I just finished listening-in on an excellent webinar put on by Shunra entitled "5 mistakes to avoid in data center relocations (DCRs)". I highly recommend it.
I listened-in because I always like to get another perspective from folks who are demonstrably smart at solving those problems. Shunra, by the way, is in the application performance engineering business, and produces many good and mature products that I consider extremely complimentary to Ixia's in solving similar issues in our common market.
The webinar made me recall the importance of cost avoidance in the enterprise, bringing to the surface my own strong feelings on the topic and its importance in making critical investment and deployment decisions.
Where application folks are concerned, cost avoidance means deploying applications only after we are quite sure of that application’s performance and resiliency under load. Where network folks are concerned, it means first insuring that the underlying IP transport will handle the applications and services that are clearly "business critical". Back in my LoadRunner days, my most memorable observation was the proven and documented savings a customer gained through cost avoidance. Today at Ixia, my goal is to take this same message to enterprise IT professionals who are looking to mitigate the risk of deploying systems and services that support key business applications.
While working for PowerTest in 2008, one of our customers, a “big three carrier”, showed me an internal report. It contained hard figures of savings through cost avoidance that were gathered after comparing downtime-related costs in a before-and-after comparison. The result was an astounding $1.4 million dollars saved over the first year by designing/implementing systems only after clearly mapping out the limits of performance and actually measuring, in a repeatable way, resiliency.
Ixia has similar success stories that are ongoing, including one case that focuses on end-to-end gateway testing, billing and charging mechanism validation, and wireless security testing – all for a production network that is literally the bread and butter if the organization. The cost savings from avoiding outages and rollbacks exceed the example given above.
The take-away here is that a well-running business infrastructure helps you deliver uninterrupted service, and deliver those services under budget. If you use sound practices for pre-deployment testing, you will understand a) where the acceptable performance limits lie and b) how to best stay within those limits.