With the growth of IT as a strategic business function, many businesses find themselves facing server sprawl across their infrastructure. Most of these servers are under 15% utilized, meaning IT organizations are investing large sums of money in assets they barely use.

Meanwhile, IT departments need to power, cool, house, and manage all these servers, as well as physically house them. Finally, much of IT's time is spent on maintenance—at a cost of eight times that of the server itself—handcuffing technical talent rather than reallocating them to strategic initiatives.

The answer? Virtualize. By consolidating servers, automating processes and simplifying infrastructure management, an IT organization can benefit from substantial up-front and ongoing savings.

Virtualization solutions can help an enterprise increase their IT infrastructure resource utilization through decreased complexity and management. These solutions can also enable the roll-out of new applications with less risk and lower platform costs.

Server consolidation alone can create significant savings by eliminating the need to buy additional server hardware, as well as costly add-ons such as storage area network connections and air conditioning units. Server consolidation also has a powerful positive impact on electricity costs, while minimizing the data center space needed to house the servers. That’s good news for any enterprise with a serious “Green IT” initiative.

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The Lighthouse Advantage

Certified in many key virtual infrastructure technologies, the Lighthouse Virtualization Group can design and implement virtualization solutions to help you build a secure, scalable, and cost effective information environment.

Lighthouse is a leading provider of Virtual Infrastructure technologies and services to small and medium size firms as well as global enterprises. By working in conjunction with our other services—such as storage, content management, security, and IT compliance—Lighthouse helps organizations utilize virtualization technology to solve common IT challenges in new and dynamic ways.

By engaging Lighthouse early in your virtualization project, you instantly tap into years of virtualization experience. Our team has delivered highly successful virtualization projects for top companies throughout the nation.

Lighthouse has established partnerships with the very best hardware and software vendors like IBM, NetApp and VMware. We are committed to helping our customers evaluate all potential virtualization solutions, including the optimization of all current IT assets. This approach, combined with our proven engagement methodology, enables us to develop and deliver cost-effective virtualization services and solutions in the following areas:

• Infrastructure Optimization
• Infrastructure Automation
• Infrastructure Management
• Infrastructure Continuity

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Infrastructure Optimization

MINIMIZE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP; IMPROVE APPLICATION AVAILABILITY, SECURITY AND SCALABILITY; AND STREAMLINE IT MANAGEMENT.

Lighthouse’s Infrastructure Optimization services helps customers minimize hardware and operational costs while ensuring their IT infrastructure always has the capacity to meet demand. By dividing resources into virtualized resource pools that can be dynamically and automatically mapped to physical hardware, IT organizations can move beyond simple server consolidation and containment to a truly shared IT infrastructure.

Lighthouse can help you create a self-optimizing IT infrastructure by unifying discrete hardware resources to create a shared dynamic platform, while delivering built–in availability, security and scalability to applications.

Through our straightforward methodology of assessment, design and implementation, Lighthouse can:

• Minimize total cost of ownership by consolidating hardware, increasing utilization, and lowering power consumption.
• Improve application availability, security, and scalability by migrating virtual machines across physical servers and storage arrays.
• Streamline IT management through live migration, provisioning, capacity management, and automated patching, all from a single console.

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Infrastructure Automation

FREE UP VALUABLE RESOURCES WITH PRODUCTS AND SERVICES THAT AUTOMATE YOUR VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE.

The majority of IT’s time and budget is spent on performing basic operations to keep things up and running. Infrastructure automation allows all stakeholders to free up valuable time previously wasted on repetitive tasks, and focus on higher value-add activities that translate directly into dollars and cents.

Once your virtual infrastructure is up and running, Lighthouse’s experts can help you with products and services that allow you to set up wizard-driven processes and templates to deploy new virtual machines instantly. Or perhaps you need to schedule tasks and alerts to improve your responsiveness to business needs, allowing you to prioritize actions that need urgent attention.

Lighthouse can also help you automate routine management tasks and monitor performance and utilization of physical servers and the virtual machines on which they run with detailed reporting on CPU, memory and I/O metrics.

Your virtual environment should also dynamically allocate and balance computing resources. Let Lighthouse show you how to continuously monitor utilization across resource pools, and intelligently allocate available resources among virtual machines according to business needs.

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Infrastructure Management

GET GREATER FLEXIBILITY, RELIABILITY, EFFICIENCY AND SECURITY MANAGING DESKTOPS AND APPLICATIONS FROM THE DATACENTER.

Remote sites such as regional offices, retail stores and bank branches present unique challenges for IT organizations. Complexity, inadequate infrastructure and lack of resources can make it difficult to deliver consistent and scalable IT services to these remote sites. Virtual-ization is a great way to address these issues.

Lighthouse’s infrastructure management solutions help you deliver personalized virtual desktops to any device with the benefits of centralized management. Our solutions allow you to run virtual desktops in the datacenter while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data on any device. Get greater flexibility, reliability, and security managing desktops and applications from the datacenter.

Key benefits of Lighthouse’s virtualization infrastructure management solutions:

• Lower costs by centralizing management, administration and resources.
• Increase security by moving data from desktop devices into the datacenter.
• Ensure always-on availability and recover quickly from disasters.
• Reduce IT hardware and operating costs for servers and desktops.

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Infrastructure Continuity

Reduce the risk of costly downtime, while simplifying the complexity of the solutions themselves.

Can your business afford any disruption of IT services? Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings with it considerable costs. While disasters and unplanned interruptions get the big headlines, planned downtime for hardware maintenance and backups is the cause of the majority of service downtime.

Basic data protection is one of the most critical elements of data center management. Problems like storage failure, server failure, and plain old user error all cause data loss. Backup and recovery of your systems needs to be fast, flexible, and easy—without taking critical resources away from your systems.

Lighthouse’s infrastructure continuity solutions reduce the risk of costly downtime, while simplifying the complexity of the solutions themselves. Our virtualization solutions automate the recovery process and eliminate the complexity of managing and testing recovery plans.

So imagine being able to recover any machine, not just specific duplicate hardware. Hardwareindependence in your data center, where any physical server can be the recovery target for your virtual servers, makes fast recovery the norm. Reduce your hardware costs and your maintenance budget. Even if you haven’t virtualized your production servers, virtualized servers for your disaster recovery give you greater simplicity, reliability, and cost savings.

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Experience

The most experienced virtualization team in the Northeast The Lighthouse Virtualization Group has nearly a decade of experience assessing, designing and implementing enterprise virtualization solutions. Our dedicated team of professionals has worked across multiple industries and public sector environments. In addition to their practical experience, our consultants have achieved the highest level of virtualization and related certifications from VMware, NetApp and IBM. These certifications ensure that our professionals can design, install, configure, and support virtualization solutions in even the most complex enterprise environments.

Come experience the latest virtualization solutions At the heart of Lighthouse Computer Services’ Rhode Island headquarters is one of the most advanced IT development and testing labs in the Northeast United States. The Lighthouse Technology Innovation Center, a multi-million dollar integrated hardware and software laboratory, allows customers a hands-on look at the latest technologies, and offers a glimpse at how they can reduce the cost and complexity of information technology. Please schedule a visit to the Technology Innovation Center for live demonstrations of the latest virtualization solutions from VMware, NetApp and IBM. Our technicians will be happy to model and provide test drives for a variety of customized solutions.

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For more information or to schedule a no-cost initial consultation, please contact info@lighthousecs.com or call 401-334-0799.