Consolidation

Consolidation, at the IT infrastructure level, is more than just reducing the number of hardware systems and software applications, or replacing with fewer and bigger servers. Consolidation should be viewed as an opportunity not only to optimize existing IT infrastructure, including servers, data storage, applications, networks and management tools, but also to establish an enterprise computing environment for growth and new business solution. More important, consolidation provide a foundation to establish departmental wide architecture and standards to allow seamless integration of Disaster Recovery and Virtualization strategy

TeraMach recommends four standard consolidation approaches: Logical, Physical, Rationalized and Data Storage. Rationalized consolidation refers to mostly application and database consolidation whereas Logical and Physical consolidation mainly leverage virtualization technologies to optimize resources utilization. These four types provide progressively greater savings, greater return on investment and improve end-user service benefits. However, they also involve progressively greater risks.

Benefits

Reduce hardware support and software licensing cost
Minimize software and system management overhead on day to day operation
Increase system resources utilization, which in term achieve greater return on investments
Reduce data center floor space and power/cooling requirements
Improve Service Level and availability on IT infrastructure and applications
Enhance flexibility on infrastructure and lessen time for upgrade and application deployment
Establish corporate standards on architecture and technologies

TeraMach’s Solutions on Consolidation

TeraMach offers best in class technologies and professional services to help our customers to perform IT consolidation for both infrastructure and applications. Following are the solutions that we provide.

Server and Storage Consolidation – TeraMach Server and Storage Consolidation includes analysis, architecture design, technology assessment and implementation to assist customers to reduce cost and management overhead while improve IT effectiveness.

Host Partitioning – Based on partitioning technologies such as SUN Containers, IBM LPar, HP NPar/VPar and Windows, TeraMach assists our customer to size servers and provision partitions for maximum performance and utilization.

Data Mobility – TeraMach, in partnership with IBM, provide end to end solutions to help customers to migrate/replicate data within the same data center, or between multiple data centers to achieve consolidation and data centers relocation.

System Management Framework – System Management is critical to an overall consolidation solution. The ability to move forward in the ongoing process of consolidation will be gauged directly by the ability to monitor, measure, plan and operate in an effective manner. System Management Framework should have a focus on common management tools with centralized views for application, servers, network, and storage. This approach will enable more universal troubleshooting, simplified management capabilities, and the needed information for the next steps in the consolidation process.

SQL Database Consolidation – TeraMach, in partnership with Scalability Expert, provide design and implementation for Microsoft SQL and other SQL databases consolidation for small departments to large enterprise with up to hundreds instances of SQL.

Our Experiences

TeraMach assisted an enterprise federal department with over 7,000 users to develop a server consolidation and platform standardization strategy. This strategy allows the department to establish a formal methodology and multi-year road map for managing and operating the hundreds of servers deployed within the organization more effectively. In addition, this strategy will enable the department to strengthen its IT infrastructure and improve its readiness for implementing new policies and initiatives affecting its clients. The deliverables include gap analysis and recommendations to implement the consolidation strategy which cover server, storage, database and backup.

TeraMach has developed and implemented Microsoft SQL consolidation for an enterprise commercial customer within Ottawa to reduce the number of SQL servers from eleven to two. This will include the consolidation of the multiple SQL databases into single instance running Microsoft SQL 2005 which significantly reduce the support cost and management.