Terms like cloud computing, grid computing and virtual data center have become buzzwords in the technology industry. These concepts are being heavily promoted as ideal data center solutions that are not only flexible but also reduce costs and risk. What exactly does this mean for you, and how do these concepts apply to your needs today? What solutions will work for your business, and how will you implement them?

Challenges

Businesses are demanding that IT reduces the complexity and cost involved in providing information and services to both internal and external customers. To meet growing demands with fewer resources, IT functions as a whole must be more flexible, must improve service quality and offer solutions to green energy concerns. Virtualization as a business function is a metaphor for doing far more with far less. The technologies are readily available to take advantage of virtualization, but in our experience with many customers of all sizes, addressing these issues is not a “quick-fix”, nor is it a single step. It is a managed process that has many elements, all of which are interconnected.

Your focus is running your business and the IT functions associated with that business. Our core competency is helping organizations like yours get the most out of their technology investments. From developing virtualization strategies that make sense tomorrow, to implementing tactical solutions today, Extropy can ensure your virtualization initiative's success. Ultimately it's all about people, and our people we have the expertise and experience gained by delivering virtualization initiatives for customers with everywhere from only a handful of servers to deployments numbering in the thousands of servers. We can get you virtualized and transition the knowledge necessary for you to operate your virtualized infrastructure. 

Virtualization Solutions:

• Vendor Management - We have vast experience in working with vendors to help you make the best decisions about what to procure, and how to commit budget to your initiative. With so many options, it's critical to make informed decisions based on more than vendor 'marketecture"; only real lessons learned by working with the technologies and vendors will help you avoid the pitfalls involved with any virtualization initiative.

• Technology Assessment, Planning and Management - Planning for a technology transition is detail oriented, requires experience, and delivers tangible business results in terms lower cost and better quality services. A solid plan and proactive project management ensures the on-time delivery of your project while staying within budget constraints. We are experienced at managing and delivering virtualization projects and can offer you insight into common pitfalls that can affect your critical path. If you're early on in your path to virtualization or want to better understand where you stand relative to best practices and your competition, then a virtualization assessment is a great first step.

• Technology Implementation and Optimization - We specialize for a reason; our people have the skill sets and experience working with a broad array of virtualization technologies in real world implementations. By utilizing our deeply experienced people, you can have assurance that your projects will be delivered correctly the first time.

• Execution Assistance - If you've already started to virtualize, or have existing platforms deployed, we can help you optimize those platforms and gain more efficiencies. In fact, we typically find that internally implemented virtualization platforms are underperforming and underutilized by as much as 60%. Not only can we help you deliver virtualization, we can help you deliver even better results.

Approach

Based on our successful track-record, how do we approach virtualization projects?  Although this isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, there are some specific practices and methodologies that allow us to deliver successful projects. We treat virtualization as a business function and make sure every plan and action aligns with the business goals for the project.

Because virtualization is so closely aligned with a services orientation, we build virtualization platforms as true services platforms to meet the service levels required by your customers. The overall success and failure of a virtualization project is hinged on the details of the technical implementation. In addition to the experience and skills our people bring to the table, we are also guided by methodologies crafted to not only plan for quality, but to also deliver it.

Depending on the virtualization model that makes sense for you, we can perform a variety of services to deliver on your plan. As the options for virtualization range from outsourcing some of the complexity to implementing a highly customized solution in-house, the components of a successful initiative will depend on your unique needs. So whether you need us to help you plan and evaluate or just improve what you have today, we will tailor a solution for you.

Methodology

Our methodologies vary based on your needs, but common elements of these methodologies and their results are: