The Need for Assessment Tools

Whilst Virtualisation and Cloud products and services provide simplicity to your infrastructure, every organisation’s infrastructure is different and every organisation has its own short medium and long-term strategic objectives, which its IT infrastructure must be fit to support.

Castle’s suite of assessment tools provide the peace of mind that when you take the decision to move to one of these Virtualisation technologies, it’s right for your organisation based on your incumbent infrastructure and your organisational goals.

Server Capacity Planning

This is the first step in server virtualisation. An agent collects statistical data over a one month period to determine peaks and troughs in server utilisation and suitability of existing server hardware for deployment in a virtualised infrastructure. Castle analyses the data and provides a report which models optimum infrastructure designs to meet objectives.

Power Savings Calculator

See how much you can save by undertaking server consolidation, with Castle’s own unique calculator. Just type in the number of servers you have for an indicative cost and power saving. You can also see what level of interest free loan you might be able to apply for from Carbon Trust, if you organisation is eligible.

vDesktop Readiness Assessment

This service will give you clear visibility of consolidation opportunities of your existing physical desktop infrastructure. Castle’s experienced consultants assess your current desktop landscape to determine your potential virtual desktop options.

Built around the end-user experience, it determines the suitability of the organisation’s Desktop estate, the organisations objectives and considers the technologies currently employed to provide a written report outlining best-practice solutions to meet the requirements.

Virtualisation Environment Audit

Nearly all organisations see vast performance improvements by using Virtualisation. However, for many their performance could be further improved and better utilisation made of the impressive functionality available, by optimising the set-up and utilising best practice.

Castle’s Virtual Environment Audit (VEA) is a unique way for organisations to ensure they are achieving all they can from their investment by ensuring their virtualised environment meets with
the latest best-practise guidelines and that all of the facilities available from virtualisation are being fully utilised.

Hosting Readiness Assessment

Castle’s Hosting Readiness Assessment collates the information required to determine the suitability of the infrastructure to operate in a hosted environment. This involves reviewing the existing use of IT and reviews what applications will be hosted and their compatibility, what server specification would be required, no. of users and remote sites accessed (from home, multiple offices), network devices and set-up and bandwidth requirements to achieve good performance levels. The report will provide a summary of existing infrastructure, summary of proposed hosted infrastructure and recommendations.

DataGuard Replication Readiness Assessment

Castle’s Replication Readiness Assessment is a process that collates the performance of the broadband communication links at your site, both upload and download performance, and tracks the incremental data change per day before calculating the expected bandwidth requirements and time to replicate each night based on average incremental data changes. This service includes Castle installing the Castle DataGuard Appliance software on the server to collate the statistics.

Further Information

To find out more about these and other Virtualisation products & services, please call Castle and ask for our Technical Sales team on 0845 230 1314. Alternatively you can email us your questions to info@castle-cs.com