Mike Bantick
Sunday, 27 July 2008 07:43
Business IT -
Technology
Page 2 of 4
The criteria were laid out, with parameters of the project broadly being;
* Separation of client environments
* 24/7 availability.
* Disaster Recovery within 4 hours
* Mixed OS environment needs
* Costs of course needed to be minimised
Deciding to separate client from client (in this
case Company X had seven clients – major financial institutions),
development, testing, production as well as housing the JAVA
applications all in their own environments. All this separation meant
the obvious answer was to virtualise the mid-range hardware.
The other consideration leading to a VM type solution was the cost of
housing extra servers in the Data Centres and that volume licensing of
OS software meant that the cost of creating new virtual machines was
not great.
Being relatively green in the mid-range world, Company X decided to
employee consultation to work with the X system administrators to
thrash out a VMWare ESX solution.
The art of consultation is worthy fodder for a further iTWire article,
but for now let us just say that a good consultant is flexible enough
to enter a client site with an open mind and the ability to adapt or
offer improvements to a companies processes.
For Company X, their first exposure to VMWare consultation was not
good. The consultant in question, though obviously experienced in
producing solutions for a “typical” ESX implementation, did not take
the time to understand Company X’s specific structure and needs.
Much of the blame does not fall squarely upon the individual
consultant, but stems as a result from the initial quotation process.
Please read on to page 3.
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