McDATA, a provider of data access solutions, has
launched four professional services offerings, designed to help
customers justify, plan, deploy and optimise their IT
environment
Intended in the main to simplify life for mainframe
administrators, the new service offerings will help IT departments
who are faced with the difficult challenge of meeting strict data
retention and protection demands, while continuing to drive down
operational costs.
McDATA sees opportunities in IT organisations looking at FICON
(for Fibre connections) migrations and expansions to provide
cost-effective performance. It believes that current industry
standard management tools do not always provide the level of
detailed metrics required to ensure an optimised storage
environment, forcing customers to make “best guess” decisions.
In addition, McDATA say that IT infrastructure administrators
don’t always have the information they need to determine when or
how to add capacity or upgrade infrastructure to achieve the
desired result. The company says its new tool-based services are
specifically designed to meet the needs of such customers by
providing a more granular operational window into the environment,
helping companies analyse and plan new FICON deployments more
effectively.
The professional services offerings include mainframe
infrastructure ROI analysis to allow customers to understand the
benefits and financial return of a FICON technology migration,
upgrade or expansion before committing to the investment; a
mainframe storage I/O healthcheck to give customers detailed
metrics about how their storage infrastructure is performing and
identify opportunities to optimise performance; and infrastructure
ESCON to FICON migration implementation services.