Capacity Planning - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 385

18.5 Reduce Provisioning Time
As discussed in Section 18.1.4 , one of the factors influencing your headroom requirement
is resource acquisition and provisioning time. If you can reduce the acquisition and provi-
sioning time, you can reduce your headroom, which in turn reduces the amount of capital
investment that is idle. In addition, faster acquisition and provisioning enables faster re-
sponse to changing demands and can be a significant competitive advantage.
However, idle excess capacity also can be a result of being unable to reduce the avail-
able resources quickly. Being able to jettison increased capacity, and its associated costs,
at will is also a competitive advantage. There are a number of approaches to reducing idle
excess capacity, and they can often be combined to have greater effect:
• Lease computers rather than purchase them. There may be a shorter acquisition
time depending on what is in stock, and the ability to terminate a lease and return
the hardware may be useful. Leasing can be used to shift capacity costs from capit-
al expenditures into operational costs.
• Use virtual resources that are allocated quickly and have little or no startup costs
associated with them. These resources can also be quickly terminated, and billing
reflects only actual usage of the resources.
• Improve the ordering process for new hardware resources. Preapprove budget
decisions and create standardized ordering.
• Improve installation time. Part of the provisioning time is the time from when
hardware hits the loading dock to when it is actually in use. Find ways to stream-
line the actual rack and burn-in.
• Manage your time. Make it a priority to install new equipment the moment it ar-
rives. Have no idle hardware. Alternatively, dedicate staff to doing this. Hire non-
system administrators (“technicians”) to unbox and rack mount systems.
• Work with vendors (supply chain management) to reduce ordering time.
• Place many smaller orders rather than one huge order. This improves parallel-
ism of the system. Vendors may be able to chop up one big order into periodic de-
liveries and monthly billing. A transition from one huge order every 6 months to 6
monthly orders and deliveries may have billing, capital cost, and labor benefits.
• Automate configuration so that once new hardware is racked, it is soon available
for use.