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Case study
SONAR™ sets the benchmark for a
world-leading architecture practice
Optimizing the existing estate ensured efficient business continuity and
future scalability planning
The customer
Foster + Partners is one of the most innovative
architecture and design practices in the world.
Over the past four decades the business
has pioneered a sustainable approach to
architecture through a strikingly varied range
of work, from airports to private houses and
even super yachts.
With offices worldwide and buildings on
six continents, IT understandably plays
an important role, with state of the art
technologies delivering a competitive edge to
the business.
The challenge
Xtravirt was selected as it is recognized as
a Centre of Excellence for consulting on
the highly complex IT topics of cloud and
virtualization solutions.
Requirements
The solution
The first step was to conduct a review of the
VMware vSphere environment and report
on resource utilization. This included using
Xtravirt’s analytics and reporting modules
powered by SONAR, where all data points
were rapidly and precisely targeted, collected
and analyzed to produce a report which
highlighted opportunities to enhance a
number of areas, including:
Following a rapid restructure of the
Infrastructure Operations Team, Foster +
Partners wanted to establish a baseline of
their virtual environment in order to give the
business confidence in decisions that were
being taken with regard to future projects.
•
•
The customer had a number of
requirements for this assessment:
•
•
To be undertaken by an organization
who had no prior knowledge of their
specific environment
A key priority was to ensure the environment
had sufficient storage capacity for future
business growth. With no immediate budget
planned to purchase more hardware, the
assessment results enabled Foster + Partners
to design a more efficient disk and server
configuration to ensure the storage was
optimized, and allowed for business growth
without additional investment.
•
To complete an inventory of the VMware
vSphere® estate
•
To conduct a health check of the estate
•
To assess how the estate could be
optimized and enhanced allowing for
future business growth
•
To create a high level plan to prioritize
the propsed actions
•
To carry out any immediate remedial
action necessary to deal with issues
that might threaten the stability of the
environment
•
•
•
Project at a glance
Proritized remediation actions to resolve
lingering issues with the vSphere estate
Improvement in failover capacity
Enhancing network optimization and
redundancy
Identification of pinch points in VM disk
space
VM patch and consistency improvements
• Conduct VMware vSphere infrastructure
baseline and health assessment
• Identify optimization and configuration
enhancements enabling future expansion
• “Do more with less” by optimizing existing
IT investments
Solution
• SONAR acted as an additional virtual
operations resource, rapidly providing a
baseline with actionable outcomes
• Identified enhancements to allow the
infrastructure to flexibly scale with future
business needs
Results
• Fully documented configuration of the
environment, including benchmarking
• Enabled immediate targeted work to optimize
existing storage
• Enabled action and maintenance plan
ensuring knowledge distributed evenly across
the operational team
• Provided input to staged work plan for the
future
SONAR sets the benchmark for a world-leading architecture practice
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SONAR’s capability enabled Xtravirt to understand our virtual environment in a very
short space of time. The valuable report provided us with a high quality, detailed
output, helping enormously in making our environment more efficient and robust
with clearly recommended areas requiring investigation / remediation. In a very short
period of time we knew exactly which areas to focus on to establish a baseline for our
virtual environment.
Gary Taylor, IT Infrastructure Manager
The results
• Alerted the customer to key optimization opportunities that they were
previously unaware of, in a concise and efficient way during a period
of rapid organizational change.
• Updated and standardized vSphere configuration allowed efficient
short term business continuity, while also enabling effective
assessment for future scalability for future business innovation.
• Provided a documented action plan for improvements, including an
ongoing routine maintenance task plan that ensured that all IT team
members would be fully informed to manage the systems going
forward, enabling IT to take control.
• A staged work plan for further tasks and projects informed by
SONAR provided independent validation of the customer’s future
infrastructure projects, providing a more informed perspective for
their own planning and decision-making.
• Rapid benchmarking of the storage and memory resources in the
estate using analytics and reporting modules within SONAR, provided
a valuable reference to determine objectives and requirements for
future planned projects.
About SONAR
SONAR Reporting-as-a-Service provides actionable insights and remediation guidance to organizations using virtualization and cloud infrastructure
to deliver innovation and efficiency. Easy-to-run and digest reports reduce administration pressures while enhancing the knowledge and
effectiveness of the IT operations team. Detect and remediate issues, baseline and plan more effectively.
Find out more
The Starter edition of SONAR is completely free of charge, so why not visit http://SONAR-raas.com and run your rapid health assessment today?
For information or to purchase SONAR, call 0800 4880 038 (outside of the United Kingdom, +44 800 4880
038). For detailed product specifications and system requirements visit http://sonar-raas.com or email
sales@sonar-raas.com.
© Copyright 2015 Xtravirt Ltd. All right reserved. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. Xtravirt Ltd shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or conclusions
contained herein. Xtravirt and the SONAR logo are trademarks of Xtravirt Ltd. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective owners.
SONAR_CS_v1.3 JAN15
SONAR sets the benchmark for a world-leading architecture practice
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