Make Your Datacenter Healthy
N'compass offers Sun-centered solutions to keep IT shops in top conditionTo be competitive in today's business environment, datacenters need to be more than just "reliable, flexible, and scalable," says Gerry Hansen, executive vice president and co-founder of Minneapolis-based N'compass, a Sun Principal Partner. "Naturally, they need to provide high performance. But they also need to be eco-friendly, energy-sensitive, and, perhaps above all in this economy, they need to be cost-effective." To help datacenters get that way, N'compass offers IT managers an array of Sun-centered professional services, applications, and managed solutions — starting with the Data Center Health Checkup assessment — designed to diagnose, promote, and maintain the health of their critical information assets. Take your datacenter's pulse: the first step to business advantage"The chief purpose of the Data Center Health Checkup," says Hansen, "is to increase competitive business advantage" — by uncovering hidden opportunities to reduce costs, minimize risks, hone energy and other efficiencies, boost productivity, and maximize true capacity — "All of which contribute to the agility of the business."
“N'compass has always looked for new ways to meet and exceed our customers' evolving needs. The Data Center Health Checkup is a natural outgrowth of that evolution.”
— Gerry Hansen, Executive Vice President
N'compass The Data Center Health Checkup is a comprehensive yet minimally invasive engagement coordinated by a team of N'compass engineers and technical architects, Hansen explains. The professional services team gathers, analyzes, and reviews data on site and (as much as possible) remotely — presenting the client with an in-depth 15 to 20-page report, including an executive summary, a "dashboard" with illustrative charts and graphics, and supporting details. N'compass offers its Data Center Health Checkup assessment service to clients around the world. What, specifically, do clients get with the assessment? A summary of the value-added Health Checkup deliverables includes:
The N'view visualization application — which employs an array of networked sensors within the datacenter to generate real-time utilization maps and key performance indicators — can also be obtained as a separate service by N'compass customers for ongoing use. Data Center Health Checkup cures what ails travel service providerRecently, a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) business solution provider serving the multibillion-dollar travel industry approached N'compass with a serious challenge when it found that three of its major clients slated for implementation were unable to access sufficient cycles to support their applications. N'compass came to the rescue with the Data Center Health Checkup assessment, which ultimately resulted in a cost-effective plan that justified a redesigned datacenter to accommodate immediate and future capacity requirements. At the outset of the project, the customer was maintaining 1,700 Hewlett-Packard servers in its datacenter. Analysis determined, however, that by moving to a virtualization model powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire X4600 servers, the number of servers could be reduced by up to 90 percent. The key to this savings, says Hansen, was the "industry-leading performance, efficiency, and energy-sensitivity of these Sun servers." By employing the Data Center Health Checkup to plan for cost-effective growth with a virtualized Sun and VMware solution, the customer not only found it could slash its server inventory (and associated maintenance costs), it also discovered how to dramatically enhance server utilization. And reduce power and cooling costs by more than 70 percent annually. What sparked this idea? A look "back into the future"...N'compass has been a Sun Partner for half of its 10-year history. "From the outset we've been involved in datacenter consulting — long before the arrival and popularization of virtualization, grid computing, and 'cloud' computing," Hansen says. "Together with Sun, N'compass has always looked for new ways to meet and exceed our customers' evolving needs. The Data Center Health Checkup, and our entire datacenter managed solutions portfolio, is a natural outgrowth of that evolution." Sun Partner Advantage"By working with us, customers can take advantage of our early exposure to innovative Sun technical and datacenter practices," says Hansen. "Together with Sun, we are leading the charge toward the next-generation datacenter. What this means is that while even now customers are struggling to cool datacenters containing 5 kilowatt-per-rack configurations, the future will bring 30 kilowatt-per-rack systems. For these systems, air cooling won't do it. Sun is now looking at moving to water-cooled designs. Because of our deep datacenter expertise and close ties to Sun, we'll be ideally positioned to help customers integrate these next-generation systems into their environments." On the horizon"The next hurdle for clients," says Hansen, "will be cloud computing. They'll need to understand the issues before leaping. Not all applications are suited for cloud computing. Some are easier than others to move to the cloud. Before making this kind of move, our customers will need to have a mature business model in place in order for their IT organizations to manage the transition. This is where we can help." Want to know more?
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