Company:
Co-operative Financial Services is a holding company bringing together The Co-operative
Bank and the Co-operative Insurance Society .
IT Strategy:
Best-in-Class Management in the Utilization of IT resources and assets.
“With the help of IBM’s
License Metric Tool, we have identified and verified that we had some
2.5 thousand IBM software licenses not being used. These will not be renewed, saving us
£27,000 per year
(approximately $40,500) ”.
Senior Asset Manager
Solution:
IBM License Metric Tool
Benefits:
Reduced time to prepare audit reports that document and verify utilization.
Improved IT software asset utilization by identifying and eliminating excess licensed capacity.
Identified under-utilized hardware assets for re-assignment or retirement.
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Sub-Capacity License Management Pays Off for Co-operative Financial
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Today’s dynamic world of business-linked IT operations demands more efficient and aggressive utilization of infrastructure than ever before. Idle and underused resources are anathema in today’s highly competitive and cost conscious business environment. Poor response times to customers or an outage or decline in services, will exact penalties in very real terms of lost revenues and unhappy customers. Cooperative Financial Services (CFS) had to have a way to maintain its high level of performance without sacrificing customer service levels
All banking operations strive to achieve the maximum advantage from every dollar spent and all resources used. For IT, this means that infrastructure, applications, and services must be able to react dynamically to fluctuations in the levels of consumer demands. They must be able to react to demand fluctuations in near real time.
.
About Co-Operative Financial
Services
Co-Operative Financial Services (CFS) is part of The Co-operative Group, the
UK’s largest consumer co-operative. As
Business in the Community 's 2008,
Company of the Year, CFS was recognized for making sustainable development a top operational priority, as well as for the innovative and useful products and services it offers to customers. Such performance results from their focus on achieving efficient and effective asset utilization.
This effort is complemented by its documented leadership in corporate responsibility practices. For which, CFS won an Impact on Society Award, honoring companies actively improving business and their overall positive impact on society in the marketplace, the workplace, the environment and
Traditionally, meeting demands for peak time capacities or forecasted growth meant expensive over-provisioning the community. of server resources. Such over-provisioning meant allocation of increasingly scarce capital dollars for resources that were underused for significant amounts of time. Alternative solution approaches were needed.
CFS was able to increase infrastructure utilization and provisioning flexibility by using technologies, such as virtualization for rapid provisioning to meet spikes in demand. These helped to address part of, but not the entire problem. Business operations staffs are responsible for strict adherence to licensed capacity use backed up by compliance audits.
To help customers in such a situation, IBM developed software licensing pricing plans which allowed customers to be charged for only the amount of server capacity, logical or virtual, being used by any of IBM’s Passport Advantage PVU-based software. Meant to complement, not replace full capacity licensing, the IBM virtual sub-capacity licensing plans allow customers to license and pay for only the actual server capacity used by the software, rather than the full potential capacity of a server or group of servers. The purchase of a sub-capacity license provides customers the opportunity to enjoy significant savings if they consistently use less than the full server capacity.
The amount of a server being used is calculated in terms of Processor Value Units (PVUs) of licensing requirements, application and virtualization and processor technologies. Passport
Advantage Sub-capacity licenses are available for a wide selection of IBM and non-IBM virtualization technologies and server platforms. Up-to-date information about the virtualization
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Services technologies, server platforms and a list of IBM Passport Advantage software eligible for subcapacity licensing is available here: http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/passportadvantage/subcaplicensing.html
.
For Co-operative Financial Services, server virtualization provided significant time-saving and efficiency benefits to IT operations staff. Such dynamic infrastructure could be called up, provisioned, assigned and de-assigned very quickly and automatically to meet fluctuating demand.
When combined with sub-capacity licensing, the potential for cost savings could be quite significant.
Corporate accountability and governance oversight mandates mean that both vendors and enterprises must be attentive to and demanding of efforts directed at assuring strict compliance to contract terms and conditions. Manual audits were used to verify the number of PVUs authorized and available, as well as to monitor server utilization capacity restrictions. Such compliance audits assure that customers are correctly billed for contracted capacity usage levels.
Unfortunately, with the manual tools and techniques initially available for tracking usage, the level of complexity and difficulty in confirming resource use and monitoring of software allocation and utilization increased. The dynamic nature of operations also added to the complexity of license tracking and management.
For Co-operative Financial Services, as well as others, manually keeping track of the PVUs for audit purposes was a time consuming task, potentially reducing overall savings. A solution needed to be found to reduce the time required to collect and process the data.
IBM addressed the problem with the IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) which is provided at no charge to the customer. For about 3 years now, its use has been mandatory for all sites with sub-capacity licensing agreements. It is necessary to validate audits for conformance to licensing terms and conditions.
An ILMT agent examines both physical and virtual servers to discover Passport Advantage software and determine the PVU licensing requirements. It then creates a report that can be used to review and document compliance. The purpose of the tool is to speed up and ease audit functions by eliminating part of the manual effort required to document the actual number of PVUs being used.
Its use will supplement and reduce, but not completely eliminate the manual effort involved in PVU tracking.
