

Let's say that after you've paid for more hardware, you still have a performance problem. Frustrated, you look for a better alternative.

As Gentry puts it, "You're unhappy with Vendor A, so you go to Vendor B. Vendor B says, 'If you build it from the ground up with our technology, you won't have this problem. Why not just go with a new data center? We'll use all-new technology.' They'll build it based on the old data center specs - which was massively overbuilt to begin with.

And in the end, maybe the new data center doesn't work very well, either.

How to fix the problem

"First, don't blame the IT operations managers - or the vendors - they're just working from outdated paradigms," Gentry says. Basically, both teams need to find a new way of looking at their infrastructure problems.

When IT operations managers sign on with VirtualWisdom from Virtual Instruments, they get an objective perspective on what's wrong (or right) with their system. "We're there with our clients, every step of the way," Gentry says.

"VirtualWisdom helps you understand your true workload performance. It gives you an authoritative, unbiased understanding of your existing assets," Gentry says.

He adds, "It's not going to recommend one vendor over the other. It tells you if your infrastructure is performing at right level for your specific workload. And if other configurations are better suited for optimizing workloads, it'll tell you that."

Virtual Wisdom helps you to get more out of what you have. It'll also produce predictive models so money doesn't get wasted in the first place.

And as for service, Gentry says. "We're attentive, every step of the way. Our expert analysts first come in and do a baseline assessment. We make recommendations. The entire process is a teamwork kind of thing."

And perhaps that's what's needed most by IT operations managers: a real team that can right-size their systems, avoid vendor bias, and still excel in this time of great competition.

This post is sponsored by Virtual Instruments.

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