Data Center Consolidation
Consonus has been helping customers virtualize and consolidate their data centers and IT assets for over a decade, helping them reduce IT asset management costs by as much as $2 million per year by increasing asset utilization many times over, improving manageability, and increasing corporate agility around new services. Consonus provides these benefits while maintaining or even improving availability, application performance and recoverability.
The first important and perhaps most impactful step to realizing the full benefits of IT Virtualization, data center consolidation is an effective way to reduce both the number and type of assets and efforts required to deliver value to the enterprise. Data center consolidation can and should reduce cost and complexity within an organization, and can lay the groundwork for more effective IT governance and IT process maturity.
- Reduce costs, both immediate and long term
- Improve operational efficiency in multiple areas
- Improve collaboration/information sharing across platforms and business units
- Enable standardization
- Improve processes and manageability
- Overcome resource restraints
Consonus has been architecting, building and supporting mission-critical computing data center infrastructures in the UNIX space for nearly 20 years. We use that experience and apply those best practices to Windows and Linux servers, thanks to newly available capabilities of VMware and new server and data storage technology offerings.
Consolidation Targets
Data center consolidation is more than just virtualizing a number of physical assets. To truly reap the benefits of a strategic IT consolidation initiative, due consideration for people, process, and environment will be integrated into the overall objective.
- Data Center Consolidation
- Storage Consolidation
- Server
- Database
- Backup
- Management/Monitoring Environment
- Staff
- Support Contracts
Benefits of Consonus Consolidation
By implementing our standardized, proven data center consolidation methodology, Consonus IT Consulting will help your organization:
- Design and build an intelligent infrastructure to increase utilization of core data storage and server assets
- Manage your environment by reducing interfaces, data sources, changes and backup tools to lower risk, improve throughput, and reduce costs
- Improve Incident/Release handling by reducing the number of help desks and tools supporting them and standardizing processes across divisions, improving service to your customers
- Support your systems through highly qualified, authorized, multi-vendor support
An undertaking of this magnitude is not only a technical exercise and challenge, but must be prepared to address almost certain cultural, organizational, and financial challenges as well. It is imperative to develop an approach to manage these issues early on by adopting a plan that will demonstrate potential benefits, primarily financial, but also indicative of equal or improved IT services. Once illustrating these, garnering cultural and organization support for such change is much easier. Then ideally, the execution of a technical data center consolidation plan becomes the means to a successful new vision, rather than a technical exercise simply for the sake of implementing new technology.
The Consonus server consolidation strategy is to first develop a recommended plan or roadmap for enterprise consolidation and virtualization service that will outline steps for building a business case, identifying fiscal and organizational challenges, identifying risk, and ultimately detailing the technical approach. The technical approach will include recommended methodologies for assessing viable storage consolidation and virtual targets, assessing the impact on a central data center colocation (power, environmental, etc.), and assessing impact from an IT management and process perspective.