The process is not fully automatic because today’s application integration and bundling techniques, which permit increased automation and result in more efficient, better performing and reliable services, cannot automatically detect and determine the difference between a licensed application bundle, which includes multiple products, but counts as a single PVU from two or more independent applications which count as separate PVUs. Therefore, the first time the tool is used, a manual reconciliation is necessary to avoid double-counting. This should not be necessary for subsequent runs. It is recommended that the count be checked whenever changes are made (such as new software package installation).
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CFS has completed installing agents on approximately 80% of its 1000 remotely distributed servers. Two mainframes also have ILMT agents installed. The systems with their agents are the responsibility of remote operations teams situated around
Birmingham, as well as the rest of the UK in branch offices and various locations. The task of setting up the
IT Assets and Applications
Supported:
The Co-operative Financial IT environment consists of 2 mainframes and approximately
1000 physical and virtual administrative server along with distributing and deploying these agents was finished in about a week with the help of an
IBM consultant.
The servers are located remotely and managed by local administrators. The administrators collect and report the ILMT report of PVU counts to a single Senior Asset Analyst. This analyst reviews, consolidates and verifies the report to assure
PVU’s have been correctly calculated. He is also responsible for accepting and signing the report to verify its accuracy.
ILMT allows Co-operative Financial Services to gather distributed servers running
INTEL, AIX and SOLARIS.
Sub-capacity licensing is available for and ILMT is able to track all software from IBM’s major brand families. This includes IBM Lotus®,
WebSphere®, Tivoli®,
Rational® and DB2®
Information Management software. information on and track their usage of a much broader range of their IBM products than they were able to do manually. ILMT confirmed the accuracy of earlier efforts at manual audits of such applications as IBM DB2, WebSphere MQ Server and Application
Server. Results were available more quickly in an easily accessible and useable format.
Further, ILMT generated reports provide data that increase IT’s insight into and knowledge of their computing environment and its operations. The analyst found that some of his ‘saved’ time was spent investigating and resolving questions raised by the additional information. As a result, he discovered under-used or obsolete servers that could be re-used or discarded. He found IBM software that wasn’t being tracked, as well as paid for, but unused licensed capacity.
An analysis of Tivoli Storage Manager Licenses yielded the greatest savings. With the knowledge gained as a result of the ILMT reports, CFS was able to reduce the number of licenses purchased significantly. Across all products, the estimated savings in all licensing fees will be on the order of
£27,000 (approximately $40,500) for this year. This does not include additional Value Added Tax
(VAT) savings.
Co-operative Financial Services has benefitted in the following ways from using ILMT:
1.
Reduction in the manual effort required to calculate PVU licenses.
2.
Makes light work of calculating PVU usage where 'Micro-Partitioning' is being used (Rounds up at the Frame level as opposed to each LPAR).
3.
Helps to highlight areas of under-utilization of assets (doesn't do it automatically, as one has to take the usage figures and manually enter them against license figures)
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Sub-Capacity License Management Pays Off for Co-operative Financial Page 5 of 6
Services
In addition, the whole experience helped to build upon and advance an already close working relationship with the IBM support team. These have been especially helpful in assisting IT staff to deal promptly and effectively with problems and questions raised during the verification process.
Overall, the reduction in the effort and time collecting the data for and preparing audit reports has been balanced by the need for on-going manual reconciliation. However, the knowledge acquired by having insight into more of their IBM products, the discovery of over-licensed and under-used servers and overall reduction in effort required for audits results in a positive payback.
For CFS, ILMT is just one small portion of the solutions available from IBM IT software and infrastructure asset management. ILMT only discovers IBM Passport Advantage software as it runs on the available, supported physical and virtual servers.
CFS is looking at more powerful tools to discover, document, manage and report on the utilization of hardware and software assets. One example is IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT (TAMIT) targeted for full life-cycle IT asset management and software license management.
TAMIT is fully integrated with Tivoli Asset Discovery products to discover all IT assets software and hardware. This includes both IBM and non-IBM software that reside on mainframe and distributed systems. TAMIT is designed to discover and track, not simply software and hardware inventory data, but also supports comprehensive license and contract management with detailed insight into vendor agreements, purchase and leasing contracts and service agreements. It includes out-of-thebox reports of software utilization and use trends. It provides detailed data on hardware and will even detect machines which do not have agents installed on them. Included with TAMIT is the IBM
Tivoli Integration Composer, which will accept input on deployed hardware and software from discovery or system management tools.
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Software Management Optimize software licensing
Reduce over-/under-buying software licenses
Reduce unplanned compliance payments
Mitigate risk of regulatory and license noncompliance
Time Savings
More accurately forecast IT software needs
Reduced time to prepare audit reports to document and verify sub-capacity utilization of servers.
Improved remote IT staff productivity
Cost Savings
Free dollars to fund new projects and programs
Asset Discovery
Improve hardware asset utilization and efficiency by discovery of hidden/under-used servers
This paper was sponsored by IBM, Inc.
No part of this document can be used in any medium without the written permission of Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. While every care has been taken during the preparation of this document to ensure accurate information, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions.
Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC makes no assumptions as to the potential return on investment that other organizations will receive. Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.
About Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC
With a belief that business and IT success are inseparable, Ptak, Noel & Associates works with clients to identify, understand and respond to the implications of today’s trends and innovations on the future of IT operations. www.ptaknoel.com
© 2010 Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC