Managing IT in a crisis: - The
Changing business requirements
We are facing a challenging economic landscape that seems to increase in uncertainty on a daily basis. The recent failure within the
banking system, coupled with a global downturn has forced a review of financial and operational activities within many organisations.
Governance at company level is under serious scrutiny and with it a drive to reduce unnecessary expenditure, cut costs and to finally
realise a frequently abused term in business - “to do more with less”.
The IT function is continually asked to drive down the cost of providing IT infrastructure and services. This article aims to give you a
glimpse of how working with Computacenter and using HP Systems Insight Manager and associated software modules can drive down the
operational cost of managing one of the largest enterprise IT footprints, the x86/x64 server environment (Intel based servers).
With the lower capital purchase cost (in relation to mainframe or enterprise UNIX platforms) and relative ease of deployment, the x86/x64
server environment has quickly grown to become the most popular server processing environment within organisations. However, the
initially small footprint of x86/x64 servers has grown to become a vast, difficult to manage, underutilized and expensive to maintain IT
processing estate. With the drive to reduce energy now a key topic and operational management costs regarded as a major operational
expenditure, the recent economic downturn is forcing widescale reviews to drive down excess financial spend.
System Management Activities
The current landscape has invigorated the systems management arena. Effective management of IT Infrastructure assets is required more
than ever as business transformation activities seek hard data to reduce the customer “time to benefit”. The benefits of understanding the IT
estate, optimising it based on accurate real-time information, upgrading it in line with business activities or future projections and
automating it to enable self healing or “lights out” operation have been frequently published. However now the need is real as unnecessary
human intervention is not only costly but time consuming.
We have finally reached the chapter where resilient systems that are optimised in operation by automation are actively sought by
organisations and being implemented at an accelerated pace.
It is frequently stated “what isn’t measured, can’t be managed”. Whilst not totally valid, management activities based on anecdotes or
ambiguity certainly lack the accuracy of those based on empirical evidence. Better still if the data derived is secure, centrally available,
capable of being used as input data for other systems and can be used as much for prevention as cure, the benefits available are immense.
The scale of the management activity is also important. Hardware infrastructure with the potential to physically fail (requiring replacement)
can be managed by a different approach to applications or business processes. A hardware failure event can deliver clear triggers with
clarity around the component (or components) failing, whereas a business process or application underpinned failure can hide the root cause
below numerous dependant layers.
To this end all management is not equal and a detailed understanding of the outcomes expected of the management activity is
fundamental before any management framework or solution is formulated.
HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) is an award winning element level infrastructure management environment supplied at no charge
with HP server products. It excels at monitoring and managing hardware events in a both reactive and predictive manner (figure 1).
Whilst the functionality of HP SIM can be extended via the additional of optional software components it should be noted for enterprise grade
business process or application monitoring a service management framework like HP Openview would be the ideal companion and utilise
data discovered by HP SIM. For those desiring rigid structure or who are bound by rigid SLAs ITSM best practice frameworks like ITIL assist
greatly by providing a library of management tools and techniques with known measures and outcomes. But even without the use of end to
end ITSM and the investment required to implement it, substantial
benefits can be realised by utilising off the shelf infrastructure and
software components from the industry’s leading vendors. HP Systems
Insight Manager (HP SIM) is grouped firmly in that category and enables
standard setting infrastructure management at an extremely low entry
point.
Do nothing is not an option
Historically, substantial investments in time and money were required to
deliver systems management to IT infrastructures. Products like HP
Openview, IBM Tivoli and BMC were deemed to be the only way to obtain
the real time systems related information needed to proactively manage
systems and make informed upgrade decisions. However HP Systems
Insight Manager has changed the market by presenting continually
evolving functionality within a product supplied at no charge for HPs
Figure 1: HP Systems Insight Manager – Summary Screen enterprise rack and bladesystem ranges.
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