Virtualization Assessment

To effectively craft a Virtualization strategy requires a balanced understanding of the current IT environment and the impact of IT consolidation beyond the server layer. It also requires an understanding of how IT consolidation serves the business today and into the future, as storage virtualization must not impede established service levels. Thus, an effective strategy will mitigate risk of deployment while expediting Return On Investment (ROI). A wise IT organization will draft an approach that offsets the cost of os virtualization with near-term consolidation savings while laying a foundation that reaps future advantage such as improved agility (provisioning test, QA, or DR environments) and decreased time-to-market.

Consonus' Virtualization Assessment combines a quantifiable assessment of the current server, storage, network and application virtualization state with forward-looking definitions of business and service requirements.

Consonus utilizes capacity planning tools to collect performance and utilization metrics in the environment to generate technical Data Center Consolidation scenarios. Our qualitative requirements gathering enable us to define and prioritize current and forward-looking business and service requirements. We present our findings, including detailed technical IT consolidation scenarios with associated ROI, followed by a strategic roadmap, organized around our four strategic data center consolidation advancement areas:

Identify opportunities for IT consolidation
Focus on manageability
Focus on availability
Enable Disaster Recovery

Consonus Virtualization Assessment

Objectives	Approach	Benefit
Reduce Cost and Complexity Reduce Sprawl	Identify Consolidation Opportunities	Provide actionable server consolidation and hardware virtualization recommendations
Optimize Staff Improve IT Agility Increase IT Virtualization Innovation	Focus on Manageability	Present additional recommendations on areas that will benefit from virtualization
Improve Service Levels Data Retention Policies for good Corporate Governance	Focus on Availability	Enable SLAs
Business Resiliency	Data Disaster Recovery	Insulate business from failure caused by natural or data disasters

Details of the Consonus Virtualization Assessment

Conduct performance and utilization analysis of up to 100 servers in the customer environment:

Install a data collector on site
Analyze the performance data for viability of server virtualization and application virtualization
Performance metrics uploaded to Consonus for analysis & report generation

Interview key personnel within the customer organization to ensure accurate estimations for a potential IT virtualization project:

IT Management and Teams
Operations Management and Team
IT Security
Service and/or Risk Management Plan
Executive Management or Line-of-Business Owners

Deliver results:

Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and consolidation ratio estimates
Migration and strategic roadmap

Benefits of Consonus Virtualization Assessment

Do-it-yourself virtualization efforts often result in delayed ROI, unexpected impact on the environment, or biased server-vendor influence. Consonus’ objective assessment results in an actionable, risk-adverse strategic virtualization plan with demonstrable ROI.

Consonus has demonstrated $500K ROI in less than 12 months by IT consolidation of as little as 32 servers. You will save money in reduced footprint and environmental costs today, and reap other benefits down the road like faster provisioning, better Disaster Recovery capabilities, and improved IT agility.