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Capacity Planning Assessments

A data-driven approach to virtualization

IT staffs at small and medium businesses, after seeing almost all of the Fortune 500 companies benefiting greatly from virtualization, realize that they could also experience the benefits of consolidation and virtualization projects, which include:

• cost reductions
• simplification and automation of administration and management
• efficient use of resources
• load balancing & fault tolerance
• agility for testing and development and application rollouts
• isolation for security

Unfortunately, most IT staffs are struggling with frozen or cut budgets, and are being forced to do more with less. To gain approval for any IT project, many managers must prove the project is low-risk, and feature a very short payback period and almost-instant return-on-investment.

North American Systems offers Capacity Planning Assessments designed to help you make the case for your virtualization projects.

Consolidation Estimates

• Recommended for IT organizations with under 25 physical servers
• Prepare VMware Capacity Planning Data Collector hardware
• Install and configure Capacity Planning software onto Data Collector hardware
• Collect data for two weeks
• Generation of Basic Consolidation Estimate

Consolidation Assessments

• Recommended for those with more than 25 physical servers
• Conduct interviews with staff for server inventory, network resources and workflow
• Install client-side data collector
• Upload data to VMware Information Warehouse
• Collaborate with stakeholders on virtualization goals, existing infrastructure, business/financial metrics and goals
• Remote data collection, benchmarking, monitoring, and analysis
• Generation of consolidation models and two separate consolidation scenarios with ROI & TCO metrics

Data Collector

• Host-based agent-less application, collects data without burdening production servers
• Collects performance statistics, inventory, and discovery
• Manual or scheduled collection
• Use existing hardware, or let us provide you with one

Capacity Planning Dashboard

• Assess workload capacity by measuring system workloads and resource utilization
• Benchmark against industry-specific data warehouse for comparison and analysis
• Plan for capacity optimization with trending and identification of various optimization alternatives
• Decide which solution works best with scenario modeling
• Monitor to detect anomalies and generate recommendations regarding expansion of virtualization

Deliverables

A CE (Consolidation Estimate) or CA (Consolidation Assessment) from North American Systems can provide you with the data and materials you need to build a solid business case for leveraging or expanding virtualization within your IT infrastructure. Deliverables from our services include:

• Executive summary
• Assessment results
• Potential cost savings
• TCO comparison for different scenarios
• ROI analysis
• Customer specific requirements and constraints
• Recommended next steps