Core Competencies

IIS is a leading provider of Oracle business software solutions delivered on high-availability HP hardware platforms. Nearly 30 years ago, Oracle introduced the first commercial Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), and soon after that, Oracle entered an enduring partnership with HP, a partnership that has consistently produced best-in-class hardware-software combinations for the world’s largest businesses.

While Oracle dominates the enterprise database market – with nearly every Fortune 100 company using Oracle products – HP delivers the critical storage and server infrastructures to support those database products. This combination has grown over 25 years of strategic partnering. In fact, HP and Oracle deliver best-in-class business solutions to more than 100,000 joint customers worldwide.

IIS has a similarly enduring relationship with both HP and Oracle. As an exclusive HP Platinum-level partner, IIS has the expertise to tailor these solutions to your organization’s specific business needs. IIS has been an exclusive HP storage solution provider for more than 17 years, while we’ve been developing highly available, optimized Oracle infrastructures for more than a decade.

Design and Planning Services

As one of HP's fastest-growing enterprise-class technology providers in the country, IIS has the knowledge to identify the optimal software configurations and hardware architectures that match your specific business needs.

At the same time, IIS helps you leverage your existing IT investments. Before deployment, we provide your organization with detailed migration plans, IT consolidation services and implementation strategies that help you avoid downtime and ensure business continuity.

Using proven HP and Oracle reference architectures, IIS will help you:

• Eliminate multiple, stand-alone data silos
• Reduce database administration overhead costs
• Provide continuous backup and quick recovery
• Create a disaster-tolerant environment for data
• Remove I/O and manageability limitations

Baseline Performance Assessment

Before committing to new infrastructure investments, it's important to understand exactly what capacity your organization requires today, while also planning and designing for future capacity needs.

IIS's capacity planning tools enable us to assess the capacity utilization of an organization’s IT infrastructure, point you to solutions that meet your capacity and performance needs, while also identifying opportunities for hardware consolidation. We provide a detailed report that includes hardware inventory, performance characteristics and total cost of ownership over a three-year period.

Customized Oracle Databases

Joint HP-Oracle database solutions have long been the gold standard for database performance. However, the range of software and hardware combinations can confuse even the most skilled IT staff.

Oracle 10g RAC on HP VSE Integrity servers, Oracle RDBMS 10gR2 on HP Integrity servers, Oracle 11g – with so many solutions, how do you know what is best for your organization?

IIS audits your IT infrastructure and assesses your database performance and capacity requirements to deliver database solutions that match your needs. We plan not only for today's capacity requirements, but we look at historical trends and industry benchmarks to provide you with solutions that will scale as your e-business needs grow.

Oracle and HP have worked together to bring new technologies, such as virtualization and grid computing, to their database solutions. IIS has the expertise to tailor these cutting-edge technologies to your business.

For instance, for organizations looking to improve capacity and increase hardware flexibility, IIS can deliver a solution that combines HP's virtualization technology with Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC). With this solution, customers increase server utilization, decrease power and HVAC costs and simplify management and administrative requirements.

Oracle-HP database solutions will run on many operating systems, and IIS will work with you to match the solution to your OS of choice, including HP-UX, Windows, Linux, Tru 64 Alpha, and Open VMS.

Customized Infrastructure for Business-Critical Oracle Applications

HP and Oracle offer a broad range of business applications on open, standards-based architectures. IIS will help you select, design and integrate HP hardware solutions delivered with any of Oracle's application suites, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel and Oracle Retail (formerly Retek).

Many of the world's largest enterprises rely on HP StorageWorks and Oracle Grid Computing for their business-critical data storage needs. Delivered by IIS, these systems provide you with the performance, security, availability and scalability you need for demanding, rapidly changing e-business environments.

IIS focuses on HP StorageWorks XP and EVA disk arrays, as well as the large HP servers, including HP Integrity Superdomes. HP leads the market with storage designed specifically for Oracle. HP's Application Centric Storage is optimized for Oracle infrastructure, providing your organization with reduced management, increased performance, and reduced TCO.

Be it CRM, ERP, or supply chain management, IIS professionals will help you tailor those various applications and their underlying databases to an appropriate hardware environment. We deliver solutions for a range of industry verticals as well, including retail, financial, health care, and communications.

