Improve Service quality
"IT organizations should engage in a server consolidation project with three major goals: cost reduction, agility improvement and service-level improvement."
Source: “Key Issues for Servers,” Gartner Inc.
GOAL: IMPLEMENT A CONSOLIDATION STRATEGY
Many companies are re-evaluating their IT infrastructures in light of changing business practices, economic demands, and security concerns. Server consolidation is seen as a strategic response to these issues. It encompasses a range of activities, from physical consolidation and centralization of a company’s IT servers to the integration of data and applications. Achieving the benefits of consolidation means overcoming a number of obstacles, including the risks of inadequate planning, provisioning, and execution.
- What are the major drivers for consolidation in your organization?
- Are you satisfied with the progress of your consolidation efforts?
- What do you see as obstacles to the consolidation process?
- Would it help to have more accurate information to guide your consolidation efforts?
- Are you able to measure the success of your consolidation process?
- Are you considering virtualizing your servers?
RETHINKING THE PROBLEM
Vityl Capacity Management can help you build a roadmap for consolidation that will provide desired performance levels, efficiency gains, and cost savings. Our experts can guide you through the consolidation process, helping you leverage modeled data to make informed decisions about consolidation candidates; develop, test and validate consolidation strategies; track ongoing performance against your objectives; and sustain your consolidation efforts over time to maintain your desired ROI.
Challenges:
- Determining the best technology approach — should applications be stacked on a single server or virtualized?
- Identifying areas of low utilization and opportunities for highest ROI
- Ensuring application performance is maintained in the consolidated environment
- Developing and supporting a business case for consolidation that is supported by business units
- Reducing risk and maximizing results
Time to upgrade—desire to take advantage of new technologies
Vendor change—new vendor requires different equipment
Considerations:
Consolidation candidates matter?
What if, when considering server consolidation, you could get the information you need to identify the best candidates for consolidation – easily and quickly?
Why does developing a plan for consolidation matter?
What if, when evaluating consolidation candidates, you could accurately model performance and develop a plan accordingly?
Why does validating your consolidation strategy matter?
What if you could test your consolidation plan under real world
conditions prior to deployment to ensure success?
Why does tracking consolidation performance matter?
What if, when evaluating the progress of your consolidation initiative, you could easily access up-to-date system performance data?
What if you had a consolidation partner to help you sustain your efforts over time?
HOW VITYL CAN HELP YOU IMPLEMENT A CONSOLIDATION STRATEGY
Identify Optimal Consolidation Candidates
Get quick access to data on server utilization and workloads so you can increase the accuracy and speed of your consolidation projects.
Develop Plan for Consolidation
Experiment with different application-server configurations to see how they will perform in a shared environment. Use this information to determine the optimal server configurations to support your multiapplication workloads.
Validate Your Consolidation Strategy
Model and validate your consolidation plan under real-world scenarios in a virtual test bed that mimics your existing server environment, eliminating the need for expensive, complex, and resource-intensive validation in an actual test lab.
Track Consolidation Performance
Utilize post-consolidation tracking mechanisms to evaluate whether your objectives were met in the areas of overall system activity, system activity by workload, process data, disk activity, and network and TCP statistics.
Manage Consolidated Environment
Continue to evaluate your server environment as you add new applications and new workloads. Ensure your initial consolidation efforts continue to deliver the desired ROI as you grow your business.