Understanding IT Costs Peter James and Martin Bennett Jisc Costing IT Services (CITS) Project University of York, 16 th December 2013

CITS Stage 1: Janet X-Ray Financial Tool University of York IT Cost Exercise CITS Stage 2 Repurposing York spreadsheet and data into a generic tool Costing specific activities e.g. data centres Extending to other institutions Financial skills learning materials for IT staff Jisc Costing IT Services (CITS) Project

PURPOSE RECORDED COSTS COST OBJECTS USE Identify what an IT department does Enable benchmarking Find improvements and/or cost savings Provide more robust data for specific decisions Determine charges for services Devolve budgets or assign financial responsibility Track cost and VFM improvements over time Improve accountancy systems to better support decision- making Central IT  Staff  Hardware  Software  Other Local IT  Staff  Hardware  Software  Other Estates  Energy  Cooling  Power Supply Other  Space/TRAC  Depreciation Services  Individual  Group Activities  Data Centre  Storage  V Machines Strategic Decisions  Cloud Investment Decisions  Storage Management  Responsibility Benchmarking An IT Cost Model

Cost Distortions

Not Just Cost - other factors - cloud may work best as part of strategic change Not for everything - non urgent HPC - lower tier storage Different solutions Costing HPC and Storage

Not just cost - other factors - cloud may be best as part of strategic change Not for everything - non urgent HPC - lower tier storage Multiple solutions e.g. for HPC - compute/store/memory bundles - speed & ‘virtual cores’ HPC & Cloud Considerations

Storage Costs Capex Per Gb Opex per Gb Total per Gb Tier 1 Storage - NetApp£6.29£2.08£8.36 Tier 2 Storage - SAS£2.60£0.00£2.60 Tier 3 Storage - MDL£1.08£0.00£1.08 Tier 4 Storage - Thumpers £1.25£0.00£1.25

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