Database Consolidation and Tuning

As organizations seek ways for reducing IT overhead, they often target underutilized servers. By consolidating multiple servers onto shared hardware through virtualization, they can cut costs, reduce management, and maximize utilization.

Database consolidation offers similar opportunities. However, database servers are usually not virtualized because of intensive I/O requirements. IIS's knowledge of HP infrastructure and Oracle databases means that our professionals have the know-how to consolidate even complex database environments.

IIS professionals will audit your database environment and assess true capacity needs. Often, there are many more Oracle database servers than are actually required, since organizations tend to plan for far more capacity than they need. With today's modular, blade architectures, adding capacity is no longer a complex, labor-intensive task.

With seamless tiering of Oracle databases across storage tiers, your organization will experience increased performance, reduced operations costs and simplified management.

Once consolidated, HP Storage Essentials provide ongoing database availability and performance views. This unified approach to infrastructure management helps you maintain peak performance while preventing costly downtime.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

In today's fast-paced business environment, your production systems must remain constantly accessible and reliable. Data must be available at anytime and from anywhere, regardless of scheduled system downtime or unplanned outages.

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans for many organizations are often inadequate, untested or unrealistic. Moreover, BC/DR infrastructure is often different from production hardware, which complicates recovery and makes it a time-consuming and difficult task.

IIS delivers high-availability solutions from HP and Oracle that are designed to safeguard mission-critical systems from downtime by mirroring production data to a secondary system in real time, as well as providing reliable disaster recovery, ensuring that businesses remain open 24x7.

HP StorageWorks Continuous Information Capture continuously captures Oracle Database and Oracle Application information to enable information extraction and rollback to any point in time. HP StorageWorks Continuous Information Capture provides automated rollback in the event of an actual outage, providing you with point-in-time business views.

IIS is a leading provider of SAP business software solutions delivered on high-availability HP hardware platforms. IIS has been an exclusive HP storage solution provider for more than 17 years. With that experience, our consultants have the knowledge to deliver software-hardware combinations tailored to meet specific business needs.

SAP software is uniquely suited for HP hardware platforms. SAP has been an HP technology partner since 1989. That long-standing relationship has resulted in an array of end-to-end hardware and software solutions that enable companies to better manage their assets, service their customers, and anticipate and capitalize on change.

As an exclusive HP Platinum-level partner, IIS builds on the HP-SAP relationship to deliver highly available, secure, and scalable HP platforms running SAP solutions. These are the same Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and business collaboration solutions that power many of the world's largest enterprises.

Design and Planning Services

As one of HP's fastest-growing enterprise-class technology providers in the country, IIS has the knowledge to identify the optimal software configurations and hardware architectures that match your specific business needs.

At the same time, IIS helps you leverage your existing IT investments. Before deployment, we provide your organization with detailed upgrade and migration plans, IT consolidation services and implementation strategies that help you avoid downtime and ensure business continuity.

Using proven HP and SAP reference architectures, IIS will help you:

• Eliminate multiple, stand-alone data silos
• Reduce database and application administration overhead
• Provide continuous backup and quick recovery
• Create a disaster-tolerant environment for data

Baseline Performance Assessment

The most common solution to application performance issues is to throw hardware at the problem. Organizations are often surprised later to learn that the additional hardware has produced only marginal improvement. At IIS we believe that a better approach is to understand the root problem, rather than simply responding to the symptoms.

Hardware may well solve the problem, but even if part of the solution is an investment in new systems and hardware, it is still important to understand the nature of your SAP environment before committing to new infrastructure investments. Otherwise, you are simply putting off addressing the root problem for another day.

IIS professionals perform a detailed study of your current infrastructure. Our data-driven performance analysis gives us insight into the root problems that degrade application performance. We measure the performance of the operating system, file system, disk subsystem and the database environment, and we analyze how all of those subsystems interact.

Through this data-driven approach, we are able to identify the specific causes of poor performance. Customers receive a complete and detailed graphical report of findings along with recommendations for performance enhancements. These recommendations range from upgrades to application tuning, to server consolidation and more.

SAP Consolidation Services

As organizations expand, as they make acquisitions or enter into mergers, they often find that their SAP environments are sprawling out of control. IIS service professionals can help you regain control and enjoy greater business agility through consolidation.

