Stalled initiatives due to challenges?

Consolidation initiatives can stall for any number of reasons. Most often these are preventable through methodical planning and good communication with stakeholders. CiRBA not only helps you avoid common issues that stall programs, but can get initiatives back on track if they are.

How will you avoid technical missteps that stall initiatives?

Technical missteps are a common reason why consolidation initiatives stall, and line of business confidence in virtualization is lost. Not every workload is suitable for a given consolidation or virtualization strategy, and often there are configuration changes required to prepare a server for that transformation that are simply overlooked.

Technical missteps can be avoided with rigorous analysis that examines the configurations, business constraints and utilization profiles of workloads within an environment. Analysis that only CiRBA provides. Some of the ways in which CiRBA helps organizations avoid technical missteps include:

• Candidate qualification that evaluates configurations, utilization patterns and personalities and the suitability of a target for consolidation using a chosen strategy
• Advanced workload modeling to avoid potential capacity shortfalls, bottlenecks and performance issues
• Risk analysis and workload content probability settings to accommodate performance considerations and service levels
• Flexible What-If analysis that enables the modeling of unlimited scenarios
• Placements and remediation steps can be evaluated as part of the decision-making process so you know exactly what your environment will look like before you agree to a chosen strategy or approach
• Forward-looking trending to ensure that growth is accommodated in an environment
• Detailed placement planning that considers business policies, service level requirements, security zones to avoid potential conflicts and issues

How will you achieve the expected cost savings and efficiency objectives?

Over provisioning and failure to achieve planned rates of virtualization are the most common reasons why organizations don’t achieve the financial objectives of an initiative. Rough sizing estimates that are used to plan many initiatives are based on sizing tools that are really selling tools provided by the suppliers of hardware and software vendors for your environment. Many organizations are now stuck with too much capacity because detailed analysis wasn’t conducted to right size the environment or increase density of virtual infrastructure. Also, unconsumed virtualization software licenses represent a heavy cost both in terms of dollars and failure to meet expected milestones and consolidation rates.

CiRBA analysis provides a clear path to achieving the objectives associated with transformation initiatives. CiRBA enables you to accurately model workloads and right-size environments with the appropriate densities given the kinds of workloads you are virtualizing and associated risk tolerances and service levels. Each scenario can be easily assessed for all the possible hardware options, including leveraging existing hardware, to avoid over provisioning and waste.

Another area of hard dollar savings is people’s time. Planning and designing data center transformations involve many complex, time consuming and absolutely mandatory steps. For instance, a proper design has remediation steps necessary for newly designed placements, new “optimal” placements (which workloads are to share what hardware), and anti-affinity rules stating which workloads should never share physical infrastructure. CiRBA’s template-driven analysis and flexible what-if scenario planning make it fast and easy to evaluate different scenarios and arrive at the best path forward.

How will you obtain buy in from the line of business partners and other key stakeholders?

Politics can be one of the biggest issues facing virtualization teams. Common objections range from “my applications are too important to be virtualized” to “there is no way I am sharing infrastructure with another department.” Communication is a critical aspect of success. CiRBA analytics allow you to show line of business customers highly detailed reports that show past utilization patterns of all the subject workloads and empirically how they will fit into the target environment…and why they will continue to operate as well or better. This changes the discussion from “trust us” to “here is exactly what the data shows will happen.”

CiRBA provides high level dashboard reporting through detailed placement and remediation plans for designing environments. So you can explore different alternatives and discuss those at the appropriate level with the various stakeholders in your organization. Whether it’s modeling scenarios to show potential savings achieved by sharing infrastructure or reassuring stakeholders of the accommodation of risk tolerance levels, CiRBA provides the answers.