- Grid Goals
- Infrastructure Assessment
- Grid Software Installation Complexities
- Grid Systems Planning
- Summary
Infrastructure Assessment
Conducting an IT infrastructure management assessment would help corporate IT users and senior management to prepare their grid environments to incorporate emerging capabilities, such as automated provisioning, resource allocation, and business systems monitoring.
Infrastructure management assessment services are key components of complexity management offerings. The services provide ongoing assessments of corporate IT systems, with special focus on the following areas:
Systems management. Ongoing operational health checks using proven methods for monitoring system availability across multi-platform IT hardware, software, and network resources.
Asset management. Systematic, multi-vendor asset management through consolidated assessment and tracking of hardware and software assets to managing even complex monitoring and usage environments.
Resource management. Health checks on what resources are being used where, and at what cost.
Change management. Processes that help decrease risk of IT system downtime.
Service management. Interlocking of test, migration, and production schedules for smooth integration and transition of new technologies into an existing data center environment.
Security management. Assessment of security strategies, policies, and protocols for deploying security techniques.
By having clear assessments of the IT environment, these services help users to define the technical and business requirements designed to enable improvements in server, storage, and network utilization; to standardize their computing environment; and to evaluate their security needs using automation software and processes.
Customers that manage their own data centers have a huge opportunity to reclaim money spent manually directing the hundreds or thousands of computer systems in the enterprise. By designing a grid solution based on industry standards and proven business processes, customers can substantially increase the efficiency and utilization of their existing IT resources.
Just as enterprise resource planning and Six Sigma made company manufacturing and supply chains more efficient and flexible, applying more discipline to a corporate data center can bring similar benefits to a company's overall IT operations.