International Pharmaceutical Company
Server Consolidation and Application Rationalization
Business Challenge
An International Pharmaceutical Company wanted to rationalize a group of legacy Windows-based applications and migrate them to new servers on a current version of operating system, utilizing server-virtualization technology to minimize the number of servers. The status of many of these applications was unclear to the data center because staff within the lines of business supported the applications and the data center provided server support only up the operating-system level. As a result, there was great uncertainty about whether the applications could tolerate an operating system version change. The client engaged Acumen Solutions to conduct a detailed review of the target group of legacy applications and develop a plan for the migration of these applications to the consolidated environment.
The Solution
Acumen Solutions first organized and executed a thorough inventory process for the group of applications, using structured interviews with line-of-business software support staff. In these interviews we assessed the readiness of the applications to operate on the target operating system and, in cases where the applications were not ready, how much work was required to remediate them, and when the line of business team could commit to completing this. In some cases these interviews revealed that the applications were targeted for replacement by new applications in the near future. The results of these interviews were used to create a project database, including application/server mappings detailing the location of each application instance and the instance class (development, test/QA, or production). Performance metrics for each of the servers were added to the database to provide a workload profile for each application. The project database was then used to build an end-state design for the new environment, assigning to virtual machines on the same physical server the best mixture of applications from the point of view of workload and business “green zones” (days of the week and times when maintenance work can be performed without affecting business). A roadmap for the migration to this end state was created, taking into account the applications’ remediation timetables, together with a business case for the consolidation for presentation to Senior Management.
Return on Investment
The business case, developed by Acumen Solutions, showed that the application rationalization and server consolidation would generate same-year savings sufficient to cover the cost of the new hardware and software and would yield savings of $2 million p.a. from the next year onwards. An additional benefit for the client of the data-gathering done at the start of the engagement was that we ported application/server mappings from the project database into a Configuration Management Database that Acumen Solutions had created for the client during a previous engagement, giving the data center staff access to up-to-date information about these applications.
