The client is the world leader in recovery auditing services. Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, the client has over 1000 associates servicing clients in more than 30 countries.

Business Problem:

Following the acquisition of its top competitor, a leading Audit Recovery firm had experienced significant growth in IT assets yet did not standardize or change its purchasing strategy. For several years after the acquisition, systems and supporting gear were purchased on an as-needed basis for each new application or project. The industry began to change and more competition entered the market which resulted in a sharp decline of revenue. In 2006, the business leaders found themselves needing to drastically reduce operating costs as revenue began to decline.

The Facts:

• The IT department was a cost center for the business. Although the company would not be able to function without a strong technology group, the core of the business were the auditors and analysts that provided the billable services to clients.
• The corporate data center had reached capacity and cooling was becoming a major problem.
• The company was nearing capacity at a co-location facility that it paid close to 40k per month for.
• The company had a mature systems management practice which monitored all critical systems and applications.
• The company was in the process of implementing change management practices.
• Virtualization technologies were not being used at the company.

The Solution:

The business asked the CIO to make deep cuts in IT spending, but was not able to provide funding of any kind to address and remedy the problem due to the dire financial state of the company.

Because the two data centers were essentially full and due to the fact that the company had a history of purchasing systems based on application and project use, the most obvious place to begin was with the IT assets themselves. Typically, we find that server assets are highly underutilized and consolidation is almost always possible. This not only lowers the number of physical systems deployed, but can also reclaim significant amounts of expense in maintenance contracts, licensing, backup methods, and engineering support.

We leveraged the already in-place systems management framework to gather and analyze six months worth of performance data for each of the 300 systems spread across all business units. Combining the utilization data with a system interdependency matrix and input from the business owners of the equipment, we classified and created a workload profile for each system in the organization.

We were quickly able to identify close to 100 physical systems within the production environment that were underutilized and in some cases, not being used at all. Further, our workload profiles illustrated that most of the servers purchased within the previous few years were powerful enough to be re-purposed for new projects created by the business to increase revenue. The remaining 200 systems were eliminated from the first phase of the project due to high utilization levels, heavy database activity, and complex interdependencies.

Since the company was not currently using in any virtualization technology, we ran a proof of concept pilot using both VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server in order to test and select a platform that could also be used to create a free server farm built with existing equipment in which to consolidate physical servers to.

Using free VMware Server software, we consolidated 30 legacy Windows NT 4.0 systems down to 3 physical blade servers in a single chassis which:

About 60 of the production Windows 2000+ servers were virtualized to about 30 physical servers hosted on Windows 2003 servers running VMware Server software. (Compression ratios are much higher today by using a bare bones hypervisor like VMware ESX server.)

Of the remaining 10 systems, 7 were SQL database servers that served light duty across the enterprise and 3 were web servers hosting about 5 websites in total. We were able to consolidate each function to one instance with plenty of remaining capacity for future growth. Decent savings were realized for future projects from the 6 reclaimed SQL Server licenses alone.

The net remaining 35 physical servers were put into surplus stock and repurposed back to the business throughout the year. We were able to use existing equipment and a newly approved VMware standard to satisfy all 2006 server requests, thus eliminating the need to spend even a single penny on new physical servers that year. The business used most of the reclaimed servers for projects aimed at servicing new revenue streams as it attempted to reclaim the top spot in the Audit Recovery industry.

The Results:

This project was a major success and an excellent example of what is possible for most businesses that have not analyzed and optimized their IT departments recently.

Some highlights include:

• A 500K cost savings related to new hardware and licensing purchases in the IT budget.
• Freed up the rack, power, and port space that 65 physical servers consumed in the data center.
• Eliminated hardware maintenance contracts for the 65 virtualized servers.
• Created a far more efficient way to backup and recover the virtualized systems.
• Actually increased productivity of the Windows NT systems due to the new architecture and faster speeds of the host systems.
• Identified 9 “mystery” systems that were powered on but not in use by anyone within the organization.
• The proven VMware technology allowed IT to finally satisfy a need by developers for QA and development systems without having to loan out physical systems needed for business purposes.

