Infrastructure assessments cookbook: ingredients, techniques, and secret sauces

All IT managers need to answer two very important questions: how to use existing infrastructure most effectively and how to adapt it to changing business requirements.

Information about IT infrastructure components has to be collected according to a proven model, structured in a demanding, detailed level, and compared with other data in predefined scales. Infrastructure assessments are usually implemented as a complex project and require considerable effort and time. The key point for such projects is a methodology; a clear explanation of all aspects of data collection, analysis, and interpretation of results is crucial.

There are three main types of infrastructure assessments: Micro, Macro, and Pointed.

In this Knowledge Sharing article, Vasily Pantyukhin covers all of the most important development stages of each of these assessment methodologies. He considers structured problem statement, as well as high and low level design and also explores common evaluation, transformation, and classification methods of different types of quantitative and qualitative data. Description of project delivery phases is oriented on best practice approaches. Comprehensive examples of different assessments in storage environment help to clarify the entire methodology development process from beginning to end.

While the article doesn’t give you ready-to-use universal recipes, it attempts to describe how to develop your own assessments using essential data collection and analysis ingredients. Also, the article offers advice on how to apply ‘secret sauces’ of valuable presentation techniques that highlight results in your final report.

Awarded 2nd place in the 2012 Knowledge Sharing Competition, this article will be useful to solution architects and analysts who deliver assessments for the purpose of strategic and tactical development of IT infrastructure.

Read the article >>