Download Managing Hardware & Software Assets

Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Computer h/w & s/w represent valuable org assets that must be
managed properly
Issues to be considered when managing these assets:
• Understanding the technology requirements for e-commerce & the
digital firm
• Determining the TCO of technology assets
• Determining whether to own & maintain technology assets or use
external technology service providers for the firm’s IT infrastructure
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Hardware technology requirements for e-commerce & the digital firm
• E-commerce & e-business are placing heavy new demands on
hardware technology because orgs are replacing manual & paper
based processes with electronic ones.
• Larger processing & storage facilities required to cope with the huge
number of digital transactions in the firm internally as well as suppliers
& customers
• (coupled with web pages with data-intensive graphics or video)
Capacity Planning & Scalability
Capacity Planning: process of predicting when a computer h/w system
becomes saturated. It ensures that the firm has enough computing power
for its current & future needs.
Takes into a/c:
• Max no. of users that the system can accommodate at one time
• Impact of existing & future s/w appl.
• Performance measure such as minimum response time for processing 2
business transactions
Managing Hardware and Software Assets
Hardware technology requirements for e-commerce and the digital firm
Capacity Planning and Scalability
Capacity Planning
Although this is performed by IS specialists, i/p from buss. mgrs is
essential to ensure that that we have acceptable levels of response time &
availability
Scalability: ability of a computer, product or system to expand to serve a
large number of users without breaking down.
• E-commerce and e-business need scalable IT infrastrucutes that have
the capacity to grow with the business as the size of a Web site and
number of visitors increase
• Orgs must make sure that they have sufficient computer processing,
storage, and network resources to handle surging volumes of digital
transactions and to make such data immediately available online
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Determining the TCO of technology assets
The cost issue is becoming more important to businesses and
companies as computer technology and networks grow.
What's most important to remember is that the Total Cost of Ownership
(TCO) should extend past the hard dollars spent on hardware and
software. TCO can be used to assess direct & indirect costs to help firms
determine the actual cost of specific technology implementations.
TCO includes:
• Cost of acquiring & installing computers & h/d
• Ongoing administration cost for h/w & s/w upgrades
• Maintenance & technical support
• Utility & real estate costs for running & housing the technology
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Determining the TCO of technology assets
TCO includes (cont’n):
• employee training
• their ability to perform necessary functions given the network
configuration
• and lost productivity when the network is down.
• the amount of money spent on communications wiring (telephone wires,
fiber optic cable, etc)
• security and access issues
Hidden costs for support staff & additional n/w mgmt can make distributed
client/server architectures more expensive than centralised mainframe
architectures
H/w & s/w acquisition account for only about 20 % of TCO.
It is possible to reduce administration costs through better mgmt.
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Determining the TCO of technology assets
How to calculate TCO of technology assets:
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Hardware acquisition
Software acquisition
Installation
Training
Support
Maintenance
Infrastructure
Downtime
Space & Energy
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Determining whether to own & maintain technology assets or use
external technology service providers for the firm’s IT infrastructure –
Rent or Build Decision
• How should we acquire and maintain our technology assets?
• Should we build an run them ourselves or lease them from outside
sources?
Egs of Technology Service Providers:
• Storage Service Provider
• Application Service Provider
• Management Service Provider
• Business continuity Service Provider
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Rent or Build Decision
On-line Storage Service Provider :
• Provides online access over networks to storage devices and storage
area network technology
• Customers don’t have to purchase and maintain their own storage
infrastrucure & storage support staff
• To be successful SSPs must provide very high availability and reliability
& also keep up with latest technology
• They are responsible for monitoring stored data and for managing their
own capacity, response time & reliability
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Rent or Build Decision
Application Service Provider :
• Uses centrally managed facilities to host and manage access to
package applications delivered over networks on a subscription basis.
• Instead of buying and installing software programs, subscribing
companies can rent the same functions from these services.
• Users pay for the use of this s/w either on a subscription or per
transaction basis
• The ASP’s solution combines package software applications and all of
the related h/w, system s/w, n/w and other infrastructure services that
the customer would have to purchase, integrate and manage on its own
• The ASP customer interacts with a single entity instead of an array of
technologies and service vendors
• Think about the benefits and challenges… ??
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Managing Hardware & Software Assets
Rent or Build Decision
Management Service Provider :
• Manages combinations of applications, networks, systems, storage and
security as well as providing Web site amd systems performance
monitoring to subscribers over the Internet
Business Continuity Service Provider :
• Defines and documents procedures for planning and recovering from
system malfunctions that threaten vital business operations
• Offers disaster recovery and Web availability services to help firms
continue essential operations when their system malfunctions
One more term…
Utility Computing:
• Model of computing in which companies only pay for the IT resources
they actually use during a specified time period.
• Also called on-demand computing Or Usage-based pricing
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Database Trends
Multidimensional Data Analysis
• As technology improves, so
does our ability to manipulate
information maintained in
databases.
