The document discusses Application Landscaping, which is a process for classifying applications into business tiers based on their non-functional requirements. The process involves identifying representative applications, determining key requirements, scoring the applications, and grouping them into service classes (e.g. platinum, gold, silver). This provides a standardized way to deliver storage services and reduces custom requests. The deliverables include documentation of the process, application scoring results, service class definitions, and optional additional analyses.

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APPLICATION LANDSCAPING
All applications are critical if you ask the teams
that administer them
Mainline Information Systems | Storage and Data Services Practice
The fundamental promise is that if that if the storage and backup infrastructure teams knew the wants and needs of applications team, they would deliver them in
exchange for an ongoing partnership to optimize and streamline those solutions over time. Without this partnership, infrastructure teams can’t be proactive designing
for workloads, planning for capacity, investing in enabling technologies or prioritizing mission critical applications and optimizing over time as requirements change.
Application Landscaping is a process of classifying applications into business tiers
Our deliverable includes…
• Detailed step by step description of that process
• Results included within the worksheet used to calculate the score
for each application in scope and the master list of nonfunctional
requirements selected from to use in your score card
• Detailed business tier descriptions based only on the resulting scores
• Business tiers mapped into service classes
• Storage architecture definitions for each service class based on scoring
results
• Optional: If data rationalization in scope then data placement
recommendations, capacity estimates for each service class, data
residency/retention policies
• Optional: If service catalog is also in scope then service classes and
scoring results are included into the service catalog for storage and
backup
• Optional: If Data Storage/Protection Design is also in scope the three or
so storage architectures are illustrated day one after implementation and
at 12 months and 36 months
• Service Features
• Ownership of the application landscaping process
• Application priority and clear wants and needs for each application
• Three preliminary storage architectures required to address the defined
business tiers that the sample applications fit into
• Facilitated with a business consultant and a storage expert
Service Benefits
• Reduces unique and custom service requests to a finite number of
solutions for customers providing effective implementation
• Provides a rational and well established process to proactively offer a set
of services as models and packages
• Improves internal customer satisfaction and reduces storage and backup
teams cycle time
• Converges infrastructure and application teams to focus on the same set
of global requirements in order to provide the most effective solution
• Reduces over and under delivery “right sizing” the environment and
related costs
• Ensures a requirements driven architecture
The eight step process…
1 Identify a representative sample of applications remotely with client
stakeholders
Install a lightweight reporting tool (optional) remotely before onsite
visit
Map infrastructure (LUNs, Ports, Shares, VMs/LPARs/Servers) to
applications (optional)
Within a series or onsite workshops, determine the 20 non-functional
requirements out of 40 possible to build the score card to be used to
rate application priority
Pilot the score card and iterate until intended results are achieved
Score all in scope applications with the validated score card for final
results
Create (Mainline) the service class definitions with the non functional
requirements offering a preliminary service catalog with those
requirements designating the participating applications as a platinum,
gold, silver application.
Mainline to perform knowledge transfer to score the rest and future
applications into service classes.
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Next Steps include defining the future data storage/protection future environment and engineering a complete service catalog marring Application Landscaping results
with the future storage environment together and building a new service request process that only needs to know what application is requesting storage, which server
needs the storage and any options that service class has if any.
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Application Landscaping is part of a larger storage assessment methodology
Mainline Information Systems | Storage and Data Services Practice
All ten capabilities are key components
in the larger Mainline Storage
Assessment Methodology. The key
synergies are listed below...
• Application Landscaping with
Infrastructure Data Analysis allows
Mainline to score applications and
group them into business tiers and build
service classes based on the objective
data alongside client workshop input.
Without it, data rationalization talks about
applications in scope and not as part of a
class of service. With service classes, data
profiles of each application can be mapped
into service classes
• Service Catalog with both Infrastructure
Data Analysis and Application Landscaping
allow service classes as the columns
and our customers to choose the finite
ways clients will request storage vs 100%
custom requests.
• Storage Financials with service catalog
allow Mainline to establish TCO, ROI
and CBA while mapping the TCO to the
HW, SW and services components in the
service catalog. Also with Gap Analysis
TCO can be established.
Again each capability in the DNA chart
can be delivered alone but understand the
relationships to ensure we can achieve you
goals.
EXPERTISE YOU CAN TRUST
• Eighty-five storage experts skilled in storage solutions from every major vendor
• Decades of industry expertise in designing, implementing and optimizing storage
solutions for environments of all sizes
• Services covering product implementations, complex data migrations, information
lifecycle management, storage assessments, and advanced archiving and
protection strategies
• Residencies and managed storage services to improve storage operations and
reduce operating cost
Next Steps:
Contact your Account Executive, or you can reach us at
StorageServices@mainline.com.
For more information on our storage services, go to
http://mainline.com/storage-transformation.
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STORAGE STRATEGY
WORKSHOP
A facilitated and managed approach to
defining infrastructure strategy.
INFRASTRUCTURE
APPLICATION
LANDSCAPING
Facilitate infrastructure and
application teams working together to
build a score card, score application
requirements and agree on the future
onboarding process.
ENTERPRISE STORAGE
ASSESSMENT
Define current and target data storage
and protection environment, identify the
gaps, and provide an actionable
roadmap of recommendations. The
core of any storage assessment.
DATA STORAGE AND
PROTECTION ARCHITECTURE
DESIGN
Define and illustrate both your current and future
environment, including both logical and physical
diagram modeling growth over 12, 24 and 36
months by data center.
STORAGE INVESTMENT ANALYSIS
Define and enable a loaded unit cost of storage
supporting showbacks/chargebacks through the
development of TCO, ROI and CBA.
SERVICE READINESS
ASSESSMENT
Use Mainline’s scoring tool to establish a service
delivery baseline and compare against your industry
average. Use to measure improvement.
SERVICE CATALOG DESIGN
Organize your infrastructure services into a catalog of
your choosing based on strategy, data requirements
and agreements with application teams by service
class, or build a starting point to update as you
learn more.
INFRASTRUCTURE DATA
ANALYSIS
Using an agentless, cloud-based
Storage Resource Management tool,
define valid and invalid data,
recommend residency and retention
policies, and classify application
data/servers into service tiers.
PROCESS ENGINEERING
Document and detail ITIL-based
process definitions within an
IT-based process reference model,
starting with storage and backup
processes and building an operational
guide delivering auditable, repeatable
one-way-to-implement infrastructure.
ARCHIVE AND COMPLIANCE
Establish a Data Storage Archive infrastructure
based on the application data
characteristics to be archived and the
regulations that guide our client's
industry.