Verizon Business intros virtualization services suite

Verizon’s new professional services suite includes:

• Server Consolidation Assessment – Verizon Business analyzes the current environment to determine how to consolidate the data center infrastructure. “We would perform an assessment that will tell them what they can visualize and what the return on investment would be,” Gregory said.
• Server Consolidation Design – Verizon Business uses the assessment and then reviews business and technical requirements to design the new consolidated environment solution.
• Secure Virtualization Assessment & Design – The approach combines the first two services and adds a security assessment of the proposed new virtualized environment. “Security is a very important part of any virtualization process,” Gregory said.
• Virtualization Design – This option is aimed at companies with greenfield applications that want to have virtualized data centers from the outset, but aren’t  consolidating existing infrastructure, Gregory said.
• Virtualization Build – The Verizon Business team actually builds and implements virtualization including installation of hardware, software and networking.
• Virtualization Migration – These services aid the enterprise in migrating its applications and data to the new virtualized environment, Gregory said.
• Virtualization Deployment Review – The review makes sure “the customer or customer’s vendor has implemented a new virtualization environment correctly and makes sure it meets best practices,” Gregory said.

“The services can be purchased separately or collectively,” Gregory said. “Customers can come to us at any point in the life cycle and get us to help on one piece or all of it.”

The economic downturn is prompting greater interest in virtualization as enterprises seek to stretch their capital dollars and avoid higher monthly recurring costs, Gregory said.