• Contact us
• To discuss how we can help make your business sharper, get in touch:
  0800 014 7420
  Click here to email us

Email this page to a friend

Print this page

Submit feedback on this page

Home Services Consult And Change Dynamic Datacenter Infrastructure Discovery & Analysis

Infrastructure Discovery & Analysis

Computacenter's Infrastructure Discovery and Analysis service enables organisations to more effectively manage their IT infrastructure and plan for future transformation by identifying their IT assets, how they are used, and how they interrelate.

A service component of our Dynamic Datacenter solution.

What we do

One of the fundamental requirements for any IT department is to understand the infrastructure it is required to operate. All too often, organisations have incomplete or inconsistent views of their IT assets and have little or no understanding of the potential impact of changes to the infrastructure. Computacenter can help address these issues through:

• Infrastructure Baseline – deploying automated software tools that identify infrastructure components, the applications they support, and build a comprehensive view of the infrastructure from a business service perspective.
  
• Infrastructure Audit & Compliance – again using software tools to create a view of infrastructure build standards and the extent to which standards are applied.
  
• Configuration Management – building and maintaining a consolidated Configuration Management Database from existing data sources and output gained from the infrastructure audit.

How it helps

Service Improvement – By understanding the implications of infrastructure change on business services, application uptime is improved and worker productivity is increased. This not only benefits ongoing management of the environment, but is a critical dependency for major change programmes such as virtualisation or relocation exercises.

Improved Operational Efficiency – By automating the process of gathering and maintaining data related to the support of the IT infrastructure, manpower is significantly reduced. Additionally, using toolsets to understand what has changed in an environment can save days or weeks of manpower trying to resolve system issues.

Cost Avoidance – Once the infrastructure is fully understood and build standards firmly established, costly repetition of patch or maintenance releases can be avoided. Using an automated toolset to discover and analyse the environment will also avoid human error, and the costly implications of incorrectly moving or changing a particular server.

Why we are different

experience of deploying infrastructure management and monitoring tools, coupled with our long history of managing our customers' IT environments, gives us the right credentials for deploying Infrastructure Discovery and Analysis solutions.

We have the experience, skills and flexible methodology that enable us to deploy the right solution and appropriate tools into your estate, regardless of your infrastructure components. We frequently integrate existing technologies to deliver broader benefits, rather than merely recommending investment in new technologies.

Adding Computacenter's own intellectual property to industry-standard tools allows for greater insight into your infrastructure and applications. This, coupled with proven methodology around verbal data gathering, delivers a far more comprehensive view of your IT estate and associated services than a generic software-based approach.

Where we have done it

Nationwide
Nationwide are the UK's second largest mortgage lender and the largest building society in the world. To make better use of the space available within their datacenter, Nationwide undertook a server consolidation project.

To assist with this exercise, the company turned to its established partner, Computacenter. Using toolsets from Tideway, Computacenter performed a Discovery and Analysis exercise to provide an understanding of the server estate, the interdependencies and the potential for consolidation. Computacenter then helped with a proof of concept exercise, illustrating the capabilities of VMware to support Nationwide's consolidation.

"After converting 40 physical servers into VMware virtual machines in only two weeks, it became clear that we could easily consolidate our application servers on a very large scale," explains Lynn Banagan, Head of IT Infrastructure for Nationwide.

Through virtualisation of the environment, Nationwide has achieved a 15:1 server consolidation ratio and is now using approximately 80 per cent of its server hardware, enabling a dramatic reduction of spending on new servers.