Data Center Consolidation Services

Most IT managers today are faced with the dilemma of delivering additional storage and server capacity without growing their IT budget. As the cost of servers and storage has declined, it has become easier to expand capacity without growing acquisition costs. However, the expanded hardware footprint increases management complexity, costs, space, and overall demands on the data center—while capacity is still not optimized to meet spikes in demand.

Symantec consultants can help you reduce the number of vendors and products; consolidate storage, servers, and data centers; and eliminate wasteful overcapacity through optimized asset management. In addition, our consolidation experts can help your company meet the challenge of managing accelerating application growth with flat or declining IT staff levels.

Challenges

Most businesses set goals to maximize productivity while minimizing costs. And yet, many fail to fully utilize their IT resources. Market research and experience with data center customers reveal that server utilization remains incredibly low—typically at 8-12% of capacity in Windows environments and 25-30% in UNIX/Linux. Storage utilization is also a concern with NAS utilization averaging 35% of capacity, and SAN utilization around 50% of capacity. Clearly, such underutilization of computing resources contributes to significantly increased cost of ownership.

As data and applications rapidly expand, the resultant data center footprint increases, raises operating costs, and introduces new environmental challenges—further driving the need to improve asset and space utilization. To address these challenges, enterprises strive to migrate and right-size applications and systems, repurpose available server capacity through virtualization and flexible application provisioning, and reclaim storage space.

Solutions

Symantec can help you transition from an environment of one workload per server and underutilized storage to a consolidated and rationalized infrastructure—one that supports virtualization of all resources, shared infrastructure pools, and unified management.

Our transformation program includes the following steps

• Creation of a consolidation framework for sites, systems, and applications

• Design and implementation of a virtualized, shared resource pool

• Plan for retirement of obsolete systems and applications

• Plan for migration of systems and applications

Why Symantec?

Many companies have accumulated siloed servers in dispersed locations. Others need to optimize and manage new resources due to mergers or acquisitions. Regardless of how you arrived at the need for consolidation, Symantec can help you fully utilize your IT resources.

In addition to resource optimization, our customers have reaped substantial benefits from reclaimed data center real estate, improved IT management, increased automation, and reduced capital and operating expenditures.