Before and after study with ITBI™

The service helps customers make fact-based decisions about capacity and performance going into a major transition, monitor the results during the transition and finally document and understand the results after the transition, based on the application of the ITBI solution.

A major transition can be a technology upgrade, moving to a datacenter, outsourcing or rehosting, moving to the cloud, a merger, an acquisitions or any other major transition that can affect capacity and performance.

Objective

Major infrastructure transitions like moving to a new data center, outsourcing or changing outsourcers, or simply upgrading your mainframe or server infrastructure often involve a lot of educated guesses. What are the potential costs, benefits, and tradeoffs when you initiate the transition? What optimization or rightsizing should be done before, during, or after the transition? What was actually achieved once the transition is complete? Often those decisions are made based more on gut feel rather than on facts.

The objective of this offering is to help customer make fact-based decisions about capacity and performance going into a major transition, monitor the results during the transition and finally document and understand the results after the transition.

What we will deliver

SMT Data gathers performance and capacity data from your current mainframe and servers environment before, during and after the transition.

For the mainframe this involves offloading SMF data to SMT Data’s ITBI™ cloud environment. For Windows and Linux servers, SMT Data installs an ITBI collector program on a server in the Customer’s environment, which collects and transfers performance and capacity data to SMT Data.

The technical data is optionally enriched with business mapping data, identifying which part of the organization or which applications are consuming capacity and driving costs.

SMT Data consultants analyze the data using the ITBI solution and document the findings and recommendations. This will typically be done in three phases:

1. Prior to transition. The focus is on what optimization or rightsizing should take place in the current environment to better position the customer for the transition. This can mean optimizing mainframe workloads and consolidating or rightsizing server infrastructure to reduce the hardware and software footprint required in the new environment post transition.
2. During transition. In some cases, optimization and cost savings can more easily be carried out during the transition. E.g. moving from an over configured server with low utilization to a smaller server or moving from an older slower technology to a smaller configuration with newer faster technology. Here it is important to understand the current utilization patterns to get maximum benefit from the new configuration, but also to monitor the results as applications are moved in order to understand the behavior of the new environment.
3. After transition. Were the objectives of the transition met in terms of cost savings or improved performance? Are there additional rightsizing or optimization recommendations now that the transition is complete? Are there unforeseen capacity or performance problems in the new environment, and what are the root causes of these?

The Customer is provided access to the ITBI environment on a cloud server for a to do further analysis or better understand the findings and recommendations.

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