Virtualisation is seen as a fundamental enabling technology for consolidation, allowing each server to be much more efficient utilized and giving more flexibility to the infrastructure. Organizations are rapidly evaluating and implementing virtualisation as they look to further consolidate and reduce the hardware footprint in their IT environment. Together consolidation and virtualisation are said to produce these benefits with nothing more than a small one-time effort of some time and money, but can you believe the hype?

While consolidation can certainly bring a number of benefits to organisations, it will take more than just an afternoon to ensure that your consolidation and virtualisation projects are truly successful.

As far too many IT managers will tell you, a poorly-planned project will have your executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and IT in the hot seat to quickly undo all the effort that went into the project in the first place.

This Riverbed white paper lays out five steps to successful IT consolidation and virtualisation projects.

While you’ll still be doing the hard work of actually implementing the new infrastructure, following these steps will enable you to make sure that you’ve covered all the issues in order to ensure that your organisation experiences the full benefits of IT consolidation.

Contents:
- Mapping out a successful IT consolidation and virtualisation strategy
- Step 1: Lay out a change and risk management strategy
- Step 2: Develop a plan for resiliency
- Step 3: Test (and improve) branch office performance
- Step 4: Architect a forward-looking infrastructure plan
- Step 5: Plan a phased roll-out