Data Center Planning Engagements
A Blueprint for Strategic Data Center Planning & Implementation
A Cerium Data Center Planning Engagement can provide you with a strategic blueprint that defines the best possible solutions and processes while identifying the potential roadblocks and pitfalls for upgrading or replacing your current data center solution.
Use a Planning Engagement to:
- Leverage Cerium expertise to develop deployment, upgrade, and migration plans tailored for your environment, workforce needs, and business requirements.
- Identify which technologies and services will fit best in your environment through in-depth technology planning sessions.
- Extend your internal expertise and incorporate Cerium’s proven best practices to help eliminate risks and reduce deployment costs.
- Demonstrate the value of your custom deployment plan and solution with a plan-reinforcing proof of concept or pilot.
Phase 1: Engagement Kick-Off Call
A remote one hour call will be conducted to kick off the engagement. Topics covered include:
- Review scope of engagement and desired results
- Review remote access requirements
- Review customer stakeholders, responsibilities, and onsite engagement commitments
- Review timeline
Phase 2: Discover
The objective of this phase is to gather information about your existing data center(s). This phase is accomplished through surveys sent to your stakeholders and select technical employees to be completed prior to a one-day onsite workshop. To attain a more complete discovery, remote system access for Cerium consultants will be required to evaluate solutions.
This one-day workshop contains three segments:
Segment 1: Current-state Technical Audit
- Compute platforms
- Virtualization platforms
- Primary storage
- Data protection
- Network infrastructure
- Data center security infrastructure
- Public or private cloud interactions
- Data center management or automation systems
- Supporting systems
Segment 2: User Type Analysis:
Identify who is utilizing the data center infrastructure and their needs
- Internal employees
- External entities
- Administrators
- Others
Segment 3: Technology Impact Statement:
- Vision alignment
- Strategic objective/business outcome identification
Phase 3: Assess
The objective of this phase is to assess the state of the current Data Center and refine the road map direction based upon the strategic objectives and business outcome statements made during the Discover phase.
- User type to workload mapping identifying a suite of solutions
- Solution to Business Outcome mapping identifying overall business justification and objective (Find the WHY)
- Road map proposed technical assessments
Phase 4: Design
The objective of this phase is to design a plan that will provide you with a concise road map for your data center(s) based on identified business and technical strategies. This includes the creation of a findings presentation based on the Discover and Assess phases to be reviewed during a half day onsite workshop.
- Review “where we are” & “where we want to go” – Discover Phase
- Findings & Recommendations
- Dependencies
- Exclusions/Assumptions
- Training & User Adoption Strategy
- Discuss Remediation & Readiness Plan – Assess Phase
- Prerequisites
- Mitigation Plans
- Create the proposed road map
- Milestones
- Recommended Architecture – At Solution Level
- Infrastructure Impacts
Final Deliverable: Road Map Documentation
Final documentation will be completed, presented, and reviewed on a final one-hour engagement closure remote call.
- Findings and Recommendations Document
- Road Map Outline
- Remediation & Readiness Plan
- Priorities & Dependencies
- Infrastructure Impacts
Talk with a Cerium Expert Today.
If you would like to better understand your options, timelines, and prospective costs, we’re offering a no-cost consultation with one of our experts. Give us a call to set up a consultation.
Call: (844) 263-6880
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With nearly two decades of experience working with state and local governments in the Northwest, Cerium is uniquely qualified to serve government agencies in the State of Idaho. We have a proven track record of successfully delivering, deploying and supporting mission-critical technology solutions that save money, improve efficiency and maintain operational continuity.
At Cerium, we do more than just sell technology, our associates are experienced and certified across a broad range of technologies and offer valuable guidance. Backed by a dedicated support team, we can partner with you to develop a technology road map that ensures your network, data, application, voice and video solutions will fit your organization’s needs today, and scale up as your organization grows and evolves in the future.
We combine proven methodologies, with decades of field experience and industry knowledge, along with a commitment to ongoing training, to assess your specific needs and present ideas that help you extract maximum value from your technology resources. Our portfolio of consulting services offers you the flexibility to select one service or an entire suite of services to match your particular needs and level of technical expertise. Our consulting services add real business value.