Virtual Assessment

As with any large IT project, virtual infrastructure inevitably becomes intertwined with politics and the organizational social fabric of the company. Our assessment provides a very granular ROI analysis capable of satisfying even the most skeptical CFO of the benefits/cost ratios that virtualization achieves. From a social perspective, an assessment identifies baseline performance metrics, which prevents future performance complaints by developers or users.

“I couldn’t imagine going forward without a virtualization assessment. It’s just a good idea. It’s best to know what you have. It’s like a health check. You want to figure out where you are, where you want to be — and how to get there safely.”
Rich Lewis, Vice-President IT, The Mechanics Bank

What to Assess?

INX's virtualization assessments evaluate your organization’s existing IT infrastructure from a holistic perspective, including not just the servers, but storage, backup, network, and disaster recovery. These are the five core components of Virtual Infrastructure and they are all interdependent.

Most organizations evaluate these areas as isolated IT projects, but INX evaluates them as interconnected components of a unified virtual infrastructure. This allows us to identify many synergies and efficiencies that provide your company with unparalleled functional and economic advantages.

Assessment Tools

INX installs the agentless VMware CapacityPlanner™ solution on each client's hardware. VMware's non-intrusive software collects relevant server information such as CPU, disk, and memory utilization over a four-week period. It allows us to accurately record and analyze the usage, performance characteristics and patterns on your existing x86 servers through several weekly cycles.

In addition to Capacity Planner, we utilize other tools and methodologies to collect additional data for your server, storage, backup, network, and DR environments. These tools include SNMP graphing, database collection tools, and interviews with appropriate IT staff.

Once data collection is complete, we analyze it for capacity planning and scenario creation.

Who Should Assess?

The implementation of virtual infrastructure as an enterprise platform requires an assessment of the physical environment as part of the planning process. Assessment is really a function of planning, and planning is a prerequisite for a successful enterprise virtual infrastructure deployment.

The formality and scope of the assessment depend upon the size of the firm. An organization with 20 physical servers or less generally requires only an informal assessment, while an organization with 40 or more servers should engage in a formal assessment process. INX can assist organizations with 20–40 servers in determining whether a formal or informal assessment is preferable.

Assessment Approach

In order to develop an optimal virtualization design for your organization, we assess your environment from every possible perspective
Technical
Business
Financial
Organizational
Process

Technical

The virtualization of a production data center requires many decisions based on the technical assessment. Which servers should be virtualized? What is the best way to group virtualized servers for optimal performance? This involves balancing the combination of virtual servers that emphasize consumption of different server resources versus the combination of virtual servers with heavy intercommunication requirements, as well as whether to scale up or out in terms of deploying VI3 Servers. INX is singularly qualified to assist you in making these complex decisions.

Business

We conduct interviews with different business and IT stakeholders, which allow us to evaluate the impact of virtual infrastructure on your company's organizational business and IT objectives. We also analyze the impact of virtual infrastructure on your existing and upcoming IT projects.

Financial

VMware certainly has plenty of technological "wow" factors, but today's organizations are more interested in economics. Fortunately, server virtualization offers incredible economic advantages. For the average company, server virtualization:

• Reduces hardware costs by 53%.
• Reduces operations costs by 79%.
• Decreases the total cost of ownership by 64%.

It's not uncommon to realize a payback period of less than six months. Our virtualization assessment incorporates our background in ROI consulting, providing you with a financial analysis designed to withstand the questioning of even the most rigorous CFO or Board.

Organizational

INX performs a brief assessment of your organizational matrix to determine the impact of introducing the Virtual Infrastructure. This assessment is conducted in an unbiased, professional manner with the intent of delivering recommendations which will ensure that your strategic business goals are met. The scope of the assessment includes:

• Determining staff capabilities for current and future virtual infrastructure deployments
• Evaluating staff head-count related to virtual infrastructure projects
• Identifying potential organizational misalignments

It's not uncommon to realize a payback period of less than six months. Our virtualization assessment incorporates our background in ROI consulting, providing you with a financial analysis designed to withstand the questioning of even the most rigorous CFO or Board.

Process Assessment

IT organizations are increasingly aware that their operational processes have a substantial impact on overall efficiency, cost, and the ability to provide consistent service to the businesses they support. IT departments that recognize themselves as "service organizations" operate with lower costs and higher customer satisfaction than those operating as "technology shops." Moving from a traditional technology 'silo' approach with individual physical servers to an integrated virtualization environment is a comprehensive change. It is important to ensure that your IT service delivery and service support processes are optimized to take advantage of and properly support the consolidated virtual infrastructure.

INX's IT Service Management (ITSM) Process Assessment provides a comprehensive review of your organization’s existing IT service support and delivery processes. We focus on identifying any changes or additions that would optimize your service delivery and support for a virtualized infrastructure.

INX utilizes the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) – the industry standard framework for defining and optimizing IT support and delivery processes.

INX Assessment Credentials

INX was the first VMware U.S. partner authorized to perform VMware Capacity Planner assessments. We made a presentation about virtualization assessments at VMworld in Las Vegas in 2005, and VMware’s press release announcing their virtualization services featured INX’s work http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/vac_services.html

INX provides virtualization assessments for VMWare, VMware partners, and directly to numerous clients across the country.