Cloud-enabled environment provisioning, deployment, and release management with IBM Workload Deployer

You can find a great IBM-published white paper entitled — A Study on reducing labor costs through the use of IBM Workload Deployer (Formally known as IBM WebSphere CloudBurst) at ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/wsw14161usen/WSW14161USEN.PDF.

In this paper, a formula that uses the calculations based on labor and server provisioning lifecycle, which goes from setup and deployment to troubleshooting and maintenance to retirement. It looks at the current labor model for servers using "total hardware labor hours" with the "number of physical servers". It adds these two to total software stack labor hours and the number of software images to come up with the total labor hour costs for a given period. It shows that the benefits of virtualization, standardization, and automation can reduce the operational labor costs to 80 percent in the cloud and non-cloud environments over manual deployment...