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Most organizations now have IT initiatives underway to reduce their carbon footprint, adopting more responsible policies to lessen any detrimental impact of IT on the world. Virtualization and increasingly various forms of Cloud computing are seen as the enablers of these Green objectives.
No one doubts the wisdom of going 'green' but unplanned and uncontrolled initiatives risk making the same over-provisioning mistakes that made virtualization such an interesting consolidation option, or under-provisioning in the name of minimizing resource usage, and taking the hit on business service that this creates. Capacity management done effectively reduces these risks, with analyst groups such as Gartner and Forrester, and good practice guidelines such as ITILŪ all recommending that it is done from a business perspective.
To achieve this, a capacity management tool needs to cover all infrastructure, both physical and virtual, as well as having the capability to bring unique business data into the capacity mix.
It seems like a tall order doesn’t it? Yet one vendor has a solution already well established in the market. Metron, with it’s athene®® capacity management software.
Andrew Smith, CSMO of Metron relates “A major telecoms company was going through a series of mergers and acquisitions. This involved merging several over-provisioned IT infrastructures, excess hardware bought in the heady days of distributed systems when a perception of cheap hardware meant over-provisioning was the accepted means of removing risk.
The climate is changing in many ways however. There was significant corporate pressure to implement Green IT initiatives, and a financial climate where over-provisioning was no longer acceptable. Multiple over-provisioned data centers certainly did not fit the bill.
Our strategic consulting team used their extensive skills and our athene®® software to identify what savings could be made in server infrastructure, leading to further savings through reductions in power usage and floor space, as the various acquisitions were merged with the original business. Through the combination of athene®® and Metron’s expertise, all this was planned and implemented while ensuring that key performance indicators and green initiatives for the business were achieved.”
A good capacity management tool will seamlessly combine business data with the underlying infrastructure statistics, enabling the business to see the relationship between the two and plan what infrastructure requirements will be required from a business not a technology perspective.
Content from Metron’s recent seminar ‘Capacity management for virtualization, Cloud and Green IT’ and a wealth of knowledge in the form of white papers, podcasts and interactive webinars on these subjects can be downloaded from their website. |
