SBC Communications thinks mainframe at the mid-tier

As an IT organization grows, it invariably becomes harder to manage. For David Brickhaus, director of operations for IT Services at SBC Communications, streamlining an organization comprising more than 10,000 employees and 9,000 servers meant a radical change in thinking.

“The first thing we had to do was to move away from a build-to-order type of mentality, where individual projects had custom solutions that we had created for them,” Brickhaus says.

Instead, SBC implemented a companywide portfolio infrastructure management project designed to reduce costs and improve asset utilization. Brickhaus and his team began looking ahead 45 to 90 days, with the goal of making bulk equipment purchases rather than one-off buys. In addition, virtualization technologies allowed SBC to reconfigure processing, network, and storage resources dynamically and share them across discrete applications. SBC’s long-term goal is to bring a mainframe mentality to its mid-tier Unix and Intel-based systems, including charging business units based on usage capacity.

“We’re not taking work to the mainframe,” Brickhaus says. “We don’t have an aggressive move to take work from the mainframe, either. The mainframe is what it is. But the idea is to bring that level of management, that level of reliability, and just that way of thinking.”

Overall, the ambitious project resulted in a savings to the company in excess of $50 million, SBC officials say.