Blog

Business Scenario

In Today’s time, All business verticals (Financial, BFSI, Telecom, Pharma.) are making a move and being successful in making the business process automated by implementing enterprise business applications or developing applications in-house.  To support this core enterprise applications there are multiple peripheral applications which become the need of time today.

 

To implement these applications, IT department works extensively on infrastructure and facilities to host the application and make them available 24*7 for business.

 

To implement these business critical applications, Organizations invest hugely on Hardware and software to co-op with business requirement. However, some point of time we lose the visibility which leads to unpredictability of such massive infrastructure.

 

Concept

Considering above challenges and Business requirements, we ( IT professionals ) started the initiative of  consolidating the IT infrastructure.

Consolidation is to move towards reducing cost of ownership by reducing hardware, software, power, floor space and keeping the same efficiency of operation / or enhance it.  This allows IT department to serve efficient environment to business and to become predictive for future growth.

To achieve the consolidation, Virtualization becomes the easy option to deploy. It looks easy to evaluate but probably goes wrong if not thought through enough. 

Virtualization for consolidation is a viable option because it keeps the interest of stakeholders intact and serves optimal computing power as per requirement unlike physical hardware where we need to anticipate maximum computing power which is very unlikely in normal operation.

The fundamental virtue of Virtualization is to grow infrastructure as you grow. TCO becomes practical and viable to justify and can be extended as and when required.

Virtualization can be extended further to create the private cloud computing.  

 

 

Typical Mistake

In today’s IT market, there are outstanding technology products available and those are supported by respective technology companies and principals.

Whilst, we initiate the project of consolidation using virtualization, we tend to overlook the critical business requirement.  We also overlook deep dive study of current infrastructure and its utilization. We tend to miss on future growth.

With various reasons we don’t involve all the stockholders to get the information on business growth and future projections and at last Consolidation becomes IT project which in turn becomes one of the expensive projects to execute where final goal is clearly not defined to all stakeholders.

We start the proof of concept internally to address the business requirement but actually end up into product evaluation. We do 2 or 3 product evaluations and end in adapting either Hardware or Software virtualization technology to achieve the desired goals and it fails in most of the cases because we tend to deviate from goal by seeing good features of product.

 

Clover Unbiased Approach

By having multiple years of experience in various technologies,  We (Clover Infotech) bring the knowledge to the table. We always take the approach which gives unbiased opinion about current infrastructure and subsequently path to achieve consolidation using virtualization.

We generally take following approach address the need.

1. We understand the goal from IT team to be achieved by introducing virtualization.
2. We take the stock of current infrastructure and understand the future growth.
3. We do the deep dive study of each of the component with in listed infrastructure. This study includes
1. Servers utilization ( CPU, memory, I/O)
2. Current applications deployed
3. High-availability implemented.
4. Application Components study (DB, Application servers tier, web tier etc…)
4. Based on study, we create the blue print of deployment architecture using virtualization technology as concept.
5. We help client decide on virtualization technology product to be deployed. This can be combination of hardware and software products to achieve the final goal.
6. We also work towards reducing the TCO by utilizing current hardware.

 

Case Study

We have done few projects recently where we have achieved the expected goals and reducing the TCO and increasing scalability and predictability. This has helped IT department to utilize the existing hardware and licenses to scale it future implementations.

Clover Infotech recently carried out consulting project at one the BFSI client.

Challenge was to reduce the footprint of hardware in future by utilizing the current hardware the effectively and save on license cost since it was over licensed evidently.

Clover offered consulting services and advised on future deployment by reducing the hardware footprint to about 50% and license cost to about 45%.

This has help client to achieve the scalability to next three years.

Manageability has become easy due to reduced infrastructure.