My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 46

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Enterprise Cloud For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
the new paradigm, you can move existing people into new
roles that are more general in nature. However, they can also
have a more business‐facing component that helps shift IT’s
focus from infrastructure to the bottom line.

Adapting Your Processes and
Infrastructure
Beyond people, you also need to rethink how you handle
some of your IT processes and your infrastructure.

Rethinking infrastructure
economics
To find a starting point, consider the current IT replacement
cycle. For this scenario, I assume that the organization has
a five‐year replacement cycle, a visual depiction of which is
shown in Figure 4‐1.
When you buy infrastructure, you probably overbuy, even if
you run out of capacity. How can this be possible? In Figure 4‐1,
the horizontal line depicts the overall capacity that you’ve
purchased. In this context, capacity doesn’t refer only to storage; it also refers to the amount of processing (CPU) power
and RAM that you have available.
Most IT departments buy what they think they’ll need for the
duration of the replacement cycle. Sometimes the estimate is
correct and sometimes it isn’t, but one fact is always true: For
some period of time, you won’t even come close to using all
the capacity you’ve purchased.
In Figure 4‐1, the diagonal line depicts the actual workload
demand for the organization that purchased this infrastructure. The lines intersect in Year 4. The shaded area before
Year 4 depicts the “waste” that this organization is suffering
from. I refer to this as the zero return on investment zone.
More than three years go by before the fictional company
grows into what it purchased.

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