Data Center Consulting, Consolidation & Rationalization Services

Data center consolidation is one of the greatest areas of cost savings for corporate infrastructures today, due to the distributed nature of client/server technology. Many companies that have experienced significant growth or growth through acquisitions in recent years have a requirement for consolidation of their information technology assets, as well as the staff that manages and maintains these assets.

Prior to making the decision to outsource their data centers, many organizations want to at least review a business case for consolidating and rationalizing their information technology infrastructure internally so they can compare that business case to the outsourcing proposal.

In addition to our outsourcing management services, we have broad experience in data center consulting - including design, consolidation and rationalization of an enterprise data center environment.

Outsourcing Management Services offers a comprehensive approach for data center rationalization. We have a partnership with the architecture firm, Parallel Technologies, Inc. PTI has vast experience in designing new data center facilities, or refitting existing facilities. We team up with PTI to provide a soup-to-nuts approach to data center design and consolidation. We have particular expertise in the development of data centers for financial institutions along with expertise in designing and building trading floors.

Outsourcing Management Services and Parallel Technologies provide the business case and overall program management for the build-out and consolition effort. OMS focuses on the system architectural design, migration plans, and governance process for the migrations. PTI manages the physical aspects of the consolidation. PTI performs the data center architecture (or refit) design, and also estimates new facilities costs. With Parallel Technologies, we will assist in the selection of contractors and will manage the entire data center construction and/or refit process. We will design, procure and implement the technical architecture at the new facility. We also provide the supplemental technical staff necessary to execute the migrations.

Our unique approach helps break down barriers that sometimes exist between a company's Information Technology and Facilities Management functions. We employ an approach that involves all the critical stakeholders within the organization in all phases of the project.

Areas of special data center focus:

• Business Case Development: OMS and PTI have developed a number of comprehensive business cases for data center consolidations. These business cases include a high-level architectural concept and associated facility costs as well as the costs for new equipment and migrations. We then estimate the savings that will be achieved in a post-consolidated environment and perform a ROI analysis. We will develop a business case as a separate stand-alone project prior to any consolidation decisions. Depending on scope and complexity, this business case often can be turned around in very short order (weeks versus months) to assist in the decision making process. See more information on our approach here >
• Program Management: OMS and Parallel Technologies have vast experience project managing data center consolidation and rationalization projects. Our team members have worked on a number of projects together consolidating data centers for several Fortune 100© firms.
• Governance: Establishing proper governance for a data center consolidation is critical to its success. As part of our project management approach, we engage all appropriate stakeholders within your organization to ensure they are able to contribute to the process as well as being kept informed. This process also defines a very clear and comprehensive decision-making approach for sign-off of the migration "dress rehearsal" tests, as well as migration go/no-go decisions.
• Centralized Data Center Design (Parallel Technologies, Inc.): Designing data center facilities is a highly-specialized field. PTI has vast expertise and experience designing a facility's structure (wind resistance, earthquake resistance, etc.), the facility's environmental systems (power, telecom and cooling), redundancy for these systems, as well as the data center space plan. PTI is also highly experienced designing and implementing the sophisticated security systems required in data centers and other highly secured facilities. Facility design as well as the technical architecture (network redundancy, processor redundancy, and storage redundancy) are all critical to ensuring a resilient information technology infrastructure.
• Disaster Recovery: Selecting the appropriate backup approach is another critical consolidation activity. When all the eggs are in one basket, a solid and realistic approach to disaster recovery must be a priority.
• Technical Architecture: We will design and implement a robust and resilient technical architecture for the new consolidated data center, including processing capability, storage management systems, and the network.
• Command and Control: Selecting and implementing the appropriate Enterprise Systems Management framework is an area which we have vast experience. This area is critical to ensuring business case metrics are achieved, as well as ensuring that service levels are improved in the consolidated command center.

Data Center SLAs

Outsourcing Management Services will establish service levels for the data center consolidation process. These service levels will include financial credits if not performed per the agreement. Examples include:

• Completion of migrations/consolidations per data center consolidation business case and project plan
• "Zero Error" tolerance service level for all critical business systems migrated.

Contact Us

Please call or write for more information about our services, or for general questions about data center consolidations or outsourcing.

For data center design questions, contact Parallel Technologies, Inc., at +1(214)999-0784.

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