Virtual Infrastructure Impact Analysis

A leading international online auction provider leveraged Operational Readiness consulting services from 4BaseTechnology to assess whether it was practical to adopt virtualization in the highly-optimized production environment. Like most organizations considering virtualization, the company had implemented the technology on a limited scale through introduction in the QA/development environment. Virtualization’s common benefits including consolidation, provisioning and flexibility had been realized in the non-production environment. The company needed to ascertain whether the benefits found in the non-production environment could be realized in the production environment and the level of effort required to do achieve similar success. The organization became a globally-recognized brand by virtue of the high-quality user experience their Web site provides, which can be attributed to the operational processes that run the site. Therefore, it was particularly important to take apply a critical eye during the assessment in an effort to account for any potential negative impact that virtualization might have.

Using their proven Operational Readiness methodology, 4Base examined the production IT environment at both a macro and micro-level for its ability to support the adoption of virtualization. 4Base started by executing a comprehensive discovery phase where qualitative data was collected using different means from which 4Base was able to identify drivers, enablers and inhibitors that would influence virtualization adoption from an organizational perspective. This macro-level view allowed the organization to consider positive and negative aspects of virtualization specific to their environment that cannot be measured or remediated with tools or processes and represents the macro view of viability. This information was also used to assess the operational maturity of their IT processes to establish a capability baseline to measure virtualization against and ensure that virtualization could be adopted while maintaining their existing service maturity levels. 4Base then drilled down into specific operational areas to determine whether they could support the unique characteristics of virtualization. Each finding, of which there were 36, was supported by a description of the issue, the impact to the organization, level of effort to adapt the process and high-level suggestions for remediation. The results of the Virtualization Impact Assessment were carefully reviewed by key stakeholders in the organization who ultimately determined that the benefits of virtualization, which were supported by specific drivers and enablers outweighed the inhibitors and effort to adapt existing processes to operationally accept the technology.

Compliance for Cloud Infrastructure
4Base Technology was enlisted by the worldwide leader in retail transaction processing services to ensure that the different virtualization technologies being adopted could meet strict compliance standards before those platforms could be introduced into the production environment. read more>

Operational Readiness for Virtual Infrastructure
Using our proven Operational Readiness for Virtualization methodology, 4Base started with a thorough discovery process to understand the real requirements of the Operations group, which were then put through a gap analysis with resulting assessments and corrective blueprints. read more>

Operations Management Guide for Virtual Infrastructure
The IT department for one of the largest city governments in the United States engaged 4Base Technology’s virtualization consulting services to evaluate their operations and create a management guide of technical operating procedures to formalize the common tasks needed to maintain their virtualization infrastructure. read more>

Data Backup: Strategy & Architecture Development
4Base interviewed business leaders and other stakeholders to develop restore RPO and RTO details, created SLAs between the business and IT, and designed a complete backup and restore architecture. read more>

Interstate Data Migration: Netapp Storage
4Base Technology engineers where brought in to help re-architect the storage and to develop a migration plan that would reduce the time and complexity of the migration.
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4Base Technology, Inc.
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Phone: 408-773-8960
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