Five Steps to Successful IT Consolidation and Virtualization

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation
and Virtualization
5 STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL IT CONSOLIDATION AND VIRTUALIZATION
5 STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL IT CONSOLIDATION AND VIRTUALIZATION
Introduction Most organizations today are faced with conflicting goals and challenges. They have geographically distributed workforces, with headquarters, datacenters, branch offices, and mobile workers scattered widely. Everyone needs to access email, file shares, and mission critical applications, and the speed of access directly ties to employee productivity. So computing resources have been widely deployed in many locations to give the local workers the best possible service delivery. However, this approach is now seen as wasteful and expensive with extra hardware and software to buy and maintain for many locations, and often few local IT staff to support the systems. As budgets get tighter, organizations are looking for solutions to handle this burden. IT consolidation is the number one approach today, taking infrastructure out of remote offices and into the main data center as a way to cut costs and boost IT staff productivity. The trick is how to consolidate without hurting the performance for the end users. Virtualization is seen as a fundamental enabling technology for consolidation, allowing each server to be much more efficiently utilized and giving more flexibility to the infrastructure. Organizations are rapidly evaluating and implementing virtualization as they look to further consolidate and reduce the hardware footprint in their IT environment. Together consolidation and virtualization are said to produce these benefits with nothing more than a small one-time effort of some time and money, but can you believe the hype? While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organizations, it will take more than just a Friday afternoon to ensure that your consolidation and virtualization projects are truly successful. As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly-planned project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place. This paper lays out 5 steps to successful IT consolidation and virtualization projects. While you'll still be doing the hard work of actually implementing the new infrastructure, following these steps will enable you to make sure that you've covered all the issues in order to ensure that your organization experiences the full benefits of IT consolidation.
Mapping out a successful IT consolidation and virtualization strategy Like most projects, successful IT consolidation requires time, planning, buy-in, and methodical execution. But there are a special set of challenges that relate to the fact that you are fundamentally changing the footprint of your IT architecture. This has wide-ranging implications that cover everything from budgets and capital expenditures to political considerations over the location of infrastructure and perceived impacts on business units. 1. Lay out a change and risk management strategy Why consolidate? 2. Develop a plan for resiliency The reasons to consolidate and virtualize IT 3. Test (and improve) branch office performance & local consolidation infrastructure are wide-ranging. While most IT managers focus on just the cost of the 4. Architect a forward-looking infrastructure & support plan physical IT infrastructure, there are many 5. Plan a phased roll-out additional benefits that can be derived from IT consolidation: .Simplified management Step 1: Lay out a change and risk management strategy . Improved data protection Risk management is part of project management 101, but there are some special . Improved resource utilization considerations in the case of IT consolidation. The benefits are most obvious to . Easier revision control the corporate entity (immediate cost savings, less strain on IT) and less obvious . Easier data protection and security to business units or remote offices. After all, these other groups may feel like they . More flexibility are losing "their" servers or local tools and will be penalized with reduced . Reduced server and software costs performance for no apparent reason. And, since IT is generally tasked to align their own goals with those of the business, this can create conflict and misunderstandin g. Similarly, IT teams located in r... [download for more]