A major food supplier with customers ranging from small delicatessens to major grocery store chains located throughout the  United States.

Business Problem:

Years of non-standard builds and procedures for implementing technology led to an inefficient infrastructure. Coupled with the fact that the company had a major operations center in the middle of Florida’s hurricane country, new management determined that a new design was needed in 2008.

The company had six regional offices in the Eastern half of the US, relying on local storage and non-technical support staff in most of the sites. Two major data centers in New York and Florida were critical to business, but ran independently of each other causing inefficiencies.

The Facts:

• Government regulations required the company to pay its vendors within ten days of receipt of food product – a disaster could cause the company to shut down if payments were not made on time.
• There was no disaster recovery plan, yet the company’s largest data center was located in the middle hurricane country.
• Most remote sites do not have local IT support and thus support technicians would have to fly to remote sites when routine problems arose.
• Local storage and an aging NAS device was the only storage in use.
• Technical staff was not trained or proficient with VMware, yet had it deployed for some production systems.
• The environment had to be mobile enough to be quickly recovered and to allow for quick migration of systems to another site in the event of an impending hurricane.
• Management created an opportunity to address the entire infrastructure while it began gathering data to create a disaster recovery plan.

The Solution:

Physical servers were assessed and it was quickly determined that most of the 60 critical systems could be virtualized and moved to less than ten hosts spread across the two major sites. Remote sites would get a standardized virtual infrastructure consisting of file, print, database, and application services. Messaging was consolidated to run from the major data center sites.

To meet the requirements for the ability to quickly move running systems to hosts in another region of the US, a new NetApp SAN environment was built. Virtual machines, user data, and backup data was located on SAN units in each location. Each location replicated with the two major data centers and could effectively be locally shut down and kept running elsewhere if necessary.

The Results:

The resulting environment gave the client several things they did not have prior – remote manageability of critical business systems, business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and a shared storage environment.

The remote manageability solved the problem of having to fly technicians out to sites which delayed repair time and was an expensive way to support remote sites. The cutting edge site to site replication and agile nature of the infrastructure gave the business the option of “pressing a button” to begin the short migration of systems from Florida to New York in the event that a hurricane was on it’s way. Locating virtual machines and user data on a SAN that replicated to other sites eliminated the traditional methods of restoring from tape, which would take several days due to the volume of data.

Sound familiar?

Doubtless, you’ve heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder” at least a few times before.

But just how do you achieve that?

If you are among the vast majority of companies that have done a lot of technology growing over the past several years without taking the time to purposefully streamline your operations, you may be in luck.

The trends over the past decade have been growth oriented. This has led to a lot of technology spending which has resulted in larger numbers of assets to manage and account for. The future completely contradicts our past practices of hosting one application tier per server.

The good news is that today, you probably already have everything you need to start reclaiming a big chunk of your IT budget.

Here are just a few things to consider while taking a look at your budget sheets. The end result is that you can easily free up valuable physical servers, rack space, port space, electricity costs, maintenance contracts, application licenses, and even MAKE money by selling back your decommissioned equipment.

Physical System Count

We are witnessing a rise in the number of data centers running out of physical space to house new systems in. New projects are not slowing down, especially when these new projects are business initiatives targeting more revenue during these difficult times. One solution is to purchase more rack space in a co-location facility or to add more racks to your internal data center. The co-location option can cost you additional tens of thousands of dollars per month, and maintaining enough power, cooling, and network/storage ports in your own data center are both solutions in the wrong direction.

An industry average 85% of all servers in use today are less than 3% utilized! This means that you can potentially locate 30 of these low utilization systems on one physical host and still have 10% utilization left over to handle peak times. These staggering numbers have given rise to virtualization and the paradigm shift in computing infrastructures.

Hardware Maintenance Costs

Chances are that you are paying vendor maintenance fees on systems that are no longer covered by the original warranty from purchase. At an average yearly cost of $1000 per machine per year, reducing the number of physical systems in your environment can add up quickly. Many companies exist that will buy back your used equipment at a reasonable rate which puts money back into your pocket. Otherwise, decommissioned systems can be redeployed to satisfy future requests, development environments, or projects that help the company find new revenue streams.

Application License Costs

Do you have ten SQL server licenses and ten databases running on ten physical servers? Does your company support twenty separate instances of IIS to serve the production, development, and QA of critical websites? We commonly see this at client sites and where that may have made sense in the past, it is time to consolidate instances of like functionality wherever it makes technical sense – often times a single host is needed to adequately provide the resources necessary for intensive database applications. Just as often though, several smaller instances can be combined on a single host and licensing and physical systems can be reclaimed for other purposes or sold back.

Operating System Deployment

It is not the most obvious method, but reducing the number of different operating systems in your environment can greatly increase the productivity of your engineers and reduce unexpected downtime, among a host of other benefits.

Just looking at Microsoft operating systems alone, most companies have Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2003 Standard Server, Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Windows 2008 Standard Server, Windows 2008 Enterprise Server, and yes, even Windows NT 4.0. In 2009!

On the surface, one may claim that Windows is Windows. Applications like antivirus, database, messaging, to name a few, behave differently on each version that your staff will need to support. Additionally, the general maintenance of so many versions translates to a whole set of patches needing to be tested and applied to each version each month, you need an enormous number of ‘standard’ server builds and deployments, and supporting the same application across multiple operating system platforms can be challenging and time consuming.

Not every instance of an aging OS can be upgraded, but a large number can. With the technology to quickly and easily test an OS upgrade before executing it, everyone should at least be evaluating their OS deployments.

Even with an enormous potential for soft cost savings, hard cost savings can be realized through quantity discounts and reduction in support for legacy versions.

Application Deployment

Similar to the reasons why reducing the number of OS versions can reduce costs, reducing the number of applications deployed across your organization will greatly simply support for and licensing of those resources. Additionally, if you have not scanned your network for application deployment, you may be surprised to see what is installed on your network. As a business, you are responsible for anything your employees install on the company owned network. Exceeding your license counts for products can be a costly penalty in the event of a license audit by a vendor.

Open Source Applications

The functionality and business cases for the use of open source software is experiencing a meteoric rise right now. Attention to spending across the board and the popularity – and usability – of the Ubuntu Linux server and desktop operating systems seem to have, at least in part, been the tipping point of mainstream acceptance of open source software. Entire companies are now being formed to deliver and support open source software.

Consider this – if your twenty person small business can use the free OpenOffice alternative to Microsoft Office, that alone translates to a savings of $6580 (Based on $329 for each Office 2007 Standard license.)

Use What You Own

We often see clients looking to invest in new products that will achieve exactly the same thing as products currently deployed or sitting on the shelf. For example, if you are interested in monitoring and baselining your current power consumption across systems and gear, you already own a monitoring system that is often times much better than what you would buy from vendors of green software solutions – it is called SNMP and all operating systems and hardware come with the ability to send/receive the data you seek. Why pay license fees and training costs for additional tools that will accomplish the same task as something you already own and your engineers are already capable of using?

Align Support Resources Appropriately

This is more of a soft cost savings rather than a hard cause and effect scenario, but nonetheless important. Over the years, IT organizations have undergone countless organizational model changes in an effort to save money. The bottom line is this – the right people must be working in the right position for any given job. Assigning your top sales people to be the front line for client technical issues is going to be just as successful as assigning your top consulting resources to sales. These are two different jobs that each have a unique path of study and require years of experience.

Our ideology is simple – we feel that all businesses require a solid technology strategy in order to be successful and competitive in their industry. We help our clients better align IT with the goals and objectives of the business through proper analysis and by providing intelligent solutions to complex business problems.

It is no secret these days that every business is looking for ways to reduce operating costs and streamline operations. There is no better time than right now to gather a complete picture of your organization’s technology assets and business processes in order to begin the transformation to a more efficient and less costly way of using your tech investments.

The client provides next generation business solutions that streamline the corporate payment process. Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, our client serves numerous Fortune 1000 companies, including 7 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Business Problem:

Following the client acquisition by American Express, they were asked to move over 200 servers from a downtown Atlanta location to a more modern data center at the clients headquarter location. The servers were a broad mix of aging IBM, Dell, and Compaq/HP hardware. Some systems were more than seven years old and ran Windows NT 4.0, but still performed mission critical tasks.

Strict system uptime requirements, along with the aging critical hardware dictated several layers of recovery methods in the event of a failure during the move. Although the IT department had spent several months on planning the move, there was no clear answer on how to protect the company assets to prevent catastrophic system and/or data loss during the physical move process. Traditional backup/restore methods were not viable due to the downtime window being far less than the time it would take to build and restore data to the systems. There were just a few weeks left before the move date and there were only a total of 13 overnight hours available each weekend in order to capture systems images for backup.

The Facts:

• There were a large number of antiquated hosts running critical applications on Windows NT 4.0 platforms
• Systems had to be captured during relatively short maintenance windows and there was not a lot of room for error based on the published move date.
• An entire swing environment was rented for a VMware farm and stand-alone physical servers that were to be used to deploy images of the production environment to.
• Some systems required that the backup instance be updated to the point of the start of the maintenance window in order to ensure data consistency and transaction accuracy.
• We were able to choose the tools for this project – PlateSpin PowerConvert and VMware Server.

The Solution:

We utilized standardized IBM xSeries swing gear that was provided on a rental basis by a local partner. Additionally, we employed PlateSpin PowerConvert and VMware Server to create an agile recovery environment within the customer’s existing network.

As the first level of protection, we virtualized each critical system and housed them all in a VMware Server environment that was built on-site.

PlateSpin PowerConvert was used to reprovision the virtual server instances on to the bare metal IBM physical swing gear to provide a physical replacement option for the more resource intensive and demanding systems. PowerConvert was also used to maintain data consistency between the running production servers and the standby virtual and physical systems after initial capture.

Due to an extremely limited timetable, a strategy was developed to leverage the remaining after-hours maintenance windows and extended daytime hours to perform all virtualization and restoration activities. The client provided space in the new data center and verified the functionality of the standby instances of the production environment in an isolated environment.

The Results:

When the move window opened at midnight, the critical systems were in a standby state as virtual machines and stand-alone physical systems.

In accordance with the customers desired options for recovery, we had created three distinct options for recovery in the event of a failure – hardware repair on the original system, a physical standby server, and a virtual instance that could be immediately turned on and put into production.

The client expressed gratitude for the level of insurance that was created for their systems. Unplanned downtime after the window would cost them millions of dollars per minute, and we were prepared to ensure and guarantee that such outages would be remedied immediately and with confidence.

It is no secret that most servers are underutilized by extreme margins. Most servers operate at an average utilization level of about 5-10%.  Some of these systems are used once a month to calculate month-end numbers; some are used only at night to perform backups; some are used only during business hours; and some are used all the time as web, file, or domain controller servers that simply do not require much horsepower to operate. Traditional tactics have led companies to purchase a stand-alone server for each application and often for each tier of an application solution. This trend has led to a state of overcrowding in the data center. Companies are running out of physical space in their data centers to locate servers. Power and cooling costs are rising at a rapid rate and in extreme cases the heat produced by systems cannot be contained at all, causing companies to resort to less than desirable solutions to handle excess heat (a box fan is NOT a reliable way to cool a server!).

At its most basic implementation, virtualizing even just a portion of your server assets will yield immediate – and cost saving – results. Compression ratios of 10:1 are commonly realized in early stages of virtualization efforts. This means that you can virtualize ten physical servers and run them all on one physical server at the same time with a target utilization rate of 75-90%. In this scenario alone, you can see how we have reclaimed nine physical servers and all of the operating and maintenance costs associated with them. This represents just the tip of the iceberg by which virtualization technologies may help transform your Data Center into the next generation of agile computing. Most companies can realize similar benefits TODAY.

How Can CTG Help?

