Information Technology Insight

Once an accurate inventory of resources and workloads has been taken, the organization must begin to track the utilization of existing resources and the resource consumption of existing workloads. This is necessary so that workloads may accurately be match to target platforms for consolidation.

When tracking utilization, the staff should be sure to monitor for a long enough period to ensure cycles of peak and valley processing periods are included. The monitoring period should include, for example, year-end processing cycles as well as any other business specific events which may have an positive (or negative) effect on resouce requirements.

Once the Inventory and Capacity items have been completed, the organization may begin the analysis required to begin matching workloads to target consolidation platforms. Several factors should be considered. Not only should average workload resource requirements be considered, but prime-shift vs. off-shift changes in requirements should also be considered when choosing workloads for co-hosting. Mixing of production, test and development workloads on the same hardware platform should also be carefuly considered as these often have very different service level requirements. When possible, workloads sharing the same consolidation platform should require similar service, availability and security levels.

At this point, one must also begin to consider the technology being used to facilitate consolidation as this will have some level of influence on the level of resource sharing and consolidation which may be accomplished. This will be discussed with more detail in the next post.

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