SITS Key Areas of Focus for '08'

Reduce TCO & Improve ROI - Server Consolidation through Virtualisation

Every client site we attend regardless of size inadvertently wastes energy, time and ultimately money through inefficient business servers. If you are reading this, you are probably no different. SITS Group specialise in consolidating many of these inefficient singular application servers, onto a robust virtual infrastructure platform, typically achieving consolidation ratios upwards of 10:1.

5 Key Facts:

  1. 90-95% of physical servers typically use between 10%-15% of their physical CPU and RAM resources - virtualised infrastructures aim to achieve between 65%-80% utilisation
  2. Consolidation of physical servers reduces the Total Cost of Ownership of the IT infrastructure
  3. Virtualisation greatly reduces the provision and deployment time for new business servers
  4. Greater scalability is expected from server hardware investments today, virtualisation allows businesses to maximize server resource utilisation and provide large scope for future scalability
  5. Administration time associated with managing server estates can be greatly reduced by leveraging virtualisation technologies and associated peripheral utilities.

IT System Disaster Recovery Planning

IT Disaster Recovery (DR) Planning is now no longer optional for many business, i.e. financial sector. For many other businesses, it is a risk that can no longer be ignored - insurance companies request recovery plans, some suppliers and customers now require them before entering into business, or as a requirement to continue business. SITS Group recognise that most DR plans are developed in the hope that they will never be implemented; therefore whilst they must work, the cost of developing, implementing and testing the strategy is a key concern.

SITS Group specialise in leveraging virtualisation technologies to enable businesses to efficiently develop and test robust DR strategies.

5 Key Facts:

  1. The vast majority of DR plans are not tested regularly to the complexity and costs associated with the test process, a virtualised recovery environment provides the ability to easily test a business' DR strategy without requiring extenisve administration time
  2. 28% of businesses that suffer a serious incident and don't have a DR strategy cease trading within 18 months
  3. 88% of companies experience unplanned 'disasters' with 43% of these companies stating that it took them 2 months or longer to recover
  4. Recovering a server estate that consists of numerous different hardware platforms increases the complexity and likelihood of errors, virtualisation technology can eliminate hardware specific dependancies, simplifying the recovery processes
  5. Typically businesses are required to invest in a large quantity of additional hardware on which to recover their business systems in the event of a serious incident. Most of this hardware may never be used. Virtualisation technology greatly reduces the hardware required to recovery numerous business application servers.

It is not only large corporate and enterpise organisations which are liable to disasters, Small to Medium sized businesses are also at risk. Business Continuity Lancashire state that:

  1. SMB's typically experience a 'disaster' every 2-3 years.
  2. Only 15% of SMB's have a Disaster Recovery plan
  3. 86% of SMB's are underinsured.