Discovery Assessment

Before embarking on any data management project we believe it is essential that an understanding of the current data storage environment, application requirements and capacity planning is undertaken.

Just as important at this stage is to understand the businesses SLO’s (Service level objectives) i.e. what the business expects or believes can be done and compare this to the current achievable SLA (service Level Agreement) This GAP analysis regularly highlights large difference between what Senior management expect and what can actually be delivered.

Alpha will engage with you to understand your business issues, future requirements and document the existing storage environment.

The exact information that will be discovered will depend on the type and size of the project but would usually include things such as your current;

• Network infrastructure and bandwidth utilisation
• Data storage environment
• Problems and issues
• Data protection & recovery environment
• Disaster Recovery (DR) environment and plans
• Type & amount of data stored (Structured, Semi Structure and Non Structured)

And agree future anticipated server and data growth, anticipated application environments and potential business requirements going forward.

There are also Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools that can provide you with detailed analysis including:

• Identifying hot spots in your storage infrastructure
• Identifying backup and restore issues
• Identifying which users and applications take up most disk space
• How much data is never used or orphaned
• How much data is not business critical
• Forecast for the future storage growth

By clearly understanding your environment and the business requirements we can provide you with recommendations to meet your specific needs.