Consolidating your application servers cuts management time and cost, eases load balancing requirements, improves system and space utilization, and optimizes your ROI. To ensure the success of the consolidation project, IIS helps you identify the key business drivers that favor consolidation, while also assessing current and future capacity requirements, collaboration opportunities, and methods for boosting utilization rates.

IIS and HP IT Consolidation Solutions provide a complete, risk-free, turnkey SAP R/3 or mySAP consolidation platform. IIS service professionals analyze the business case for consolidation, and if a strong case is evident, we then design a technical solution to fit both your business and IT objectives. To control costs and leverage previous IT investments, we use existing technologies wherever possible. We also provide a business case justification for each step along the way to reduce your risk.

With SAP server consolidation, your organization will reduce IT overhead, improve application performance, increase data availability, reduce the costs associated with various licenses, and boost scalability.

Our comprehensive consolidation services help you derive maximum value from your SAP solution. In fact, SAP cites our consolidated SAP R/3 implementations as models their customers should emulate.

SAP Upgrade and Migration Services

SAP constantly adds new features and capabilities to its product line. For instance, SAP recently released two "enhancement packages" to its ERP solution. These enhancements, or upgrades, offer several benefits, such as a simplified order-to-cash process, improved access to customer and sales order information, streamlined invoices and payments, and improved visibility for accounts-receivable representatives and cash managers.

Most organizations, however, don't have in-house SAP infrastructure experts to navigate such changes, so they often put off taking advantage of upgrades, fearing a disruption to business activities. Moreover, when those without the necessary expertise attempt the upgrades on their own, they often find themselves mired in an upgrade process that is painful, complicated, and time consuming.

IIS's SAP professionals will help you take advantage of new features today, guiding you through the upgrade process. We will help you migrate all critical data, while also helping you avoid costly downtime. As part of the upgrade process, we can help you re-engineer business processes, implement complete solutions, and tie in upgrades to consolidation projects.

Another consideration is service oriented architecture (SOA). SAP has committed itself to an enterprise SOA, which will simplify the delivery and deployment of future upgrades, patches and enhancements. If SOA is in your plans, IIS will help you select an upgrade plan that embraces SOA, giving you the ability to adopt new features and capabilities as desired without disrupting the core ERP platform.

Capacity Planning Services

When planning for future needs, IIS professionals take the guesswork out of capacity planning. Since underperforming SAP applications can drastically throw off future capacity projections, our first step is to scrutinize your current environment. Our data-driven performance analysis gives us a clear understanding of how well your SAP environment is currently performing and what can be done to improve that performance.

Based on optimal performance, we then look at future capacity requirements. Our capacity planning service goes beyond simply adding new users. Predicting on users alone is fairly simple. IIS professionals, on the other hand, look at a number of variables that can influence capacity. We look at the workload, the impact of consolidation, the addition of application features, the underlying hardware and the nature of transactions.

With this data in hand, IIS then delivers a detailed, graphical capacity planning assessment. Customers receive a report that specifies various options for accommodating future capacity needs. These focus on both short-term adjustments, such as database and application tuning, and more involved efforts, such as consolidation, virtualization and future hardware purchases.

SAP Management and Monitoring Services

IIS professionals can help you manage and maintain your SAP environments by deploying and configuring sophisticated SAP management and monitoring solutions. IIS can help you deploy and configure HP BTO Smart Plug-in (SPI) for SAP, the HP Business Availability Center (BAC), and HP Operations Manager software - all of which deliver fine-grained management of SAP applications and underlying infrastructure to help you meet various SLAs.

HP BTO SPI for SAP enables you to manage your SAP IT environment from a service perspective. It works in tandem with other HP business technology optimization solutions, such as Operations Manager and Business Availability Center, to give you end-to-end control over the SAP application services that support your core business processes.

HP Operations Manager SPI for SAP provides centralized management for multiple SAP systems, regardless of version or underlying platform. Once deployed, it discovers each SAP service and maps dependencies between SAP systems, instances and processes. This monitoring solution helps you maintain high availability for your SAP business applications, ensuring that they perform as expected and stay aligned with business priorities.