• Have you ever played with a
Rubik Cube - one of those cute
little multicolored puzzle boxes
you can twist around and
around to come up with various
color combinations? That's a
close analogy to how
multidimensional data analysis
or on-line analytical
processing (OLAP) works
• Multidimensional analysis
enables users to view the same
data in different ways using
mutiple dimensions
Multidimensional data model.
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Database Trends
Data Warehouses & Data Mining
Date Warehouse
• As organizations want and need more information about the company,
the products, and the customers, the concept of data warehousing has
become very popular.
• Data warehouses are not great big buildings with shelves and shelves of
bits and bytes stored on them. They are huge computer files that store
old and new data about anything and everything a company wants to
maintain information on.
• The data are standardised into a common data model and consolidated
so that they can be used across the enterprise for management analysis
and decision making. The data are available for anyone to access as
needed but can’t be altered
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Database Trends
Data Warehouse
• Since the data warehouse can be cumbersome, a company can
break the information into smaller groups called data marts. It's
easier and cheaper to sort through smaller groups of data.
• Data Mart:
– Subset of data warehouse
– Contains summarized or highly focused portion of data for a
specified function or group of users
• It's still useful to have a huge data warehouse, though, so that
information is available to everyone who wants or needs it. You can
let the user determine how the data will be manipulated and used.
Using a data warehouse correctly can give management a
tremendous amount of information that can be used to trim costs,
reduce inventory, put products in the right stores, etc.
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Data Warehouse
• Supports reporting and query tools
• Stores current and historical data
• Consolidates data for management analysis and
decision making
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Database Trends
Datamining
• Datamining uses a variety of techniques to find hidden
patterns and relationships in large pools of data and infer
rules from them that can be used to predict future behavior
and guide decision making
• Often sued to provide info for targeted marketing where
personalised or individualised messages can be created bsed
on individual preferences
• These systems can perform high-level analyses of patterns or
trends, but they can also drill into more detail when needed
• Datamining is a powerful & profitable tool but it poses threats
to individual privacy
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Database Trends
Benefits of Data Warehouses
• Improved and easy accessibility to information
• Ability to model & remodel data
• Many legacy systems use hierarchical DBMS or even older
nondatabase files where info in diff for users to access
• Data warehouse enable decision makers to access data as often as
the need without affecting the performance of the underlying
operational systems
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Database Trends
Databases & the Web
Object-Oriented and Hypermedia
Databases
• Many companies are steering
away from strictly text-based
database systems. Data as
objects can be pictures, groups
of text, voice, audio, etc.
Object-oriented databases
bring the various objects from
many different sources and get
them all working together.
• As we move away from strictly
text-based information systems
and incorporate video and
sound, graphics and text, the
hypermedia
database
will
become more common.
• The attraction to this type of
database is that it allows the
user to decide which path to
follow from one node to another.
The concept of a hypermedia
database: how the various elements
are networked. Relationships b/w recs
less structured than tranditional DBMS
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Database Trends
Hypermedia database
• Organizes data as network of nodes
• Links nodes in pattern specified by user
• Supports text, graphic, sound, video and executable programs
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Database Trends
Linking Internal Databases to the Web
• Even though Web browsers have been around for only a few years,
they are far easier to use than most of the query languages
associated with the other programs on mainframe computer
systems.
• That's why many companies are starting to link their databases to a
Web-like browser. They are finding out that it's easier to provide their
"road warriors" with Web-like browsers attached to the computer at
the main office.
• Employees anywhere can have up-to-the-minute access to any
information they need. It's also proving cheaper to create browser
applications that can more easily link information from disparate
systems than to try to combine all the systems.
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Database Trends
Linking Internal Databases to the Web
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Database Trends
Linking Internal Databases to the Web
• A customer with a Web browser might want to search an online
retailer’s database for pricing information
• The user would access the retailer’s website over the Internet using
web browser s/w on his PC
• The user’s web browser s/w would request data from the org’s db
using HTML commands to communicate with the Web server
• Since many bach-end dbs can’t interpret commands written in
HTML, the Web server would pass these requests for data to special
s/w that would translate HTML commands into SQL so they could be
processed by the DBMS working with the db
• The DBMS received the SQL requests & provides required data
• The middleware would transfer info form the org’s internal db back
to the web server for delivery in the form of a web page to the user
• In a client/server env, the DBMS often resides on a special
dedicated computer called a database server
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Database Trends
Linking Internal Databases to the Web
• In a client/server env, the DBMS often resides on a special
dedicated computer called a database server
• The s/w working between the Web server & the DBMS could be an
application server, a custom programs or a series of scripts.
• Application server: s/w that handles all application operations,
including transaction processing and data access, between browserbases computers and a company’s back-end business applications
or dbs.
What are the advantages of using the Web to access an
organisation’s internal database??
Also Work on the Case study on Pg 241 – Public Databases for
Sales
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