Heidi Fraser-Krauss, Director of IT at the University of York explores some of the issues she encountered in trying to understand the true costs of the central IT provision at the university

1. What does central IT really cost?
An attempt to find out!
Heidi Fraser-Krauss
Head of IT Services University of York

2. Why?
• To understand where money is spent.
• To be able to compare our costs with those of
other providers- cloud…..
• To be able to price services that we offer to
others.
• Curiosity!
• To have evidence to argue for more resource.
• To understand central vs. local provision costs.

3. Its worth noting…..
Our methodology evolved, we had to start
somewhere

4. How- understanding services?
1. Started with getting an understanding of
our systems and services
– DNS
– Finance system
– Active Directory
– Storage
2. Listed physical and virtual servers and
attributed each server to a service
There were lots of gaps!

5. How- Costs?
3. Got a handle on license and maintenance
costs
– Hardware maintenance
– O/S licences
4. Added up hardware capital costs
5. Worked out a cost for a virtual machine
–
–
Physical infrastructure
VM license

6. How- Costs?
7. Worked out a cost per Gb of storage
– Differentiated tiers
8. Attributed these costs across the different
services
9. Group heads allocated staff-time to the
previously identified services
10. We attributed staff costs to services
– Difficult to do as no time sheets
– Accounted for time spent supporting non-central systems

7. Work in progress…..
• Software license costs
– To date a broad brush for major systems
• Attribution of data centre costs
– Capital
– Running costs
• More accurate attribution of power and cooling
– Can do it per server
• More sophisticated use of TraC costs
• Add in depreciation of capital costs
• Cover whole University

8. Keeping up to date
• Attribute purchase orders to service
• Once model in place and costs known shouldn’t be
difficult to keep things up to date

9. Lessons learned
• Need a firm grasp of services at a detailed level
– Takes time
– Things get missed out
• Staff cost allocation without time sheets is a best
guess.
• We used an iterative approach for obtaining
costs
– This annoyed people
– It could have been done in one iteration

10. Challenges
• How to allocate network costs or other costs that
are truly infrastructural?
– How do you cost the network for student record
system?

11. Some figures…..
• Storage tiers /Gb/year
– £2.33 NetApp
– £0.31 Sunfire X45100
•
•
•
•
•
•
Wireless/year £338,000
PURE/year £41,000
Identity management/year £79,000
SITS/year £163, 000
Agresso/year £95, 100
VLE/year £155,000k

12. Thanks to….
Stefan Wielgosz Data Centre Manager
Sarah Hall IT Accountant