Data Center Consolidation & Optimization Assessment
"My business is outgrowing its data center."
"Our data center was appropriately configured when it was built but changes in technologies and hardware have made it less than optimal."
"I’m not sure our data center is fully secure and future-ready."
"We are one system failure away from disaster and have never truly tested our recovery plan."
"Potential downtime poses a dangerous risk to the health of our organization."
"Our strategic IT plans are consistently put on the back burner as we’re too busy maintaining the day-to-day operations."
Did you agree with any of these statements?
If so, it may be time for a refreshed data center strategy. Whether:
- Your current hardware is reaching end of life,
- You want to take advantage of modular power and cooling, or airflow management
- Heat loads have increased over time due to additional hardware,
- Performance is suffering,
- You want to consolidate servers, or
- You’re considering a network upgrade
MCPc can help you determine the best approach to meet your business objectives. We are confident that you know your data center environment better than anyone else. However, at MCPc, our exposure to hundreds of data center customers from a broad spectrum of sizes, complexities and industries enables us to offer you insight into solutions or environments to which you may not currently have access. We can utilize this experience to help your organization build a solution better suited to meet your specific needs and budget.
We’ll begin with one-on-one discussions. However, we may discover that the best place to start is with a Data Center Assessment, which allows us to get a complete view of your current environment and identify the course of action necessary to support your ideal one. Without a clear understanding of your current data center design and performance, it is nearly impossible to make sound upgrade recommendations.
Data Center Assessment Details
At MCPc, we take a holistic approach to data center architecture. By fully understanding all components of your data center, ongoing maintenance costs, budget constraints and your strategic goals, we can help you design and build a fully optimized data center that specifically supports your business needs.
The data center assessment process is a collaboration between our organization and yours, and typically takes about two weeks. MCPc collects available information through interviews, inventory reviews and capacity-planning software that captures your data center’s performance and operational costs, including:
Step One: Data Collection
First, you will meet with an MCPc Data Center Solution Architect to discuss your current environment, challenges and desired results.
- Server data: Hardware inventory and pricing
- Storage data: Capacity versus utilization, storage information based on application priority (tier 1, tier 2, etc.)
- Network data: Most-used applications
- Security data: Disaster recovery abilities, backup process
- Power data: Heating and cooling costs, BTUs of heat produced daily
- Performance data: I/O speed
- Management and maintenance needs: IT technician, manager and director time to maintain data center performance
- Environmental information: Physical data center layout, power components and equipment used
Step Two: Assessment Data Analysis and Recommendations
After gathering all available information, your MCPc Solution Architect analyzes the data and compares current operations to your business objectives. With your goals in mind, he or she prepares recommendations for your data center design, and meets with you to discuss the following:
- Executive overview of your current environment
- Key assessment data based on the metrics above
- Proposed data center design architecture based on your objectives
- New hardware requirements and procurement costs
- Supporting budgets for solution implementation
- Estimated power savings
- Anticipated storage reduction due to consolidation and/or server virtualization
- Estimated time to achieve 100% ROI
- Options for plan implementation
MCPc holds expertise in all major technologies and manufacturers. Therefore, we will recommend the most appropriate solution for your business – no matter who manufacturers it.
Step 3: Discussion, Selection and Implementation
MCPc will reconvene with you to review our analysis and recommendations. Our discussions are straightforward and flexible, providing you with various options in budget and implementation time frames.
After completing a data center assessment, you can be sure that subsequent data center projects are based on facts rather than assumptions.
For more information, read these MCPc blog posts: