Discovering What it Takes to Consolidate
Adaptivity has been working with a large bank that’s planning a data center consolidation. Like many organizations considering data center consolidation, they were worried about the impact of moving their applications because of how tightly connected they’ve become. They had begun a discovery process to understand how their applications were physically deployed, what their dependencies were and how were communicating with other functions within the business service structure. They had mountains of data from discovery tools and home-grown spreadsheets, but wanted to be more confident in answering questions like “what happens when I move this applications and what part of my business does it affect?” and “which applications interact with each other and should they be moved together?” To assist with this process they engaged Adaptivity consultants to work with our Design Studio tool to meet the following objectives:
- Complete inventory and dependency mapping for target environment
- Provide a baseline for developing migration move groups, roadmap and timeline
- Assess and validate data center migration impacts to the business and technology teams involved
- Assist solution architects and infrastructure operations in defining and documenting application environments
- Provide observations and recommendations based on discovery and blueprinting activity: impacts, risks, mitigation
- Complete 266 blueprint deliverables in 16 weeks
As is typical with these types of projects, Adaptivity helped the large bank through a three-step process.
- Objectives Workshop – We started with an objectives workshop. Discovery tools are powerful and can be used to do a great deal of different things, it’s important that we know what you want to learn and that we discuss who will give us the ability to find it. At this bank we learned about their plans for migration, the type of concerns they had and the risks they were trying to mitigate.
- Deploy and Discover – We provided the project management and resources necessary to go through the sometimes difficult task of deploying agents and collecting data without risking performance or availability in production.
- Analyze and Blueprint – Our team leveraged our Design Studio tool and experience to produce useful blueprints in significantly less time than most large consulting firms.
When the project was complete we had met all of the customer’s objectives. In fact, we exceeded them in many ways, including finishing the project on time, allowing the client to begin the planning phase of their migration on schedule (it had been nearly a month behind schedule). We also provided this client with an export of the data discovered so that they could start their own internal CMDB. In the end Adaptivity provided the client with the following outputs:
- 266 Infrastructure Deployment Diagrams depicting the logical and physical deployment architecture for each application. Each diagram breaks down and displays web, application and data tiers.
- 266 Application Interaction Diagrams representing the dependencies for each application. This allowed the client to understand the implications of moving each application.
- 10 Estate View Diagrams representing the interaction of all core and dependent applications related to a specific line of business (LOB).
The success this firm had with our Design Studio and Blueprinting as a Service (BPaaS) doesn’t have to be unique to them. Contact us to meet the people and see the technologies that made this all possible.
