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Version 16 Feb 25 2011

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There is pressure on all parts of IT Operations to become more efficient. It’s not necessarily “cut costs” – it’s often more “support more people and more business with the same number of people”. There are also mergers, acquisitions and divestitures going on. And there is probably a data center consolidation project and an app rationalization project ongoing too.

And there is pressure to “do things faster” – move the latest drop of an agile developed app into production faster, provision and change services faster (e.g. private cloud), and flex capacity faster in response to changing business needs (both up and down).

And there is increasing compliance legislation too.

And while all this is going on, we must ensure that the reliability of applications remains constant, particularly when lots of changing are going on.

And if you use HP’s Software for IT Operations, what can you expect?

Be more efficient: automated release, provisioning and change will fewer staff doing administration. Better availability and performance management will mean fewer staff required to solve problems. And automated compliance monitoring and remediation will also save on people costs.

Get results faster: automation means a faster roll-out from development to production. Automated provisioning and change has the same result. Better availability and performance management means problems get fixed faster.

Be trusted and reliable : better availability and performance management means less downtime and fewer performance brown-outs. This is important for the business, both in your running data center but also during the transition from the old to the new state. Automated compliance monitoring and fixing means you are out of compliance for less time, less often. And a well controlled and automated change process means fewer release and change errors.

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HP Software has a strong history in management of IT Operations in enterprises.

In fact, recent analysis of the Financial Times’ top companies showed the extent to which HP was helping the top companies in all sectors.

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3. Sustained Compliance: compliance can be compliance to regulations and compliance to internal best practice configurations. Manually monitoring compliance is time consuming and error prone. And fixing compliance issues manually is similarly problematic. Sustained compliance is about ensuring each element’s configuration is compliance, but also about ensuring whole service hiearchies remain “frozen” – this is known as desired state management. It’s also important we can prove our compliance – compliance of elements, compliance of whole services and compliance to proper change processes.

4. Automated Self-serve : if you want to be fast and low cost, you must allow your “customers” in the rest of the organization to order services from you via a catalog. No longer can IT afford to deliver whatever a developer or business user wants – we need to constain using a catalog. A specific form of request management that is hot right now is Private Cloud.

In order to meet these three goals, the VP Ops has to ensure that a number of things work well. These “pillars”are:

1. Automated Release, provisioning and change automation: this is all about moving stuff from dev/test to production, provisioning whole services in the operations environment, and making changes to running services. It’s about controlling change as well as automating change.

2. Availability and Performance: this all about ensuring that services are available and that they are performing to the correct levels. The latter, performance management, is becoming increasingly important – it’s no good that the web site is up, it has to be fast enough that customers don’t leave and go to a competitor. Or, it’s no good that a network path is up – it has to be fast enough that people can stream video over it. It’s also key that health is managed with respect to application performance – at the end of the day, it’s the application’s preformance that is paramount.

Provisioning and change is done manually. This is people intensive. It can result in errors, especially at the boundaries between departments – the hand offs in complex, mutli-silo service provisioning. And when something goes wrong, it’s very hard to get humans, across silos, to undo what they have done in the right order. Thus, we end up with “half chewed” back-outs.

Agile development of composite applications is increasing in popularity. So, every 3 to 4 weeks, a lot of components need to be installed to be deployed. Composite apps can contain 30, 40 or 50 different components – new pieces of infrastructure, configurations, code and data. It’s starting to get beyond the ability of humans to manually deploy such complexity reliably month after month.

Modern technologies allow faster change. Virtualization is the perfect example of this. But, if the change is bad – it impacts another service or clashes with another change – all this increased flexibility is going to do is create a train wreck faster. We must marry increased flexibility and automation with well informed change control. I was talking to an IT director the other day. He said that outside of the twice-yearly lockdown, incidents go up by a factor of six. In other words, poor change is increasing his incident rate by a factor of six.

• We use graphical workflow technology to co-ordinate the provisioning of a service across all the silos. And, should there be a problem, we have coded in the workflow the work required to back out. We can, of course, automate provisioning within silos (NA, SA, CA, SE), but the real power comes from our ability to co-ordinate complex, whole service provisioning across a series of silos. We can also update the service desk as to the change status, and notify the CMDB that changes have occured. And, we can backout any changes in a proper and orderly fashion should anything fail catastrophically.

