Capacity Planning and Assessments
Virtualization Assessment
When your business demands the most out of your IT assets and staff, server virtualization can significantly improve the efficiency of IT infrastructure and enhance front-end productivity. Insight's Virtualization Assessment (VA) is designed to help organizations determine how a virtual server environment will improve the bottomline and increase return on net assets.
The assessment includes an understanding of the existing server and application workloads over a sufficient period of time to successfully model the characteristics of the existing server environment and user demands. A modeling scenario is then generated to understand the cost, energy, cooling, and efficiency trade-offs and benefits of utilizing virtualized infrastructure.
Phases of the virtualization assessment include:
- Installation, configuration and testing of the data collection software.
- Collection of data and troubleshooting any issues that arise during the data collection period.
- Delivery of Virtualization Assessment results.
After the assessment period, Insight's VA will prepare and deliver a (hard and soft copy) report that includes the total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), as well as the hardware and workload modeling analysis.
Backup Assessments
Information technology is the lifeline for many businesses today. Data is business-critical, and necessary for continuous business operations. Improving the speed of data recovery in the event of disaster or system failure is necessary to manage risk and minimize business downtime.
Insight's Backup Assessment is designed to investigate and map the entire data path from application to disk and/or tape both offsite and on. The backup policies and logs are studied to ensure that the right data is being backed up and is being backed up in the desired timeframes. Performance data is analyzed to find areas for potential enhancements. Finally, Insight's Professional Services team documents the results of the analysis and recommends enhancements to the existing recovery infrastructure as required.
During a Backup Assessment, we focus on the entire infrastructure which includes:
Application/Business Unit Needs Review
- Recovery Point (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
- Evaluate backup policies characteristics.
Current Backup Software Capabilities
- Configuration review including version(s), features and functions currently in use.
- Document the current state-of-the-state with current tools and processes.
Current Backup Hardware Environment
- Storage pools, tape and/or disk configuration review.
- Master/media server configurations.
- Errors and failed jobs analysis.
- Examine backup and restore jobs' specifics (throughput, duration, etc.).
Network Topology
- Study backup client's network interface (100Gb, 1000Gb).
- Provide a list of mission-critical drives where backup is essential.
- Study network infrastructure (data path between clients and backup server).
Performance Evaluation
- Capture and compare those to find out if there are any bottlenecks caused by either side.
- Perform backup and restoration tests during various times of the day to identify any network or media congestion during busy hours or heavy backup loads.
- Sample and monitor media servers' system utilization (CPU, memory, disk, etc.).
At the end of the analysis period, Insight will prepare and deliver a report that includes total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), operational trade-offs and next step recommendations and analysis delivered in both hard and soft copy.
Storage Assessment
Today's demands for information are dynamic and vary by time, day, and month. As user requests for data and applications rise, these demands tax the IT infrastructure and may lead to poor system performance, high latency, decreased productivity, and risk of data loss. Often the bottleneck in system performance is storage.
Our Storage Assessments are used conjunctively with our expertise, to understand the complete storage infrastructure needed to meet specific business and financial objectives.
We begin with a non-intrusive, end-to-end scan of the entire SAN environment to track device conversations between systems, applications, and users. We then collect detailed performance and event statistics for ease in identification of gaps in the storage infrastructure. An investigation of asset capacity, file types, and backup information on the storage network are used to gauge current system performance, as well as plan and budget for future storage requirements.
Upon completion of the capacity assessment analysis, Insight will prepare a detailed report which identifies the total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), includes operational trade-offs, and anticipates the future needs based upon existing capacity trends. From this report, businesses will have a better picture of the existing storage environment, which enhances planning, forecasting and budgeting for future storage purchases.