Start with OLA
The PolarSeven Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) is a Certified Amazon Web Services) AWS Partner led engagement that evaluates your on-premise Windows environment to define an optimised compute and Cloud infrastructure that will reduce your operational and licensing costs when moving from on-premise to the Cloud.
Specifically, a PolarSeven OLA will help you:
Right size your resources
Reduce costs
Exploit flexible Windows licensing options
Right Sizing
The PolarSeven OLA process discovers workloads in your on-premises environment and builds an inventory of your compute resources. Our tooling-based approach will help you determine your actual utilisation requirements to help optimally select the lowest-cost AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance size and type for each of your Windows workloads. We can then use this data to determine the right blend of on-demand and spot instances, dedicated hosts, savings plan, and other options tailored to your environment.
Cost Reduction
You can leverage the recommendations from a PolarSeven OLA to get the most value from your existing licensing entitlements by configuring your instances to require fewer licenses while still maintaining highly performant applications. You can take advantage of the elasticity of the Cloud whilst avoiding over-provisioning third-party licensing.
Exploit flexible licensing options
You can use the results of a PolarSeven OLA to avoid unnecessary Windows licensing costs by modelling different licensing scenarios with license-included or Bring Your Own License (BYOL) instances to meet the needs of your business. Flexible licensing options enable you to drive seasonal workloads and support agile experimentation, as well as to model dedicated environments, so you only pay for what you need.
How it works
The OLA process has four simple steps:
Scope the Workloads
Collect the Data
Analyse the Data
Plan your next steps
Scope the Workloads
As well as identifying the servers and applications that are appropriate for Cloud migration we review all your current Windows licensing arrangements. This information is required as one of the main objectives is to minimise the cost of those licenses in the Cloud.
Collect the Data
The required data is collected easily and at a very granular level using the AWS Application Discovery service.
Using discovery agents installed on your servers (and/or Virtual Machines), the AWS Application Discovery Service collects configuration, usage, and behaviour data from your servers. It collects detailed server specification data, hardware configuration, performance data, and details of running processes and network connections.
Analyse the Data
This data can then be exported and analysed in Excel or other bespoke tools to help you better understand your workloads and provide an estimate of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of running on AWS.
The data is tagged and grouped into applications to help organise AWS migration planning. In addition, this data is also available in AWS Migration Hub, where you can migrate the discovered servers and track their progress as they get migrated to AWS.
The data can be used in association with Migrator Evaluator which helps build a data-driven business case for AWS Cloud Migration. The output includes a business case report, complete with exec summary, a breakdown of costs, the all important licensing scenarios and recommended next steps.
Once you are convinced of the advantages of moving to the Cloud, you can start planning the journey in earnest. This might involve building the business case, or nominating an application to serve as a migration proof of concept.
Plan your Next Steps
Whatever your next step, PolarSeven is ready to help you take it. Book a free consultation to understand what your best options are.
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