1. Understanding IT Costs
Peter James and Martin Bennett
Jisc Costing IT Services (CITS) Project
London, 10 th February 2014

2. Cost Distortions

3. Amazon Web Services

4. Jisc Costing IT Services (CITS) Project
CITS Stage 1:
Janet X-Ray
Financial Tool
University of
York IT Cost
Exercise
CITS Stage 2
• Repurposing York spreadsheet and
experience into a generic tool
• Costing specific activities e.g. data centres
• Financial skills learning materials for IT staff

5. PURPOS
E
• Identify what an IT
department does
• Enable benchmarking
• Find improvements
and/or cost savings
• Provide more robust
data for specific
decisions
• Determine charges for
services
• Devolve budgets or
assign financial
responsibility
• Track cost and VFM
improvements over
time
• Improve accountancy
systems to better
support decisionmaking
An IT Cost Model
RECORDE
D COSTS
Central IT
Staff
Hardware
Software
Other
Local IT
Staff
Hardware
Software
Other
Estates
Energy
Cooling
Power Supply
Other
Space/TRAC
Depreciation
COST
OBJECTS
Services
Individual
Group
Activities
Data Centre
Storage
V Machines
USE
Strategic
Decisions
Cloud
Investment
Decisions
Storage
Management
Responsibility
Benchmarking

6. Costing HPC and Storage
• Not Just Cost
- other factors
- cloud may work best as part
of strategic change
• Not for everything
- non urgent HPC
- lower tier storage
• Different solutions

7. HPC & Cloud Considerations
• Not just cost
- other factors
- cloud may be best as part of strategic change
• Not for everything
- non urgent HPC
- lower tier storage
• Multiple solutions e.g. for HPC
- compute/store/memory bundles
- speed & ‘virtual cores’