Other key benefits include:

• Automatic detection, correlation and reaction to problems in your SAP environment, beyond what can be detected with CCMS
• Alarms for critical situations in your SAP environment that cannot be resolved automatically, along with guidance for the resolution
• Insight into the impact of IT problems on business processes
• Management of response-time data for SLAs
• Collection of SAP performance and resource data for real-time visualization, aggregation and reporting
• Pre-defined templates for more than 100 web-based service reports
• Monitoring of availability and performance from an end-user perspective
• Measurement of availability and end-to-end response time based on test SAP transactions

The HP Business Availability Center (BAC) solution is a business service and application management solution that monitors the health of your business services and applications from the end-user's point of view and provides message stream integration with Operations Manager.

HP BAC helps your organization manage business and operational service levels proactively, and, when problems emerge, it helps you isolate them by automating standard operational processes. BAC can also help you manage complex business transactions across heterogeneous environments and provides full monitoring of SAP transactions. HP BAC for SAP Applications complements SAP Solution Manager and SAP NetWeaver Administrator by enabling the customer to proactively measure and manage application availability and performance, as well as transports' impact.

HP BAC works in concert with HP Operations Manager Software to give you control over and visibility into complex SAP environments. HP Operations Manager software delivers a view of the health of your infrastructure, helping you to preempt anything that could have a negative impact on service.

For organizations with complex SAP environments - multiple applications to support various front- and back-office business functions - many seek to integrate their SAP systems with non-SAP applications in order to better control complex business processes. SAP's NetWeaver middleware provides the technology for that integration, but each point of integration makes it more difficult to manage service levels and monitor application performance.

HP BAC enables you to centralize the management of those integrated components, be they SAP or non-SAP in origin. HP BAC automatically detects, triages and diagnoses SAP NetWeaver applications, while providing visibility into SAP transactions across NetWeaver and R/3 backends.

Together, HP Operations Manager software and HP BAC deliver:

• Fine-grained management of various SAP applications
• Management of SAP service levels in real-time from the business process perspective
• The ability to proactively identify, diagnose and solve SAP application issues
• Consolidated management over the relationships between users, applications, and the underlying infrastructure
• Automated creation and maintenance of SAP application maps
• Management of business and application complexity caused by interdependencies of SAP and non-SAP applications

Leveraging an Established Technology Partnership

The HP-SAP partnership is one of the most enduring technology alliances. Today, HP servers host SAP installations for 20,000 customers - nearly 50 percent of all SAP installations worldwide. The HP-SAP relationship is so critical to each organization that it extends to beyond the customer base and into their own infrastructures.

HP is one of the largest SAP customers in the world. HP relies on SAP solutions for ERP and supply chain management. At the same time, SAP has turned to HP to provide and manage its hosted services infrastructure in North America.

These trusted, mission-critical solutions are what IIS skilled IT professionals deliver to our clients. We match the right HP hardware, such as Itanium servers and HP storage arrays, to the proper SAP software solutions. Delivered with HP business technology optomization and storage management software, these are the same technologies that many of the world's largest manufacturing, government, telecommunications, and financial services organizations rely on every day.

Our long track record as integration and IT experts means that our clients are up and running in the shortest time possible. From discovery to production, from testing to deployment, we work to tailor the technology to your business requirements at each step along the way.

Download: HP SAP Solution Elite (PDF, 533.28 K)

In today's information-centric world, an organization is only as good as its data. SQL databases store and serve much of the mission-critical information that powers today's e-businesses. SQL databases underpin such key enterprise applications as Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

One of the key benefits of a SQL database is that it allows views to be created. A view is a table derived by defining a filter over one or more tables to let users or programs view only certain data in the tables. The result is improved security and more granular user access. Unlike other applications, which tend to have all-in or all-out authentication, SQL views give users or groups of users restricted access to the database, providing them only with the data pertinent to their view.

Additionally, since the view is not actually a physical table, use of views does not result in redundant data. When data in a table is updated, all views that use the data are automatically updated.

SQL Server Consolidation Services

Even so, many organizations find that they have multiple SQL databases scattered throughout the distributed enterprise. Departments install their own SQL Servers, and most applications have dedicated servers, regardless of usage patterns. The net result is database sprawl, and with it comes high hardware costs, data isolation (since data is locked within narrow applications), data repetition (since locked data isn't available for cross-application sharing), and an IT staff that is saddled with excessive administration burdens.

