Logicalis US Warns CIOs: Your Cloud Will Mirror Your On-Premise Environment

NEW YORK, May 21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- As companies establish cloud strategies, conducting a comprehensive assessment of their current IT environment coupled with the remediation of existing IT issues is one of the first and most important steps along a successful IT journey to the cloud.  According to Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), remediation is one of the most beneficial parts of a thoughtful cloud strategy, and one that ensures the upgrades made to each component contribute to the development of a solid and well-planned converged infrastructure.

"In most cases, a company's cloud environment will be a reflection of its on-premise environment. If the organization's on-premise environment is under- or over-utilized, its cloud environment will be as well," says Kevin Gruneisen, Senior Director, Cloud and Data Center Solutions, Logicalis US.  "Simply moving an inefficient environment to the cloud will not by itself make it any more efficient. Performing remediation of systems identified as inefficient – both physical and virtual – while aligning each new project with the company's long-term IT vision will help prevent companies from ending up in a technological dead end that forces them to start over."

Three Key Areas for Remediation

1. Virtualization: Remediation of virtual environments is directly related to remediation of management abilities through the development and execution of ITIL best practices as part of an IT service management (ITSM) strategy.  Research shows, a typical IT environment is only about 50 percent virtualized. That clearly leaves the other 50 percent to be virtualized. The ROI and other benefits of extending virtualization are well established.  But companies also need to rationalize the systems they have already virtualized. It is common to see organizations with 100 physical servers that have been transformed into 200 or more virtual servers.  Because virtual machines have the same support, security and compliance issues that physical machines do, the cost of server sprawl can be significant.
2. Blade Servers: Throughout the data center, blade technology has initiated change. Blades are modular, need fewer cables, require less floor space, use less power, require less cooling and can be managed by integrated management tools. These and other dramatic efficiencies have enabled the blade form factor to take the data center by storm.  Additionally, an investment in the blade chassis is protected over time because additional blades can always be added.
3. Converged Storage: Rather than buying more storage than is needed "just to be sure," as many IT departments do, CIOs need to carefully select a specific storage solution that meets the company's current needs, yet leaves future options open.  Converged storage area networks (SANs) for virtual server farms, for example, allow IT pros to assign virtual storage and provide high availability with commands from the hypervisor environment the way they manage virtual servers. It's important, however, to keep an eye on where storage is headed.  Recent advancements in flash and direct-attached storage may soon provide services that were traditionally only supported through a SAN.

"The ideal goal, of course, is to get everything into the converged infrastructure with the lowest costs per port, the lowest cost for SAN storage, for compute resources, for everything, compared to a discrete physical environment, and to take advantage of the dynamic movement, self-provisioning, scaling and all the benefits of a shared resources model," Gruneisen says.

Want to Learn More?

• Watch a short video about the IT Transformation Journey here: http://www.ict-log.us/wNDd7 and take a quiz to see where your company stands.
• Learn more about cloud solutions from Logicalis here: http://www.ict-log.us/wNCJU.
• Find out what a Cloud Readiness Assessment can do for your company: http://www.ict-log.us/wNCTv.

About Logicalis

Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis employs nearly 3,500 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, specify, deploy and manage complex ICT infrastructures to meet the needs of almost 6,000 corporate and public sector customers.  To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, CA Technologies, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of approximately $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, South America and Asia Pacific and is fast establishing itself as one of the leading IT and Communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $5 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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Media contacts:
Lisa Dreher, VP, Marketing &
Business Development,
Logicalis US
[e-mail]
425-201-8111
www.us.logicalis.com

Karen Franse,
Communication Strategy Group
for Logicalis US
[e-mail]
866-997-2424
www.gocsg.com

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SOURCE Logicalis US

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