Haddon Hill Group's team of experts is dedicated to helping enterprise customers quickly implement private clouds in complex and highly secure environments. Our experience includes implementing several first-of-their-kind deployments in highly secure environments.
These implementations include a mix of:
- Custom deployable patterns with Hypervisor Editions created by HHG engineers,
- integration with Rational DevOps operational tooling for one-click automated custom application provisioning, and
- OS customization to meet customer-specific security and operational requirements.
IBM PureApplication System and PureApplication Service on SoftLayer can be quickly implemented as "drop-ins" to support stand-alone WebSphere development teams. However, the most value to enterprise customers is in the creation of enterprise-class private clouds. HHG maintains multiple Private Clouds on both VMware and pSeries, and our engineers can provide in-depth, live demonstrations to our clients' engineering teams, answering the detailed technical, operational and managerial questions that must be addressed to successfully implement cloud computing within a complex enterprise IT environment.
The IBM Cloud Orchestrator products and associated DevOps tooling such as UCDeploy will often be part of a hybrid cloud solution for complex organizations.
We can provide immediate customer-specific demonstration proofs of concept on our own infrastructure. HHG also has a Hybrid Cloud Quick Start package of à la carte services so that our clients can immediately implement hybrid clouds on IBM SoftLayer, or into their own data centers' existing VMware or PowerVM-based IT infrastructures (also on zSeries z/VM and zLinux) to immediately begin capturing the value of private cloud computing.
HHG à la carte Private Cloud Implementation Services
Discovery via Live Walk-throughs of Business, Engineering and Process Requirements/Constraints with Critical Success Factors
- Discover the customer's specific use cases via live walk-throughs on the HHG private cloud technologies instead of open-ended paper exercises.
- Identify critical stakeholder organizations, document the business engineering and process requirements, and enumerate critical success factors.
- Identify implementation constraints due to existing mandated engineering, operations or development standards/processes and describe opportunities for improvement based on implementation of a private cloud infrastructure.
- Initial Requirements and recommendations based on customer Discovery specifics, mapped and extended from HHG's typical Hybrid Cloud technical use-case portfolio.
- Quantify opportunities for improvement for input to the Financial Justification and Business Value Assessment.
Financial Justification
- Assist the client's IT finance group to project return on investment, including estimating total capital, labor and non-labor expenses to complete the Hybrid Cloud project and expected savings (extending the IBM Business Value Assessment format), as well as creating a presentation suitable for executive management.
Initial Design
- Document and design, in conjunction with the client's technical staff, the high-level deployment architecture suitable for sizing, procurement and subsequent detailed deployment planning for the hybrid cloud and all associated software products, describing a deployment model that integrates recommendations for the customer's IT infrastructure as well as IT Service Management processes for the hybrid cloud.
- Create User, System and support-centric use cases with a RACI chart to delineate organizational roles and responsibilities, as well as provide customer specific hands-on initial training validating the use cases and RACI chart on HHG's hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Iterative Builds
- Create an iterative rollout plan, along with the initial Engineering Patterns and deployments, and customer-specific install configurations, tooling, scripts or security to realize deployable patterns.
- Based on live review on the cloud prototype, agree on the customer-specific architectural Topologies and Engineering configurations.
- Create the customer-specific Iteration One artifacts from the above design and review activities, including the design and creation of necessary ITSM, process and NFR artifacts, including security, best practice middleware product patterns, monitoring, CMDB registration, agent deployment, as well as Dev Ops automation for application provisioning.
- Create client-specific custom deployable patterns where required and where they provide business value.
- Based on the above, create client-specific patterns and images that will be deployed by the IBM Cloud technologies.
IT Process Design, Documentation and Knowledge Transfer
- Provide on-site or remote training suitable to each stakeholder role to inform decision-making by stakeholders during business requirements and design sessions.
- Design and document the implementation and integration plans, suitable for immediate execution and knowledge transfer to the customer, taking into account the client's IT Service Management, compliance and operational controls.
Third-Party and Custom Application Hypervisor Creation and Integration
- Integrate third-party applications into the client's Hybrid Cloud provisioning capability, including creation of non-IBM Hypervisor images that can be dispensed by the IBM cloud technologies.
Rollout Plan across Client's Environments
- Create the technical implementation plan for actual IBM Cloud Technology deployment, including the configuration of all target environment machines to the appropriate operating system and middleware release levels and fix packs.
- Optionally, during the rollout, HHG can provide operational support of the SoftLayer infrastructure for the customer.
- Document the detailed migration Work Breakdown Structure/ project plan that meets the requirements, implements the architecture and is consistent with the client's policies, procedures, and methodologies.
- Document the deployment risks, issues, and considerations that must be mitigated, including skills assessment, staff training and maintainability.
- Iterate the Customer's new Hybrid Cloud infrastructure based on new knowledge gained during the course of the early iterations.
- Add additional enterprise or cloud integration (e.g. new workloads, new IBM software products, analytics, realtime security, platform APIs, etc.).
- Ongoing mentoring of original or new client members of the project team.
- Option: Full documentation and runbooks.