End of Software, The: Finding Security, Flexibility, and Profit in the On Demand Future

Performance: Pay to Play

Security management clearly gets the front-page headlines, but there is also a significant cost to managing application performance. Consider the simple issue of managing disk performance. IDC estimates that corporations are losing as much as $50 billion per year as a result of not defragmenting every server and workstation on the network. Perhaps disk performance isn't being managed because the cost of doing so is so high. IDC estimates the annual cost per machine to run the manual disk defragmentation utility at about $2,000 (52 weeks × 1 hour per week × $40 per hour). For a network with 25 servers and 5,000 workstations, the annual cost would be $10 million, and that is assuming the company had the extra 250,000+ person-hours ...