Case Studies at CiRBA

Examining Alternate Scenarios
to Determine the Best Approach
to Consolidation

Faced with a corporate mandate to reduce their physical infrastructure by 20%, an outsourcing technology and services provider leveraged CiRBA to determine which consolidation approach offered the least amount of risk. CiRBA’s analysis provided a detailed plan to enable the team to exceed targets and achieve a 45% reduction in their target environment.

The organization focused its consolidation initiative on a group of Solaris Servers. Using spreadsheets and manually gathered data, an internal team conducted an analysis of the environment to look for consolidation opportunities. Minimizing operational risks associated with the transformations was of particular concern as customers of the organization hold rigorous SLA’s with steep financial penalties.

The analysis focused on upgrading existing Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 servers to Solaris10 with the intention of leveraging Solaris Zones for consolidation. The team determined that a consolidation rate of 10% was possible with limited risks; however this would enable them to achieve only half of their goal. Examining other scenarios that could get them closer to their objective was determined to be too time-consuming using the same manual process. In addition, management didn’t have confidence in the quality of the data and analysis the first time around. The team looked externally for analytical tools and chose CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence solution.

CiRBA was used to audit the environment to gather comprehensive configuration and workload data that was combined with unique business constraints provided by the organization. This approach provided a complete view of the necessary constraints and accurate data to be used in the analysis, eliminating management’s concerns regarding data quality. CiRBA’s flexible “What if” analysis enabled the team to evaluate different consolidation strategies for the various pools of Solaris servers. CiRBA determined that by stacking the Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 servers onto existing hardware instead of migrating to Solaris 10 as originally planned and purchasing new hardware, the team could significantly reduce costs. In addition, when evaluating options for establishing Solaris 10 zones, the organization determined that by adding memory to existing servers they would avoid political battles and achieve a higher consolidation rate than they would by combining multiple business units onto new servers provided.

CiRBA’s analysis enabled the organization to quickly and easily explore multiple consolidation scenarios and choose the one that provided maximum savings while also minimizing operational risk.