views of disparate systems to provide insights and reporting capabilities into the Client’s IT assets
tracker tables enabling the running of multiple projects concurrently
Data stored in the tracking tool
Client Problem
MHC’s Tier 1 Investment Banking Client had a large complicated compute estate with no tooling to analyse the estate for possible optimisation opportunities, such as: virtualisations, Technical Roadmap Compliance (TRC) of hardware and software, resizing to match compute or memory requirements, etc. Subsequently, the Client was not able to track the progress of its projects.
MHC Approach
MHC created a data warehouse which took daily feeds from the Client’s core Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and many other supporting systems, including: auto discovery tools, performance monitoring agents, hardware maintenance and running costs, along with various ticketing systems.
Using this data, a database view was created that determined for each server and database in the portfolio, how optimised the asset was and what remediation steps were required to fully optimise the asset. The existing running costs of the asset versus the running costs of the optimised asset were also calculated. This information allowed MHC to quickly identify optimisation opportunities and to build a bespoke business case to demonstrate the cost savings once optimised. The new data warehouse was also designed to store historic data to allow trending information to be utilised.
As a direct result of MHC’s work, the following value adds were achieved:
Project Outcome
The creation of the data warehouse and the online tracking application meant that many optimisation projects could be run concurrently seamlessly by the Client. As all of the data was centralised, project reporting could also be centralised and automated, ensuring consistency in approach and style.
The tooling also allowed a large programme to run with a small PMO, allowing the budget to be spent on achieving objectives rather than governance. The optimisation data and tracking tool have since been adopted by other project teams as can be used to track any infrastructure related work.
