Four Essential Steps To Guide Virtualization Process From SunGard Availability Services
Wayne, Pa., December 17, 2008 — SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of enterprise-wide information availability, today outlined four essential steps for companies looking to add virtualization technologies to their data centers. These steps help organizations examine the business and technology upside and risks related to migrating to virtual infrastructure.
Today, many organizations are investigating virtualization with an eye towards advancing data center consolidation strategies to decrease IT costs. These initiatives can also reduce power and cooling outlays, and cut data center space requirements, supporting green IT initiatives.
“Whether driven by a data center move or consolidation, building a clear case for both IT and business managers on the expected benefits of a virtual infrastructure is an essential foundation to project success,” said Mark Stoecklein, senior director, Technology Solutions Practice of SunGard Availability Services. “Working with a vendor-agnostic consulting partner, like SunGard, can keep companies on the right path. We can also help organizations factor in recovery time and recovery point objectives to virtualization strategies, ensuring proper levels of information availability.”
For virtualization initiatives, companies need to include these four steps:
1. Examine why you want to virtualize. Only by looking at both business and technical drivers can a company determine whether virtualization is the right course. Here, companies examine issues most important to them such as are they looking to reduce the server footprint in their data center or are they running out of power for their data center and their utility cannot provide more. Additionally, this stage is where you balance business requirements against possible alternative solutions – such as managed services – to determine the best course for your company.
2. Assess what you want to virtualize. This step helps you determine which applications and hardware can best deliver virtualization’s benefits to your IT environment. At this stage, organizations discover and document applications, servers, networks and storage devices to determine the best virtualization candidates. With this information, you can build the business case for virtualization.
3. Develop your virtualization strategy and design. With this step, companies develop a step-by-step implementation plan that includes cost analysis for software, hardware and services. One area often overlooked during this step is information availability. Some vendors position virtualization as automatically providing disaster recovery – or eliminating the need for DR. This is a wrong assumption. Recoverability needs to be designed into the virtualization solution to reduce the severity and duration of IT-related outages and lessen business risks.
4. Implement your virtualization strategy. With this step, companies implement the physical to virtual environment plans. You should follow best practices to ensure success. This means starting with a proof of concept system by piloting non-critical applications. Companies should implement initial systems in a test and development – not production – environment and then scale systems from there. Another priority needs to be testing failover to a secondary site to ensure disaster recovery is working flawlessly to safeguard information availability.
Core to SunGard’s offerings is information availability, helping companies address specific business continuity needs. SunGard also offers a robust portfolio of solutions capable of addressing the broad range of information availability needs companies have, including virtualization assessment, strategy and design, and implementation services to assist companies in migrating to virtual infrastructures.