Now, with 64-bit servers being widely available at a low cost, many organizations are seeking to consolidate their many SQL Servers to a small number of high-end servers that can be centrally maintained. Not only will consolidation result in reduced TCO, due to reduced hardware overhead and lower licensing fees, but it promises to unlock data, making it easier to manage, share, and store.

To ensure the success of the consolidation project, IIS helps you identify the key business drivers that favor consolidation, while also assessing current and future capacity requirements, collaboration opportunities, and methods for boosting utilization rates.

With SQL Server consolidation, your organization will reduce IT overhead, improve database performance, increase data availability, reduce the costs associated with various database licenses, and boost scalability.

Using proven HP and SQL reference architectures, IIS will help you:

• Eliminate multiple, stand-alone data silos
• Reduce database administration overhead
• Provide continuous backup and quick recovery
• Create a disaster-tolerant environment for data
• Create a platform that will scale to meet future capacity needs

Scalability Assessment Services

Before committing to new infrastructure investments, it's important to understand exactly what capacity your organization requires today, while also planning and designing for future capacity needs.

IIS will audit your infrastructure, measure usage patterns, and project future capacity needs. IIS professionals perform a scalability assessment during a two- or three-week engagement.

The scalability assessment involves data collection, hardware inspection, and an assessment of underlying databases and the applications that depend on them – all from a SQL perspective. Customer information remains confidential, since our technicians inspect only the meta-data and not the actual information.

Upon completion of the scalability assessment, IIS delivers a detailed report showing both short-term (0-6 months) and long-term (7-18 months) optimization suggestions. These suggestions range from simple upgrades to database tuning to server consolidation and more.

IIS professionals will also recommend the appropriate HP hardware to support your SQL databases and the applications that rely on them. HP provides a complete line of servers, storage, and software that meet the information needs of today's data-rich businesses.

As an exclusive HP Platinum-level partner, IIS delivers HP platforms that maintain high availability, stress security, and serve as the foundation for future scalability. Delivered with HP OpenView and HP storage management software, these solutions are tailored to match Microsoft SQL database software to your specific business needs.

SQL Upgrade and Migration Services

When Microsoft SQL Server 2008 debuts next year, many organizations intend to upgrade in order to take advantage of new features, such as enhanced security, easier key management, and policy-based management features.

Before upgrading, IIS will provide your organization with detailed migration plans to ensure business continuity and data integrity, while avoiding costly downtime. As part of the migration process, IIS will also audit your infrastructure, pointing out any opportunities for database consolidation. IIS can also tie migration plans to continuous backup and disaster recovery initiatives in order to further ensure business continuity.

With the new features provided in SQL 2008, such as better support for rich media, many organizations will standardize around this platform. IIS professionals will provide your organization with migration plans that help you not only upgrade to SQL 2008, but which will also help you move data from such platforms as Sybase, DB2, or Oracle to SQL.

For some organizations, SQL 2008 provides more features than are needed. Many customers will simply seek to upgrade from SQL 2000, since Microsoft is phasing out support and patches, to the more secure and flexible SQL 2005. IIS professionals will assess the business drivers that underpin any upgrade plan and provide you with the options that best match your business needs – be that an upgrade to SQL 2005, an upgrade to SQL 2008, server consolidation, server tuning, or standardization around and migration to SQL from other databases.

Capacity Planning Services

When planning for future needs, IIS professionals take the guesswork out of capacity planning. Our process starts with the important – and often overlooked – first step of scrutinizing your existing SQL server infrastructure. Underperforming SQL servers can drastically throw off future capacity projections.

IIS professionals work to maximize the performance of your existing infrastructure, tuning databases and getting the most out of your existing technology investments. Using tools like SQLscaler and LoadRunner, we then load test your infrastructure to determine maximum capacity. Seeing optimally performing servers stressed under peak loads, IIS professionals then have an accurate baseline from which to project future capacity needs.

Our capacity planning service goes beyond simply adding new users. User prediction alone is fairly simple. IIS professionals, on the other hand, look at the impact of rolling out new applications. We look at your storage infrastructure. We look at related initiatives for things like disaster recovery. We study how server consolidation could affect capacity needs, and how the underlying hardware helps determine performance.

With all of those factors in mind, IIS then delivers a detailed capacity planning assessment. Customers receive a report that specifies your various options for accommodating future capacity needs. These focus on both short-term adjustments, such as database tuning, and more involved efforts like consolidation and suggestions about future hardware purchases. We can also provide proof-of-concept testing for proposed changes, such as the addition of new applications.

