How can you accelerate IT evolution to create comprehensive, sustainable business value?
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Virtualization Realities Sustainable Value, Ongoing Efficiencies, Continuing Innovation, An Open Path to the Future
Introduction
To be sure, some enterprises already benefit from virtualization in many ways. Yet the full potential of virtualization can be realized only through a process of evolution guided by a long-term strategy and a partner with comprehensive answers to the technical, operational and industry issues you face. In some organizations, project-by-project efforts – limited in scope and geared to short-term savings – obscure virtualization’s greater benefits. In others, the sheer distance from their IT infrastructure’s current physical state to a desired virtualized state requires a set of evolving paths that include environments that are readily virtualized will need a transition strategy and possibly the use of less limited technologies will remain the same and are perfectly suited for their current role By creating such pathways, the strategy for virtualization can provide both immediate benefits and a roadmap for evolution toward your future business computing needs. There is a natural progression – with steps along the way – from the physical world of owning and managing your own servers, data centers, networks and desktop environments to the virtual world. It is a world where resources anywhere on a network are dynamically provisioned and consumed on demand, where the hardware and software infrastructure is reduced, more efficiently employed, and focused on priority business processes. Siemens Virtualization Consulting Services understands the world of virtualized computing. There are many paths toward the evolution you must follow, and we can help you identify and pursue the correct ones.
Siemens Virtualization Consulting Services can be your evolution guide and partner. We can manage the complexity of transformation and the evolution of virtualization for your IT infrastructure. Siemens brings exceptional experience and a profound understanding of multiple industries. We can prove the value of virtualization for your business. We have a reliable, measurable process to guide our work with you and we have a successful architecture to work for you. As an evolution of your IT infrastructure, virtualization can create sustainable value in times of growth, in times of consolidation, even in times of retrenchment.
Section II
The Siemens Solution Siemens’ Virtualization Consulting Services are predicated on three core tenets: • Convergence • Containment • Dynamic Siemens believes that the end state of virtualization converges desktop and core infrastructure services. Our approach moves beyond the fragmented perspective of controlling capital and operating expenses for desktops or servers, and streamlines the entire process of requesting services within the infrastructure. In the design of our model, we virtualize every interconnection and function contained within the infrastructure continuum – from desktop to application to network to server to storage. Virtualization drives dynamic business solutions around business processes. Within the enterprise, IT dynamically provisions capabilities and resources aligned to execute essential, priority business processes. The business solutions address both specific issues, such as charge backs, and broader concerns, such as workload balancing and virtualization management.
Target Architecture for Virtualization Siemens Virtualization Consulting Services, itself, has evolved from the global enterprise computing experience of Siemens IT Solutions and Services, an organization with more than 40,000 employees in over 40 countries. Drawing on that experience, and guided by best practices and metrics developed for the physical-to-virtual lifecycle transformation, Siemens has created Target Architecture to provide: • Production service to deliver virtualized compute resources • Pre-integrated framework of technology and infrastructure components • Optimized operational model and service catalog based on virtualization • Holistic approach for Intel server consolidation and infrastructure optimization • Converged platform for desktop and core infrastructure virtualization The Target Architecture delivers virtualization throughout the IT continuum, enabling the enterprise to: • Deploy capacity from multiple locations with built-in lifecycle management • Integrate management framework with coexistence of physical and virtual environments • Reduce resource requirements by workload • Integrate application lifecycle management • Eliminate complexities of technical refresh on both infrastructure and application levels.
Section III
4 Steps to Virtualization Successful evolution requires clear direction to avoid dead ends. Siemens incorporates its extensive IT transformation and virtualization experience in a defined process that produces predictable and repeatable results. 1. Virtualization Workshop Our one- or three-day workshop educates your organization on the technologies, industry trends, concepts and solutions that are driving IT virtualization. The workshop can initiate mapping business strategy to a preliminary IT roadmap. 2. Virtualization Assessment We gather vital information on the what, where and how systems are provided in your IT infrastructure. The assessment identifies options and formulates recommendations for your virtualization evolution. 3. Virtualization Design We create the virtualization roadmap, architecture and customized path that will accelerate your evolution from current state to the desired end state. 4. Virtualization Implementation We can provide the resources necessary to consolidate, implement, and optimize your virtualized computing platform. At Siemens, we have developed this process to define and guide your virtualization and to ensure that you know exactly what to expect every step of the way.
Section IV
Summary of Virtualization Benefits • Become more competitive by focusing on core business issues instead of IT administration and infrastructure management • Grow market share and new business opportunities by helping customers address the significant challenges facing their businesses, including Green IT, cost reduction, business innovation, customer service, and faster time-to-market • Offer a flexible and secure virtualized computing resource – through cloud environments – that can support variable demands from internal and external customers in real time • Achieve a greater return on capital investments by dramatically improving server utilization from 30 percent to 80 percent, while also reducing hardware expenditures by approximately 70 percent • Reduce time and resources required for server administration and management by moving mission-critical applications – including ERP, reporting, management, and web systems – into a flexible, scalable, and centralized virtual environment • Offer a cost-effective, reliable disaster-recovery model and a resilient application environment that deliver service availability up to 99.999 percent • Reduce deployment time for new applications from weeks to days and hours • Balance workloads automatically across interchangeable pools of resources to cost-effectively maximize asset utilization, performance, and capacity
The Starting Point for Virtualization Siemens Virtualization Consulting Services can guide your company through a successful virtualization evolution. Our holistic approach accommodates all technical, operational and industry issues pertinent to your organization. A Siemens Virtualization Workshop is an excellent place to begin exploring virtualization and its realities. It is a professional forum on virtualization that also provides an opportunity for you to become acquainted with our approach – and for us to become acquainted with your business and its IT infrastructure issues.