A team of experts was assembled to analyze the 9 proposals from 7 vendors. They were Alan McConnell from Grand Rapids, MI, John Hagan from Norfolk, VA and Emad Hammoud from Centreville, VA. We created a scoring grid in a spreadsheet and set about the task.
Preliminary Questions: These points are general in nature, but reflect the attention paid by the responders,
- Did the proposals address the 4 questions asked in the RFQ? -- 3 did, 9 did not.
- Did we get Service Level Agreement information? -- 9 did, 0 did not
- Provide empty virtual servers and all resources in a cloud shared environment. We could then install everything on them until we matched our current environment. This is cheap solution on the cloud side, but extremely expensive to re-create our current servers on new equipment. There is a great probability that we might not be successful. -- 1 proposal offered this solution.
- Provide physical hardware and a VMWare virtual environment dedicated to our needs. We could copy our existing virtual machines into our dedicated environment and expect them to work. There are some disadvantages. Our physical environment is subject to physical failures such as a disk. The down time could be an issue. Also we are expected to manage infrastructure issues like networking from their firewall in and backups. We also have to monitor the hardware environment. -- 4 proposals offered this type of solution.
- Provide a VMWare virtual environment on shared physical resources. Again we could copy our existing virtual machines into our dedicated environment and expect them to work. We wouldn't need to monitor or manage the infrastructure. We could add more resources without worrying about downtime. -- 5 proposals offered this type of solution.
- Assistance with Cloud Migration. Do procedures, manuals, videos exist that provide guidance to the customer that enables the on-boarding process to be as smooth as possible? Our IT staff must agree to the strategy for moving. Operations need to continue with the least interruption possible. Orderly guidance here will reduce the effort and cost substantially. -- 2 proposals addressed this issue, 3 did not.
- Training for our IT staff in using the proposed environment. Do training materials, videos, manuals exist that will enable our IT staff to pick up their responsibilities in the new environment? Our operations must continue, applications need updating and generally we need to quickly understand how run things after migration. -- 2 proposals addressed this issue, 3 did not.
Our team has selected finalists as the proposals from VirtaCore and Vigilant Hosting. They are the most responsive to our RFQ. We are convinced that these vendors can take computers from any small to medium size organization and make them work on the cloud with all of the cloud advantages. Their assistance with migration and training will make the process smooth and painless. We will study these companies in more detail in the next post.
I would like to thanks my analysts and all of the vendors who participated in this RFQ project. The time and effort spent has been worthwhile.
