Are Hidden Costs Plaguing Your IT Operations? A View from the Trenches
19 Aug 2008 | Permalink | News
One global investment bank is convinced that there’s a lot of waste and redundancy that can be eliminated fairly easily. Using Tideway’s mapping product Foundation, for example, it created “a map of all of our data center assets and the relationships between them. The idea here was to be able to be predictive about our data center relocation – ‘what happens if we unplug this server?’ When we did an initial scan of 3,000 servers, we found another 90 machines that should have been retired.” On those servers, they found a lot of ghost services that created some maintenance issues.
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What to Watch for during a Virtual Machine’s Lifecycle
18 Aug 2008 | Permalink | News
Visibility: Machines set up for a specific purpose – for example, testing or development – can linger without administrators’ knowledge. For application visibility, Tideway Systems’ Foundation maps application relationships to the physical and virtual servers.
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The Life and Death of a Virtual Machine
18 Aug 2008 | Permalink | News
Most IT organizations have a hard time nailing down their physical inventory. They lose track of things over the years and through mergers, agrees Jim Houghton, who led Wachovia’s Corporate & Investment Bank IT Utility group until a year ago and now is CTO of Adaptivity, an infrastructure consulting firm. For example, when Wachovia’s IT department initially deployed Tideway Systems’ Foundation application and discovery tool, “we found over 50 servers that should have been retired,” he says.
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How to Create a Business Boosting Virtualization Plan
18 Aug 2008 | Permalink | News
From the bottom up, you want to understand what you have. That’s where you use a tool like Tideway Systems’ Foundation, which tells you the physical inventory and the dependencies of your existing infrastructure. You’re able to understand how every system interconnects, down from the network and up to the application. That’s powerful, especially because then, when you virtualize and add changes, it can show you the new dependencies. Now, when you come bottom-up, with ‘what do I have’ and ‘where can I target opportunities to virtualize,’ you can understand what that would do to the infrastructure.
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Virtualization Sprawl Hits Wall Street
13 Aug 2008 | Permalink | News
Having implemented virtualization software to conquer “server sprawl”, many Wall Street firms are now in the throes of “virtual sprawl.” Wachovia uses IT mapping software from Tideway to see where virtual machines exist — on which physical servers. The firm is also building a “mapquest for the data center” that will provide a visual representation of everything in the data centers. “As we virtualize more, it will become more important to know what we have and how it’s physically deployed — where do the resources exist today, where were they yesterday?” Jacob Hall,Chief Architect at Wachovia says.
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