Making Server Consolidations a Snap

An Executive Guide to Avoiding the Professional, Financial and End-user Satisfaction Pitfalls when Consolidating Servers

But such a complex and expensive project that brings with it much senior management visibility requires careful
planning and execution. For the failure to deliver – and deliver right the first time – is very expensive! If you have ever:

• feared that you undersized WAN bandwidth or server costs by $750,000, or more
• realized – after you started – that you need to double the project timeline
• dreaded hearing your end-users yell in frustration as the system grinds to a virtual standstill then you know first-hand what’s at stake.
   

By using a proven server consolidation methodology, you ensure that your project remains on-track, on-budget and ultimately delivers committed benefits while imposing minimal impact on your end users.

We present a field-tested roadmap to plan, optimize and validate your upcoming – or even in-process – server consolidation project. With this roadmap, you will rest easy knowing you will deliver accurately, on-time and at budget. We profile five organizations that performed server consolidation projects – one was a failure and four were successes. The four successful customers performed a comprehensive analysis of their pre-consolidated environment, mapped this usage onto potential future consolidation models and tuned their consolidation plan thereby ensuring a successful project.

Only by performing comprehensive analysis of your current messaging and Domino application environment, coupled with the DYS Server Consolidation Methodology that maps today’s usage onto potential consolidation models, can you develop a plan that quickly – and efficiently – gets you to an optimal and balanced consolidated environment which, in turn, catapults you to success.

Outlined below is the DYS Server Consolidation Methodology that performs this analysis. We summarize with the Top Five Rules that are critical to best performing a server consolidation project.
 

Issues Preventing Successful Server Consolidations

A server consolidation project is very risky. There are many issues and unknowns that must be dealt with before the project is undertaken. Many times, the consolidation team plows ahead with estimates, guesstimates and incomplete information. The team assumes they can safely do mid-project course corrections and can get more funds to complete the project. The team assumes their end-users will understand and bear with them as performance slows.

In almost every case, these assumptions are wrong.

Consolidation risks center around the accurate planning and sizing of future server, network and storage requirements. If these are not detailed, modeled and well understood before the new servers go live, you risk – at best – substantial performance problems, project delays and unbudgeted emergency expenditures. At worst, the project is deemed a failure and the original network is brought back on-line and the team and the expenses they incurred are written off.