Data Center Business Case

Consolidation of an enterprise's data centers in most efficiency-driven situations, an opportunity that offers significant cost savings for an organization. In addition to cost savings, data center consolidation also offers immense benefit for technological improvements and ultimately business growth. Too often the short-term cost savings endeavor overshadows the longer-term technology-based opportunities that can be derived from developing a consolidation strategy that focuses on long-term enterprise objectives.

Traditionally, developing a data center business case requires three basic components:

• A description and cost structure for the Current Environment
  A vision of the new or Proposed Environment (including its operating costs)
• A plan (and associated costs) for migrating from the current data center environment to proposed environment.
• Enclosed is a Table Of Contents for a Command & Control Center business plan developed for a global financial institution. This project did not involve consolidation of data centers - only the consolidation of the operations support function into a single command and control center facility. This outline will give you some ideas of the topics that need to be covered.

The Team

Assembling the right team to gather and document this information and develop a credible plan is critical to ensuring a comprehensive review for a business case. Below is an outline of a the team (and skill sets) required to perform such a comprehensive review.

• Project Manager
• Applications Specialist
• Storage Management Specialist
• Network Specialist
• Systems Management Specialist
• Operations Management Specialist
• Help Desk Specialist
• Data Center Design Architect

Command & Control Center Business Plan - Table of Contents [DOC]

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