Five steps to successful consolidation and virtualization

Due to the reductions of the budget, the company look for opportunities to increase productivity of the distributed resources, but the main issue here – how to consolidate infrastructure, without slowing down work of remote workers?

Virtualization is considered how fundamental technology for consolidation, but badly thought over project will nullify all expected advantages.

We offer five steps to successful consolidation of IT of infrastructure below.

How to create the successful strategy of virtualization and consolidation?

As any other project, IT consolidation requires time, efforts and methodical approach. But there is the whole set of difficulties, connected with the fact that you should change fundamentally your IT architecture. It will affect not only the budget and the capital investments, but also political affairs about the location of infrastructure and its business impact departments.

• 1. Plan changes and develop risk management strategy.
• 2. Develop the plan of recovery
• 3. Test and if it is required, increase efficiency of branches and local consolidation
• 4. Create perspective architecture of infrastructure and the plan of its support
• 5. Plan implementation stages

1 Plan changes and develop risk management strategy

Risk management – one of the major operations control rooms projects, but in case of IT consolidations is several additional points. Its advantages are well visible to a business command of the enterprise (economy of costs, is less load of IT), but is not visible, for example, to the staff of remote branches at all. Their command can consider that they lose "the" servers or tools and in exchange technicians will get the causeless slowed-down job. And as, the purposes of IT should serve the business purposes, all this can lead to misunderstanding and the conflicts.

The good strategy of changes begins with communication. Communications with different business – divisions can take some time to explain what advantages they will get from innovations.

They can offer the following advantages, for example:

• The systems are supported and updated more often. As a system is located in the same place where also the main core of IT of employees, much more flexibility in providing services appears, it becomes simpler to plan regular checkups. It means less idle time in connection with technical regulations and an opportunity to use software most current releases.
• Joint work with other branches will become simpler. As all important data lie in one place now.
• In case many people work on one project, it is often difficult to follow which the file correct. But when all materials in one place, it is simpler to monitor it.
• The company will save money. Show to people an expected business case and explain.
• Consolidation reduces risk of data loss as a result of theft or the wrong processing. Such loss can cause administrative punishments, negative reaction of the press and loss of customer confidence and partners.

IT managers at remote offices should be sure that consolidations will be able to take advantage:

• Reduction of routine tasks of support. Instead of everyday routine procedures they will be able to be focused on perspective projects and to help people to perform more works in smaller time.
• The service level will be supported.
• Feedback will be taken seriously. Communication with IT by managers will help to enhance effect of planning of consolidation and virtualization.

Accomplishment of the first step will take quite long time in any company. But as soon as you will begin to work with more difficult processes, time spent for preparation will beat off. Employees will be aware, and more people agree to tolerate temporary inconveniences in case of failures and also to help when carrying out tests.

Step approach will allow successful carrying out consolidation of the first offices to show prospects of the project for all company.

2 Develop the plan of recovery

One of the main problems of consolidation consists that users depend on a global network and the central data center during the work with applications more. It is necessary to prepare for such changes in infrastructure thoroughly in terms of stability of system operation and restorability of architecture.

Distributed systems give a certain additional stability, at least in terms of the fact that failure will affect not all users of the enterprise or everything, but not at once. At a centralized system, idle time affects at once and all. This problem needs to be provided.

First, estimate redundancy of applications, storage systems and servers. When all system is virtualized and is placed on the smaller number of servers, it is always possible to make bakap, without exceeding the budget. Then it is logical to implement such system of a bakap which instantly would get into gear with critical applications. Here it is necessary to consider the position of a system of a bakap. Whether it will be located in the main data center, in reserve or in out of the company?

Also the company should think of redundancy of WAN. At the centralized data storage the lack of connection will paralyze work of remote offices of the company.

Estimating redundancy of WAN, it is necessary to weigh, what is more profitable, to have two different providers for communication on the last mile or to use one provider, but through different PoP.

