Making the Best Use of Limited Resources

“Capacity planning is a prerequisite for any resource efficiency improvement program.”

Source: “Server Virtualization for x86: A Benefits Impact Assessment,” Gartner Inc.

GOAL: MAKE THE BEST USE OF RESOURCES

IT organizations are under considerable pressure as they struggle to control operating and capital costs while meeting stringent service requirements. While the computing environment is expanding and becoming more complex, the resources and budget to manage IT are, in many cases, diminishing. IT organizations need to find ways to realize higher productivity from existing staff, increase utilization of the existing infrastructure, and reduce acquisition, implementation and management costs for their IT infrastructure.

• Is cost management a critical issue for your IT organization?
• Are you currently able to track your IT operating and capital expenditures?
• Where have you had the most difficulty in reducing costs?
• Are you looking for more opportunities to take cost out of your operations?

RETHINKING THE PROBLEM

TeamQuest (now a Fortra company) provides an effective approach to controlling costs while meeting service requirements by making optimal use of existing IT resources. Vityl Capacity Management shows how well IT systems are currently performing and how well they will perform under projected workloads.

This information can help you better utilize your existing resources, right-size your hardware/software expenditures to avoid under- or overprovisioning, increase staff productivity, and gain greater control over your IT budget.

Challenges:

• Planning — Verifying you’ve chosen the right applications for virtualization
• Configuration — Predicting performance in order to identify the lowest-cost environment
• Management — Alerting, monitoring, reporting and analyzing performance to ensure service levels are met
• Cost Justification — Providing objective data as input to a business case for virtualization

Considerations:

• What if you could significantly increase the ratio of systems to administrators without jeopardizing performance?
• What if, when considering consolidation to reduce costs, you could easily identify the optimal candidates for stacking and predetermine whether they will perform successfully in a consolidated environment?
• What if, when applications require new hardware, you had a fast, accurate way to right-size the investment to meet desired service levels without overbuying?
• What if you could accurately plan hardware investments based on business unit forecasts and proactively manage growth to avoid acute performance problems and budget busters?

USE OF LIMITED RESOURCES

Improve Hardware-to-Personnel Ratio Improve staff productivity by automating routine server management tasks, freeing personnel time for other duties.

Maximize the Use of Existing Infrastructure Reduce costs by reclaiming significant amounts of IT resources currently sitting idle in your data center.

Deploy Applications Into a Shared Environment Determine whether new applications will function in a shared environment and identify underutilized server resources on which to host them.

Right-Size Hardware Investments for New Applications Avoid over- or under-provisioning with capacity planning software that helps you determine requirements of new applications.

Forecast Hardware Investments to Handle Growth

Manage growth proactively with accurate forecasts for hardware investments required to meet business demands.

In Fact: A fortune 500 insurance company used Vityl Capacity Management to analyze current usage, increase utilization of existing resources, and gain greater control over their budget. As a result, all new services were deployed without purchasing any new servers in a two-year period, providing a $12M savings in the first 18 months.