SQL Management and Monitoring Services

IIS professionals can help you manage and maintain your SQL environments by deploying sophisticated SQL management and monitoring solutions. IIS can help you deploy and run HP Operations Smart Plug-in (SPI) for MS SQL, the HP Business Availability Center, and HP Operations Manager software – all of which deliver fine-grained management of SQL components to help you meet various Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The HP Operations SPI for MS SQL Server helps you manage SQL Server environments that can range in size from a single database managed with local tools to a distributed environment of hundreds of databases managed from a central console.

The HP Operations Smart Plug-in helps you increase availability and performance, lets you visualize capacity shortages and trends and lower the costs of maintaining a SQL Server environment. With 30+ predefined threshold events and several log file conditions, SPI for MS SQL Server works to proactively identify database problems before they affect applications and end-users, helping you to ensure uninterrupted availability.

Another management tool that IIS can provide is the HP Business Availability Center (BAC) solution. HP BAC is a business service and application management solution that monitors the health of your business services and applications from the end-user's point of view.

HP BAC helps your organization manage business and operational service levels proactively, and when problems emerge, it helps you isolate them by automating standard operational processes. BAC can also help you manage complex business transactions across heterogeneous environments.

HP BAC works in concert with HP Operations Manager Software to give you control over and visibility into your SQL environment. HP Operations Manager software delivers a view of the health of your infrastructure, helping you to preempt anything that could have a negative impact on service.

Together, HP Operations Manager software and HP BAC give you fine-grained management of SQL components and synthetic transactions. The end result is that you can be confident that end-user experience meets defined SLAs.

Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today's powerful x86 computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond, making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, increasing the utilization and flexibility of hardware.

IIS is a leading provider of virtualization technologies and services. Our experts will show you how to maximize your IT investments by reducing hardware requirements, freeing up floor space in the data center, and saving on power and cooling costs. In addition, virtualization will simplify IT administration and increases application availability.

VMware ESX Server

The VMware ESX Server is the key platform for building virtualized data centers. VMware ESX Server is a virtualization layer that resides on the server and abstracts processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines.

The VMware ESX Server enables dynamic, self-optimizing IT infrastructures. With it organizations are able to increase hardware utilization and contain server sprawl by running many virtual machines side-by-side on the same server. With a virtualized architecture, your organization will be able to decrease IT infrastructure capital and operating costs, while maintaining high availability.

In fact, ESX Server's advanced resource management and high availability features enable improved service levels to business-critical applications – even to resource-intensive applications.

ESX Server installs directly on "bare metal" server hardware and inserts a virtualization layer between the hardware and the operating system. ESX Server partitions a physical server into multiple secure and portable virtual servers that reside on the same physical server, regardless of operating system.

ESX Server's virtualized infrastructure centralizes and simplifies IT management, while at the same time boosting security and availability. Security is improved through LUN zoning and masking, VLAN traffic tagging and filtering, and the enforcement of security at the Ethernet layer.

At the same time, ESX Server virtual machines have built-in high availability, resource management and security features that provide better service levels to software applications than static physical environments. They are also isolated from each other by the virtualization layer, thus preventing conflicts and system crashes.

VMware ESX server gives you the ability to virtualize any environment, be it a corporate data center, a set of department-specific servers or a branch office. ESX Server is compatible with more than 200 server and storage systems, and users are able to run unmodified Windows, Linux, Solaris, and NetWare operating systems in side-by-side virtual machines.

Capacity Planning and Virtualization Audit

IIS uses the VMware Capacity planning tool to provide consolidation assessment services. We assess the capacity utilization of an organization's IT infrastructure. From there, we identify opportunities for consolidation and deliver a virtualization roadmap for effective server containment and consolidation.

We provide a detailed report that includes server inventory, performance characteristics and total cost of ownership over a 3-year period.

