---
# source: src/content/services/en/datacenter-lifecycle.md
# route:  /en/services/datacenter-lifecycle/
title: Datacenter Lifecycle
group: consulting
audience: [enterprise, provider]
order: 8
tags: [architecture, migration, monitoring]
vendors: [hpe, vmware, lenovo]
summary: Check the state of the infrastructure once or twice a year, validate it against best practice, and implement the recommendations if you want.
photoNeed: "A working session with a customer: a whiteboard with a real diagram, or two people over a laptop across a table"
stub: false
draft: false
---

## What the service does

We check the state of your infrastructure and validate it against best practice, including
analysis of installed software and firmware levels with update recommendations. The output
is a status report with the current state and the recommendations that follow from it.

## Why it recurs

Because a one-off check only says how things stood on one day. The lifecycle service is the
proactive part of our operations services and has two pieces.

**LifeCycle Service:** once a year an update of the infrastructure, software, firmware and
drivers, with a compatibility check beforehand. Plus once a year the installation of a
critical patch for VMware, Veeam, HPE, Lenovo, IBM or Scality.

**SmartCheck Service:** a monthly check of the systems with a capacity and utilisation
check, and we keep the task list with the recommendations. Once a year a technology update
on what is new in the products in use. A technical account manager coordinates technical
requests around changes and incidents and helps open support tickets with the vendors.

It starts with an onboarding: exchange and documentation of contacts, system documentation,
IP addresses, passwords and remote access. If we did not build the infrastructure, a health
check is part of the onboarding.

## What the service covers

The same six categories as the health check: storage systems, SAN, backup, servers, server
virtualization and client virtualization, with the product list that sits there.

For the analysis itself we use InfoSight on the HPE side. It evaluates product usage data
automatically and checks it against known problems, weaknesses and security gaps. On the
VMware by Broadcom side we use VCF Checker, the Health Analyzer and Invar, which the Health
Check page describes.

For systems at the end of their lifecycle you get an offer for their replacement, matched to
the state the analysis showed.

## How this differs from Health Check

The Health Check ends with the report. With the lifecycle service the annual update and the
monthly check are part of it: our engineers make sure that the findings which would sit in a
health check report actually get worked off.

Not all of it can be done by an external engineer. Some tasks depend on access, on approvals
or on decisions that have to be taken inside your organisation, and we name those as such.
What is in our hands, we take on.

That difference sounds small and is the decisive one in practice: reports nobody works
through accumulate, and the estate degrades anyway.