Do you really know how well your infrastructure is performing? Does it provide the performance you need to deliver new services and applications quickly? Is it using resources efficiently and helping you control costs? And, does it provide a level of security that protects your users and your data effectively?

If you have any doubts, a fitness test is essential. The results could provide you with a basis for improving performance or dealing with issues that could lead to more serious problems. The challenge with any fitness test is knowing what, how and when to measure, and how to obtain the data you need.

Insight and Understanding

An infrastructure assessment provides the tools and the data to evaluate fitness. When the assessment is carried out by specialists using automated tools, you can quickly get a precise picture of the health of your infrastructure.

The assessment should be integrated with a review of your strategic data center goals. Do you want to deliver news services faster, improve availability for users or reduce operating costs? Maybe, you are considering migration to the cloud and you want to create detailed requirements for the next deployment.  An objective infrastructure assessment gives you a benchmark that you can use to measure how well you are meeting your goals.

Setting Metrics

Strategic goals help you identify the most important metrics to include in your fitness test. If your organization is planning to increase mobility, for example, you need to be confident that your infrastructure can support uninterrupted access from any location. You may be planning to roll out new services. Does your infrastructure have the capacity and the flexibility to support the development and deployment of the new services?

How adaptable is your infrastructure? Can it scale easily or is it operating at full capacity? Can you identify underutilized capacity that could be used to meet changing demand or respond to new threats or business opportunities?  By benchmarking your assessment results against competitors or industry best practice, you can get a better understanding of your organization’s ability to compete using IT.

Keeping Data Up-to-Date

While traditional manual assessment tools can provide a view of your infrastructure at a certain point in time, you may need information more frequently. If uninterrupted access is a key metric, regular reports that provide an up-to-date picture at all times are essential.

That makes assessment tools like VTG’s ZENfra^TM important. They can reduce the complexity and risk of manual data capture by automating the collection of data from log files. ZENfra processes the log files and creates a database with the required information.

Maintain Fitness and Control

The tool supports fast, accurate infrastructure assessment with detailed analysis and reporting capabilities. ZENfra creates a variety of preset or customized reports that help you assess fitness and maintain control over your infrastructure at all times.

More information

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