At the first option has the best diversification of delivery and it is quiet for access of remote offices to the headquarters.

At the second option the office has a little smaller level of stability. If the problem at provider, office remains without communication. If only one ROR "falls", the second PoP of the same provider will provide office with communication. Advantages of such approach in the price and management.

3 Test and increase efficiency of branches and local consolidation

Undoubtedly, the staff of remote offices will object most of all. In addition to feeling of loss IT of infrastructure, they have serious reasons to be afraid of loss of access to the centralized information. It is necessary to solve this problem at once and to test performance. In most cases employees will consider that it is a problem of width of the channel. But, often the problem is not solved by expansion of the channel. The matter is that the delay together with inefficiency of protocols of applications creates traffic jams in the channel. It is necessary to perform complex optimization – reduction of data, optimization of the transport protocol and optimization of the protocol of applications.

Often carrying out consolidation, the organizations leave access rate problem solving for later in hope that there will be enough performance for the distributed users. It is fraught at least with dissatisfaction and as at most scandal. Sometimes the organizations carry out consolidation only to cancel it at the end because it becomes impossible to work from remote offices, and workers require to return old infrastructure.

It is very important to draw influential users who would agree to test applications on the party. Test the following actions with a stop watch:

• Access to public files
• Access to remote folders
• Opening of the file using office applications
• Access to the database
• Interaction of web applications

Try to repeat the test using the optimizer of WAN and without it. In spite of the fact that adding of the device contradicts the concept of consolidation, it can significantly facilitate work of remote offices. Usually WAN the optimizer pays off within several months.

4 Create perspective architecture of infrastructure and the plan of its support

It is a step on which there is an economy of money. The biggest economy happens when you remove servers, virtualize them, and consolidate NAS for increase in level of utilization. The strategy of consolidation allows IT to scale and to reliably protect data in the future. All infrastructure is in one place. Therefore it is much simpler to develop, operate applications and to test future modifications. But the complexity consists in dependence of a system on separate components of architecture. How will these changes influence interactions of applications? Whether it is reasonable to move certain groups of applications at the same time? What applications and technologies sonut to be consolidated and to what degree?

If you decide to add WAN the optimizer for acceleration of applications to networks, you need to consider it in architecture.

After consolidation of IT of infrastructure you can find out that some services need to be provided after all locally. For example, local printing, DNS and DHCP servers which ignore efforts on centralization. But there are such optimization solutions for WAN which support these services.

5 Plan pofazovy implementation

As well as the first step, this contains the most difficult technologies and initiatives in the company. For considering on phase of implementation study the following factors:

• How well you can support offices in the first project stage?
• What applications should be consolidated the first?
• How complete will be consolidation process?

The first steps should be taken with those offices which are simpler for supporting. Perhaps, it will be the offices not strongly remote from the location of the main data center. In that case all difficulties can be eliminated quickly. Would be great if these offices are located in the same time zones, as the main office. It is possible to begin with the smallest offices. In case of problems, not so many users will suffer.

Deliberate what applications it makes sense to consolidate the first. Many treat the fulfilled purposes for consolidation – file servers, mail servers, servers of bases – data and web applications. It is the best approach as allows to study positive experience of other enterprises. Other organizations consolidate even less commonly accepted systems, for example servers of management of documentation, the film system of a bakap, billing applications and applications for accounting.

It is important to think over everything and together with a command to come to a unified plan.

And at last, think over the consolidation level which you want to reach. In many cases of the organization all would prefer to remove from remote offices, having left only WAN, the router and WAN the optimizer, but in reality everything is frequent differently. For some offices complete consolidation works, for others – no. For example, the remote office needs the server with temporary files which are not necessary to other offices. Or the office is located too far from data center. Other offices are too big therefore it is more reasonable to leave them the infrastructure.

• It is prepared by Sodeystviye NP on the materials Riverbed Technology