If your company is relatively new to virtualization, CTG can perform a Virtualization/Consolidation assessment to show you how your systems are performing and we will identify systems that are ideal candidates for virtualization and/or consolidation.

If your company has already implemented a virtual infrastructure, CTG can perform a health check, identify gaps in efficiency, certify your environment, or help you apply best-practices to the management and operation of your environment.

If you are among those companies that have a mature virtual infrastructure and management methodologies, CTG can help you build Disaster Recovery and a distributed High Availability blueprint for achieving uptime levels that have previously been out of reach.

CTG has developed proven methodologies and practices aimed at assisting companies in realizing an agile computing infrastructure based on virtualization.

For further information or to explore other areas in which CTG can help you save time and money, please contact us today.

Green practices start with a frame of mind or a goal to deliberately focus your actions to be aligned with green concepts. Companies gain a great advantage by declaring themselves “green” through tax breaks and public opinion, second to actually helping the environment.

Companies should take caution when declaring a green state to obtain publicity or favor in that even if you have implemented every change possible to be classified as a green company, your employees may still drive “gas guzzlers” or not practice green concepts while at client sites or other venues during the course of doing business. It is difficult to maintain a perception of being green when you show up in a luxury sport utility vehicle that gets fifteen miles to the gallon!

Going green can bring bleeding edge technologies to your company for a price, so you should weigh your desire to be green with being what we call “fashionably green”. Cutting edge products can do things like automatically migrating virtual servers to run on a fewer number of hosts during off-peak hours while powering off unneeded hosts to save electricity. While on the surface this sounds like a great way to save money and help the environment, the costs for virtualizing your environment, investing in the specialized servers and racks that facilitate automated power functions, and purchasing the software licenses to control it all may very well outweigh the savings you get from powering of some hosts at night. Avoid going fashionably green in favor of implementing green practices that make sense from every angle.

There is good news, though. At a time when everyone is trying to economize every facet of business, you can employ green techniques today and begin the transformation into being a more consciously aware company while saving a boatload of money in the process.

Here are some ideas that will directly impact your bottom line while raising awareness and participation by all members of your organization:

Computers and Peripherals

• Servers – Consolidating the physical number of servers and networking gear that are plugged in and turned on is one of the best places to start saving money. Between the power, cooling, and rack cost savings alone, you will see direct results on your next energy bill.
• Desktop PC’s – Most modern PC’s are equipped with various “sleep modes” that balance energy consumption with how fast it will “wake up”. PC’s should be put in low power states when the user has been away for fifteen minutes or longer and during non-working hours.
• Monitors & Speakers – Monitors and speakers consume a great deal of electricity, especially when left on all the time. Screensavers do not do anything to save electricity, but using your systems built-in power features will. Turning off speakers when not in use will save a significant amount of electricity and money.
• Peripherals – Unplug items when they are not in use. For example, a tape backup unit that only runs at night does not need to be powered on all the time and printers probably do not need to be powered on overnight.  Look for settings on your devices that will put the unit in a low energy consumption mode after a set amount of time. Also, look for devices that run on the power provided through the USB port rather than a dedicated power cord.

General Office

• Telecommuting – With the mobile technologies available to us today and the blurring lines between business hours and personal time, there is no reason to not consider the financial recovery available through the adoption of telecommuting policies. Reduced office space and daily power consumption coupled with reduced fuel and emissions related to travel to and from the office add up to a very green company profile.
• Travel and Meetings – While some situations call for traveling to a remote site, careful consideration should be given to business travel. Advances in teleconferencing software and services have made for extremely reliable and user-friendly ways to host and participate in face to face conferences over your existing network infrastructure. There are business quality solutions available for free, so the cost of a modest webcam is your only barrier to entry if you would like to cut down on business travel.
• Lighting – It seems obvious, but turn the lights off when you leave a conference room. An unoccupied room really doesn’t need to be illuminated.
• Think twice before printing something.
• Use “draft” quality when printing documents to save ink.
• Use energy efficient light bulbs in your office and home where possible.

These are just a few simple ways that you can begin addressing the green issues and start saving real money in the process without requiring any special expertise or additional investment.