Why Storage Consolidation

Today IT environments are unique. Budgets remain flat, business units now hold IT departments accountable for services provided and businesses demand less downtime and increased productivity. In short, the expectation is to do more with less. This has driven the need for IT consolidation as a way to streamline the IT infrastructure and to help IT departments achieve this goal expectation. The goal of IT consolidation is to make optimal use of available computing resources, while maintaining an infrastructure that is lower in costs, easier to manage, and secure.

Value/Benefit:

Financial

Cost savings is the first potential benefit since economic justification is necessary to help build a case for implementing storage consolidation. The easiest way to look at cost savings is through two categories - cost avoidance and cost reduction. Your objective might be to reduce operating expenses, cost per GB, or avoid costs such as power consumption costs, purchasing new equipment, Service Level Agreements (SLA), or costs from additional data center space.

Operational

Improved availability and functionality can also be a result of a successful consolidation initiative. If your infrastructure is frequently faced with downtime challenges, end users will have a hard time being productive. One of the objectives of the storage consolidation effort might be to obtain the best possible availability for end users.

Strategic

A successful consolidation initiative would allow you to allocate resources more efficiently and easily introduce new applications/servers and create a “plug and play” environment.

A combination of financial, operational, and strategic objectives will allow you to focus your storage consolidation on the key areas of impact for your entire organization.

Deliverables:

The objectives of the Storage Consolidation Offering is to deliver the following:

Ø      Provide the client with an accurate inventory of servers and the utilization of storage allocated both from a logical and physical view for  the targeted environment to be in scope for this offering

Ø      Provide observations and recommendations based on industry best practices for storage consolidation to include network attached storage options, potential iSCSI candidates, moving servers with captive storage to a alternative solution, tiered storage options, and other alternatives that may be considered as a viable options

Ø      Provide reports and recommendations to address storage consolidation and reduction of costs via consolidation of storage arrays, internal/captive storage, etc .These reports will address storage utilization, look at the applications running on the server to identify the role and function and which can then be mapped to business units

Ø      This offering will be utilizing performance data powered by Lighthouse Solutions Group to deliver the reports and output needed to address the areas for this offering                                       

Why Storage Consolidation

Today IT environments are unique. Budgets remain flat, business units now hold IT departments accountable for services provided and businesses demand less downtime and increased productivity. In short, the expectation is to do more with less. This has driven the need for IT consolidation as a way to streamline the IT infrastructure and to help IT departments achieve this goal expectation. The goal of IT consolidation is to make optimal use of available computing resources, while maintaining an infrastructure that is lower in costs, easier to manage, and secure.

Value/Benefit:

Financial

Cost savings is the first potential benefit since economic justification is necessary to help build a case for implementing storage consolidation. The easiest way to look at cost savings is through two categories - cost avoidance and cost reduction. Your objective might be to reduce operating expenses, cost per GB, or avoid costs such as power consumption costs, purchasing new equipment, Service Level Agreements (SLA), or costs from additional data center space.

Operational

Improved availability and functionality can also be a result of a successful consolidation initiative. If your infrastructure is frequently faced with downtime challenges, end users will have a hard time being productive. One of the objectives of the storage consolidation effort might be to obtain the best possible availability for end users.

Strategic

A successful consolidation initiative would allow you to allocate resources more efficiently and easily introduce new applications/servers and create a “plug and play” environment.

A combination of financial, operational, and strategic objectives will allow you to focus your storage consolidation on the key areas of impact for your entire organization.

Deliverables:

The objectives of the Storage Consolidation Offering is to deliver the following:

Ø      Provide the client with an accurate inventory of servers and the utilization of storage allocated both from a logical and physical view for  the targeted environment to be in scope for this offering

Ø      Provide observations and recommendations based on industry best practices for storage consolidation to include network attached storage options, potential iSCSI candidates, moving servers with captive storage to a alternative solution, tiered storage options, and other alternatives that may be considered as a viable options

Ø      Provide reports and recommendations to address storage consolidation and reduction of costs via consolidation of storage arrays, internal/captive storage, etc .These reports will address storage utilization, look at the applications running on the server to identify the role and function and which can then be mapped to business units

Ø      This offering will be utilizing performance data powered by Lighthouse Solutions Group to deliver the reports and output needed to address the areas for this offering                                       

SAN

Services:

Lighthouse Solutions expert implementation of a SAN enables you to quickly realize the value of a SAN while mitigating the risk and time required to deliver a successful deployment. Our complete implementation service consists of Fabric Design with industry best practices applied, switch zoning and security, installation and configuration of two (2) 16 Port Switches, verify connectivity of host to switch, and storage and knowledge transfer.

Value/Benefit:

The scope of our SAN Services enables:

Ø      Discovery and Analysis of current SAN environment (if applicable), host configuration, and storage configuration.

Ø      Implementation Planning and Design of SAN Fabric (2 SAN switches) to include documentation.

Ø      Coordination of Lighthouse Solutions and Customer schedules to ensure a successful implementation.

Ø      Determination of the system implementation process and schedule.

Ø      Documentation of environment and deliver Lighthouse Solutions Implementation Design Workbook.

Ø      Verification that environment, hardware and software requirements are met.

Ø      Knowledge transfer and functional overview for client.

Deliverables:

The following will be delivered in this engagement:

Ø      Design and Implementation of two (2) 16 port switches

Ø      Up to 15 hosts connected and verified functional with SAN

Ø      SAN Implementation Design Workbook

Ø      One (1) day knowledge transfer

SAN

Services:

Lighthouse Solutions expert implementation of a SAN enables you to quickly realize the value of a SAN while mitigating the risk and time required to deliver a successful deployment. Our complete implementation service consists of Fabric Design with industry best practices applied, switch zoning and security, installation and configuration of two (2) 16 Port Switches, verify connectivity of host to switch, and storage and knowledge transfer.

Value/Benefit:

The scope of our SAN Services enables:

Ø      Discovery and Analysis of current SAN environment (if applicable), host configuration, and storage configuration.

Ø      Implementation Planning and Design of SAN Fabric (2 SAN switches) to include documentation.

Ø      Coordination of Lighthouse Solutions and Customer schedules to ensure a successful implementation.

Ø      Determination of the system implementation process and schedule.

Ø      Documentation of environment and deliver Lighthouse Solutions Implementation Design Workbook.

Ø      Verification that environment, hardware and software requirements are met.

Ø      Knowledge transfer and functional overview for client.

Deliverables:

The following will be delivered in this engagement:

Ø      Design and Implementation of two (2) 16 port switches

Ø      Up to 15 hosts connected and verified functional with SAN

Ø      SAN Implementation Design Workbook

Ø      One (1) day knowledge transfer