SUSE reduces capital expenditures for servers by 80 percent

Four enterprise customers migrating away from proprietary UNIX systems and standardising on x86 servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise found an average saving of 80 percent for each new server purchased, according to a recent Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Commissioned by enterprise Linux provider SUSE, the study is based on recent interviews with four SUSE customers whose responses were synthesized to represent a single composite organisation that realised benefits of more than $23.4 million versus costs of nearly $15 million, adding up to a net present value of more than $8.4 million.

“We had to be faster to provide solutions to our business in less time,” said the IT director of a global energy provider. “Standardisation allowed us to reduce this time. Shrinking the time to market is the main goal that we have achieved.”

The composite customer represents an organisation with 3,000 physical and virtual servers across the globe; 1 petabyte of data, half of which is actively used in databases with the rest being primarily archival data; 100 employees who architect, plan and manage the servers, storage, databases and middleware; and 150 applications with active databases, although the primary enterprise applications (finance, for example) are SAP products.

Forrester examined four fundamental elements of economic impact in its research: benefits, costs, flexibility and risks. The composite SUSE customer – represented by the interviewed companies – was facing rising costs in capital expenditures for servers and their operating expenses along with increasing complexity in hiring staff required to maintain the UNIX systems from various hardware vendors. It was also preparing to leverage cloud solutions by standardising the organisation's server environment.

The composite customer realised benefits from migrating to SUSE Linux Enterprise including:

· Reduced capital expenditure for servers. Standardising on x86 servers reduced capital expenditure for the composite organisation by 80 percent for a total risk-adjusted savings of $6.4 million per year and, over three years, more than $19.4 million. Some of the interviewed companies also made significant reductions in the number of servers required to handle the processing workload.

· Reduced maintenance costs for servers. Cost savings for hardware maintenance based on purchasing lower-priced servers is more than $3 million per year for a total of more than $9.2 million over three years. When a company is using 3,000 servers, the savings in maintenance costs become significant.

· Reduced the time to respond to changing business requirements from months to minutes. Because the composite organisation is able to procure servers in a few days rather than weeks and has the ability to anticipate business needs by keeping a handful of extra servers in stock, the organisation has assets available more quickly. In addition, using standard server templates, cloud services and virtual servers enables the IT organisation to literally respond in minutes, when business needs justify the effort.

The director of technology for an international bank said, “Our savings in servers is amazing. Our savings is a 1 to 6 ratio, which means that we used to have six servers, now we can cover it using one server.”

Unquantifiable benefits experienced by these customers include improved response time to changing business needs, increased ability to hire and retain system administrators, and enhanced disaster recovery and business continuity. The IT director at the global banking company told Forrester, “We saw improvements in disaster recovery and the continuity of business as the Linux platform is very stable. We were able to architect this from a design perspective and adopt a higher level disaster control system.”