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. As is typical with new technology adoption, virtualization was introduced by various groups across the organization but without a centralized plan or common methodology. As the teams began leveraging a centralized support model it became clear that standard operating procedures were needed to ensure a consistency in the quality of services delivered and to improve operational efficiency through consistent design and implementation.

4Base Technology’s expert consulting services assessed the current operating environment and worked with the support groups to develop procedures each team could follow for common tasks such as host platform deployment, virtual machine provisioning, resource management, etc. to enable highly efficient, scalable and repeatable operation of the virtual infrastructure. A proof of concept environment was established to allow prototyping and development of the technical operating procedures (TOP) and maintained as a test lab going forward to allow physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration testing of applications to the virtual infrastructure. The TOP guide was supplemented with hands-on training sessions to validate the documented procedures (i.e. can someone with no pretext follow the procedure?) along with a maintenance plan to ensure updates to procedures are captured, tested and documented as policy changes mandate. The management guide effort resulted in quicker response times and improved service levels to the consumers. In addition, the IT team members now have more time to plan future projects with the new management guide being expanded to include additional virtualization platforms and business continuity plans.

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>

Virtual Infrastructure Impact Analysis
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. 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>

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.
read more>

4Base Technology, Inc.
1298 Kifer Road
Suite 508
Sunnyvale, CA 94086

Phone: 408-773-8960
Fax: 408-773-8477
info@4basetech.com