Christian Leadership Alliance
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IT in a Tight Economy
Considerations for ministry success.| Outcomes, Fall 2009
The economy has taken a serious downturn, and it's affecting church and ministry budgets. Many are looking for wise, effective ways to cut expenses. How do you maintain computer-system stability and reliability when finances are tight?
Thankfully, there are ways to reevaluate information technology (IT) expenses in this tight economy without cutting quality, reliability, or impact. In fact, what I suggest may actually improve your IT quality and reliability. While re-examining hardware strategies, ask, "Are we making hardware decisions that increase our overall IT costs without providing additional benefits?" Here are some areas where this challenge may save you money:
Donation Downside
Churches and ministries often receive donated computer equipment. We need to be sincerely grateful, but using that equipment might be costly. Consider the following:
• Donors rarely buy new equipment to give. Rather, they usually donate equipment they are replacing or want to throw away. If it can't serve them well, why do we feel it will serve our teams well?
• Used equipment is almost always out of warranty, making us liable for fixing failing components. Bad motherboards and crashing hard drives take time to support, and the cost to do so includes parts, personnel, and vendors. Also, deploying used hardware usually means lower team productivity (because they are older, slower systems). The cost of using donated equipment is high.
Server Solutions
Today's networks require many servers to run at peak efficiency and reliability. Each server is expensive to buy and support, and each uses much electricity. But technology exists that allows them to be optimized, and it is mature and often free.
• The concept of "virtual servers" is still new to most. The best way to picture it is to think about partitioning a hard drive. When you do so, it looks like you have multiple drives, but physically you only have one. "Virtualizing" a server is very similar in that you configure the computer to "partition" its processing, communicating, and memory. In effect, the computer you once called a server becomes a host of multiple servers. This is a very efficient way to organize a network.
• A few publishers have software that allows a computer to become a server host. Though very large ministries may need the expensive versions, most ministries are able to do all they need with the free versions. Our favorite producer of this kind of software, called hypervisors, is VMware (VMware.com). This company has been producing it the longest, and its software works very well. Microsoft is in its second generation of hypervisor software and may eventually rule the niche, but VMware is the best solution for now.
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