IT puts its house in order, for business' sake

13.03.2006

The typical ratio of systems administrators to servers inside data centers has been described as 1-to-20, but HP officials have said 1-to-200 is possible. What kind of ratio will you be running in the new facilities? I don't want to comment on that, but I think we will exceed 1-to-200.

If you are making this into a customer showcase, how forthcoming will you be with users as the plan moves forward? Will you disclose lessons learned -- the things that went wrong, the things you could have done better? I think part of our responsibility as being part of Hewlett-Packard is to be very forthcoming on, "Here's what we started with, we decided there were problems with this, we changed course." There will be certainly lessons learned along the way, and I don't know what the right milestones will be. But my guess is it will be multiple times a year. Certainly, one of the things you do by making a public statement like you do in a forum as widely followed as this [conference, you're] going to have everyone asking, "Where are you at now?"

When do you see the data center consolidation being completed? Our goal right now is the end of [fiscal] '08, which is literally Oct. 31, 2008. A lot of it will happen, quite frankly, next year. We will get some consolidation done at the end of this year. A lot of the heaviest lifting will happen in FY '07.