A 100-user company in the mail and media distribution business approached Tardis for a refresh of its fifteen servers. The customer’s initial belief was that they were too small for a virtualised solution, but Tardis worked with them to investigate their options and found that a virtual solution could become a reality.

Tardis, having performed a server consolidation study on their existing environment, designed a highly available IBM®-based solution that consisted of two x3650 servers, the DS3400 SAN Storage and VMware Enterprise Software, with Tardis providing installation and migration services.

The customer’s new virtualised environment ended up costing less than a traditional one-for-one server replacement. It also freed up the company’s system administrator to spend less time on the servers and more on performing end user and desktop support, which in turn resulted not only a more productive system administrator, but also happier and more valuable end users.

There’s been no unscheduled downtime since the project’s inception and the company is so pleased with the results that it’s now considering expanding the virtualisation into other areas of the business.

Virtualisation – not just for the big end of town.

High performing, flexible and affordable, IBM’s ITS2007 gives your organisation – whatever its size – the ability to implement virtualisation efficiently and cost-effectively.

For mid-size organisations, the mid-range server (x3650 M2) and stand-alone tower server (x3500) feature quad-core processors, doubling performance of previous generations. Both have exceptional memory per core, allowing you to support more applications with less hardware. Purpose-built for stability and to keep mission-critical applications running, their redundant components reduce points of failure and light path diagnostics provide the required resilience.

For high-end requirements the x3850 M2 4U Rackmount Server featuring fourth generation IBM X-Architecture® chipset design enhancements delivers even more of the performance, balanced design and reliability that customers have come to expect. With 32 DIMM slots it has twice the memory availability of previous generations, as well as the reliability and availability to help reduce downtime and maintain data integrity.

To control costs and reduce your carbon footprint, the range is also environmentally friendly - all IBM ITS2007 servers minimise power consumption from both usage and cooling with features like Power Executive providing advanced control of energy consumption.

Easy to deploy or integrate and scalable to meet future growth, Tardis IBM ITS2007 range gives you all the flexibility you need; applications and memory can be added as demand requires, facilitating future upgrades. And, as always, Tardis’ services are also scalable, allowing you to choose the level of support that best fits your needs.

For further details, please call one of our specialist consultants on + 61 2 8870 9000 to discuss the ways that the IBM ITS2007 range could fulfil your organisation’s specific requirements.

Disaster recovery is an increasingly challenging area so when solutions break new ground it’s big news. What virtualisation is to traditional server environments, VMware Site Recovery Manager is to traditional business continuity solutions. This pioneering solution improves recovery management by:

• Simplifying creation and management of recovery plans

• Delivering centralised recovery plan management

• Automating complex manual recovery steps

• Integrating disaster recovery into your virtual data centre operating system

• Executing automated, non-disruptive testing of recovery plans

• Managing failover from data centres to recovery sites as well as between active sites that act as recovery sites for each other

• Assisting with planned failovers in data centre migrations

With VMware Center Site Recovery Manager, businesses can have quick, reliable, manageable and affordable failover and recovery, removing the risk from the process and meeting recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs) and compliance requirements.

If you’d like more information or want to discuss how VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager could benefit your business, please call Tardis on
+ 61 2 8870 9000.

Many thanks to everyone who attended our storage seminar in July – and thanks too, for your positive feedback on the seminar’s content.

In our comprehensive overview of storage solutions, we looked at XIV®, the new class of grid storage, at IBM TSM FastBack which provides continuous protection of Windows environments, we decoded the subject of disk encryption, demonstrating how you can secure your data at rest with the IBM DS5000 and we investigated the benefits of TPC, the data analysis and discovery solution. Tardis will be happy to discuss these topics if you couldn’t attend on the day.

Consistent with our aim of improving our customers’ businesses, we’ll be bringing you up-to-the-minute information on more timely topics in our forthcoming seminars. We’ll advise you of dates and times in future editions of TardisTalk.

Tardis Services Consulting offers a broad range of services to help align your business needs with the best technical solutions to make your business goals more achievable.

Consulting engagements vary from a focused one- to ten-day analysis looking at single items in an existing IT infrastructure to on-going coaching and long-term consulting on a one day per week/fortnight/month basis to achieve long term business and IT strategy alignment.

Our exceptional in-house knowledge, skills and expertise allow us to offer consulting services in many areas, including:

• Information technology strategy

• Enterprise architecture and design

• Disaster recovery (DRP)

• Business continuity (BCP)

• Software design

• Systems integration

• General consulting

Until Friday, October 30, we’re offering TardisTalk recipients a complimentary, no-obligation consulting engagement. We’ll come to your offices, discuss your organisation’s needs with you and offer our recommendations as to where you could benefit from our services.

To talk to one of our consultants, please call us on + 61 2 8870 9000 today to set up an appointment.

You’ve invested time and effort in virtualising your infrastructure, consolidating all your major application servers to a VMware farm and you’re now reaping the benefits of a consolidated environment.

Have you considered:

• VMware managed services tailored to fit your specific needs

• VMware support services

• VMware monitoring and health checks

Tardis Services offers them all. We have a great deal of experience in virtual environments and many satisfied clients, so if this is an area you’re considering, please call us anytime on + 61 2 8870 9000 to discuss your organisation’s environment and requirements.

As you virtualise your infrastructure you become more reliant on your shared storage infrastructure. This critical hardware layer can be the most neglected area of information technology systems in terms of maintenance and monitoring.

Tardis Services is offering TardisTalk readers a one-off shared storage health check on this crucial part of your operation. Our health check will:

• Provide audits of your physical infrastructure including firmware levels and hardware health

• Supply performance statistics and metrics on all devices in your fabrics

• Deliver a detailed report on storage and switching

• Offer recommendations on potential improvements

We can also provide this audit as an ongoing service in your storage monitoring maintenance contract – call us on
+ 61 2 8870 9000 to discuss your options.

Virtualising server fleets with IBM SAN Volume Controller has delivered big benefits to many businesses. Virtualising your storage environment can deliver similar improvements to your data and storage results.

Storage virtualisation enables you to:

• Increase storage utilisation with more flexible access to capacity

• Improve productivity of storage administrators by enabling management of heterogeneous storage systems using a common interface

• Improve application availability by insulating host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure

• Enable a tiered storage environment in which the cost of storage can be better matched to the value of data

• Enable advanced disaster recovery and high availability solutions

If you could use an improved storage environment talk to Tardis today about storage virtualisation – give us a call
on + 61 2 8870 9000.