Design and Planning Services

Building on the Virtual Assessment audit, an IIS VMware Certified Professional will plan and design a customized VMware infrastructure implementation to meet your specific needs for server consolidation and server containment. IIS delivers a detailed virtualization road map that includes:

• Implementation of a prototype reference VMware environment of up to two VMware ESX servers, one VMware VirtualCenter Server and VMware Converter
• Virtualization capacity and financial analysis
• VMware Infrastructure (VI) Design Documents
  • VI Architectural Design
  • VI Assembly and Configuration Guide
  • VI Standard Procedures
  • VI Test Plan
  • VI Rollout Plan

ESX Server Jumpstart and Implementation Services

IIS implementation services are custom designed to help clients plan for and implement virtualization projects. IIS implementation services are designed to help you as much or as little as you need. We can custom design any part of a virtualization project from a kick start to a full implementation.

For organizations new to the concept of virtualization, we offer the VMware ESX Server Jumpstart. Our consultants will introduce you to virtualization and quickly bring up a virtual environment – based on your existing infrastructure – that can be used for a pilot or a staging area prior to rolling it into production.

As part of the Jumpstart, IIS will assess your current server deployment to determine potential costs and realized savings. We will install VMware Capacity Planner Data Managers to collect system and performance metrics on existing servers in your environment (up to 1 month's worth). IIS professionals will analyze data on selected servers and provide a detailed server consolidation and virtualization assessment report, which includes a preliminary total cost of ownership analysis of the sampled environment and recommendations.

For organizations already familiar with and committed to virtualization, we provide full implementation services. These services start with our design and planning services, which lay out a roadmap for virtualization and provide design documents. During the implementation phase, we follow those plans and document all aspect of the rollout, with those documents then serving as the foundation for the development of IT procedures and policy. During implementation, IIS will either help you with or perform the migration from a physical environment to a virtual infrastructure.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans (BC/DR) for many organizations are often inadequate, untested or unrealistic. As infrastructure changes and as new applications are added, organizations often forget to alter their BC/DR plans, which undermines recovery efforts during an actual outage.

In many cases, companies outsource their BC/DR and rely on rented hardware. This in and of itself can be a problem, especially if a disaster is regional. During Hurricane Katrina, for instance, many regionalized BC/DR plans failed because the off-site was simply across town, not out of the region entirely.

To further complicate matters, the servers that are provided at shared, third-party operated facilities are not always exactly the same as the production servers, further complicating recovery and making it a time-consuming and difficult task.

Virtualization allows a company to deploy DR solutions that exactly mirror the production environment, but at a fraction of the traditional cost. A mirrored production environment assures any company almost instantaneous failover capabilities and full confidence in their DR plans.

IIS BC/DR services are designed to reduce both the recovery point objectives (RPO) and the recovery time objectives (RTO). By employing data de-duplication, we can overcome many of the limitations imposed by latency, while we use WAN acceleration technologies to overcome distance restrictions. Our solutions are based on best-of-breed software and hardware solutions from today's most innovative companies.

Data Archiving and Backup

With distributed locations and data centers, data archiving and backup is a challenge for many organizations. In addition to the logistics of orchestrating a parade of tapes and archival media, security is a major issue. What happens if one or more of the tapes are misplaced or fall into the wrong hands?

IIS can help you centralize your data backup and archival solutions. By implementing WAN acceleration devices, nightly backups to remote locations can be performed at LAN-like speeds. SNAP mirror technologies enable LAN-free backup of all your mission critical data, while data synchronization tools ensure that an exact mirror of that data is available for your DR scenarios.

Virtual Desktops

VMware's Virtual desktop infrastructure allows your organization to host desktops inside virtual machines that run on centralized servers in a data center. Users can access their virtual desktops remotely from a traditional PC, from a thin client or even from a repurposed computer using a remote display protocol.

VDI enables you to:

• Manage desktops centrally, simplifying desktop installations, backups and maintenance
• Control access to sensitive data and intellectual property by maintaining information in a secure data center
• Deliver individual isolated virtual desktops to end users that look and feel like their normal desktop
• Provide the benefits of server-based computing without the limitations of shared services or the hassles of application integration

Virtual Software Development

VMware Lab Manager helps you streamline development and test lab infrastructure and operations. Users achieve significant IT cost savings and operational benefits by pooling servers, networking, storage and other resources that can be shared across development and test teams.

Virtual software development also allows you to provision complex multi-machine configurations in seconds, rather than days. You are able to provide on-demand access to a shared library of complex system environments, giving your developers and testers instant use of the resources they need, while leaving IT in administrative control.