Packaged Consulting Offerings

The following packaged consulting services are aimed at companies and organisations that are looking at virtualisation technologies in the data centre and are considering how VMware solutions would fit.

• vReadiness Assessment
• Server Consolidation Plan & Design
• P2V Jumpstart
• Presales

Presales is part of the Taupo engagement process and is free of charge and encompasses several meetings to enable our team to understand your business and technology challenges and ensures that we understand the problem before we propose any consulting time. This is also the time where we can provide references i.e. VMware, Cisco, reference clients and if required, arrange site visits to existing clients and partners.

Strategy & Roadmap Workshops

Taupo can deliver strategy & roadmap workshops for differing sizes of organisations. These bespoke workshops can span several days for large estates and would be delivered with a written report on current virtualisation position, defining a virtualisation strategy and the milestones in implementing that strategy.

During these customised workshop sessions, Taupo would also discuss what is needed to achieve your business objectives and also understand what you are looking to do in the future. The reason we do this is for several key financial and technical reasons, such as:

• Ensures any hardware investment in shared storage (SAN/NAS) is strategic cap-ex spend and doesn’t lead to a technology dead-end; especially if VMware SRM is planned in the next 3 years
• Can often reduce software licensing costs due to not needing Enterprise functionality
• Reduces the number of consultancy days required by reducing replication of tasks
• Ensures projects are broken down into manageable parts
• Provides a road map of what /if any software upgrades would add value
• Establishes what skill set transfer/ official training is needed

Please also note that if other VMware projects are planned we will also provide budgetary costs for these at this time and ensure any upgrade paths are achievable.

Project Definition Workshops

These workshop sessions are all about scoping the project and ensuring the technology will work in your environment. This includes looking at the network, SAN, AD dependencies. It is also at this stage that we establish the project plan and agree the resourcing, typically being a combination of Taupo and existing internal resource.

Consultancy

Consultancy is a core service provided by the Taupo team and can be purchased as either a project or by ordering a bank of days to be called off as required. Due to the nature of VMware projects Taupo often works closely with other suppliers who are specialised in some of the other disciplines required to deploy VMware successfully i.e. shared storage, Identity Management, Active Directory, Cisco (including Nexus) skills. By working in this way with your existing vertical specialist or one of Taupo’s partners, our consultants/instructors remain dedicated professionals in their field of expertise.

Most importantly all clients will be asked to sign the project off as complete or in larger projects agree that each phase is finished.

Continuous Health Check & Support

Unlike the troubleshooting work where we are often asked to resolve problems in a virtualised deployment, Taupo also offers proactive services delivered through quarterly and six monthly health check & review subscriptions.

The objective is to ensure that as the virtual infrastructure evolves, new applications are added, data is replicated and VMs deployed, that the infrastructure is still providing an agreed level of performance and cost savings. During these regular checks, the on-site consultant also discuss/implement:

• Patches
• Minor releases upgrades
• SAN performance statistics
• Road maps and new releases
• Any other VMware related issues
• Additional training requirements
• Further integration into your infrastructure i.e. Cisco Nexus
• Internal preparation for other VMware solution

For further information please call 0845 094 3366 or click here.