Assessment Offerings
Our Professional Services team provides assessments as a routine part of our Business Intelligence, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions. We offer various types of assessments and including:
- Enterprise Consolidation Assessment and Proof of Concept
- TCO Assessment and Proof of Concept
- Disaster Recovery Assessment
- High Availability Assessment
Enterprise Consolidation Assessment - Process Overview
Initial Meeting
American Digital consultants meet with key stakeholders in the IT consolidation project. Your team meets with the actual American Digital engineers and team members who will be conducting the analysis and providing consolidation recommendations.
VMware Capacity Planner Software is used for each Windows server analysis.* Our team members demonstrate the VMware tool for you and explain our methodology for data collection and the processing. *Note: Other tools may be used for Unix and data/storage analysis and reporting.
The initial meeting answers your questions about consolidation and defines the project scope by outlining details such as:
Servers
- Identify which servers will be monitored
- Decide which domain authentication credentials shall be used for data collection
- Identify if the servers will run standard Microsoft OS, VMware ESX, GSX or a combination
Storage
- Identify the location of current storage: centralized or distributed
- Determine which storage devices will be monitored including disk and tape
- Decide which reports are needed such as: storage capacity, file age distribution, schedule of file access, space consumption by file type
Customer Requirements
Your IT team provides the following grouping information for all named servers and/or storage devices being monitored:
- The physical location of the equipment
- The role and function of the server or storage device (test, dev, QA, production, email, etc.)
- Department owners of the server or storage equipment
Analysis of Data Collection
While offsite in the post-data collection phase, our consultants:
- Review the information gathered and mine the data for technical and financial insights
- Share the preliminary findings with your team for validation
- Create the financial and technical reports
Final Presentation
While onsite, our consultants:
- Review the reports with your team and provide technical recommendations and ROI opportunities
- Deliver the final analysis presentation
- Deliver a project scope and timetable in the American Digital Statement of Work (SOW)
In the final presentation, you receive all of the documentation of our complete assessment. Armed with this information, you can confidently present your CIO and CFO with the value of Enterprise Consolidation.