• We use automated provisioning technology to deploy apps (agile apps, often) from test into production. The typical next-generation composite app has 20, 30, 40 components and many configuration changes required when it gets deployed. With agile development, composite apps are moving for test to production every three to four weeks. Our new “Automated Deployment Manager” product automated this process.

• And, just like with service health, most of this isn’t possible without the help of an automatically discovered service dependency map – it’s used to trap rogue changes (desired state management) and its used to give us insight when making go/no go change decisions in the CAB.

This diagram shows HP Software’s automated release, provisioning and change management:

• Changes are controlled via an ITIL change process. Not only does the process control the changes, but equally importantly, it documents the change process for audit and compliance purposes. Such documentation is becoming a common component of compliance regulations. SOX, for example.

• When the CAB meets, they use the servce dependency map to determine the impact of changes. No more old XL spreadsheets and “oh, it should be OK”. The discovered service dependency map is holistic – it’s across all services. So, the impact of a change on one silo can be seen across all applications and other infrastructure services.

• HP has won a number of awards for its «Data Cente r Automation» and for its service desk.

• Our recent acquisition of Stratavia means that we can deploye and provision across the whole IT stack from infrastructure right up to applications

• 5X faster deployment : this is from an IDC study on automated deployment

• 6X increased admin loading : this is from EDS (HP ES’s) use of HP’s automation tools

• 130X cut in provisioning errors – this is from a recent HP survey into the benefits of the use of automation

• 50% reduction in unplanned changes : this comes from Kellogg’s use of our change control technology – service desk, change insight and service dependency map discovery

• We know, from our observations and from IDC studies, that if you have management silos (i.e. Each domain having their own management console) you don’t a single view of what’s going on. This results in slow resolution times and duplication of effort and/or a ton of IT ops people in a room trying to solve each performance problem

• Even if all fault and performance information comes to one place, we need to understand how it all relates to each other. We can only do this if we can put it onto a service dependency map. That way we get a single view of what’s going on.

• If we rely on monitoring all the many bits that go to make up a user experience of an application, we’ll never know if that app is having problems. There is TONS of evidence to back up this assertion. We therefore need automated user experience monitoring so that we proactively see what it looks like to the customers – no waiting 45 minutes for the first angry customer to call in

• When we solve a problem, we need everyone involved to have the same data about the problem. Maybe surprisingly, this doesn’t happen today.

• One of our customers found that they could automate the remediation actions for about 20% of incidents

HP believes you can cut downtime, resolve issues faster and do all this in a more people-efficient way using Consolidated Operations.

1. All fault and performance information into on e place so we can ssee everything that’s going on

2. Included in that is automated user experience monitoring so we know the INSTANT there is a performance problem with out applications

3. Of course, when all that data comes to one place, that’s a lot of data, much of it is just noise. It’s hard and time consuming to manually cut the noise. You need the help. Automated help that cuts the noise for you. This will let you see just the actionable data

4. Everyone involved in the incident process gets to see the “single version of the truth” - > faster resolution, less wastage of people’s time. You can now create an integrated incident process across event management, service desk, and expert teams.

5. Once you really know what’s going on, you can automatically remediate with confiedence.

Almost all of the above can’t be achieved without a model of how the services relate to each other – an automatically discovered service dependency map

Consolidated Operations is all about availability and performance from the point of view of IT Operations. What about application support?

The key here is remember that applications don’t just appear magically. They are developed by the development team and a linkage between development and production means a sharing of assets and more predictable application performance

• Scripts used in testing are re-used in production user experience monitoring.

• The application performance tool used in development is also used in production

• The data from user experience monitoring is used to feed auto-analysis tools that allow us to infer the root cause of a performance problem. As with all other aspects of HP Software’s IT Operations solutions, a discovery service dependency map is key

• The hardest application performance problems to solve are those involving multi-hop transactions, typically across a number of different systems (app server to intergration bus to mainframe to web service, etc). Mutli-hop transaction analysis helps fix such problems

The parts of HP’s availability and performance management are Consolidated Operations and Applications Performance Management across the lifecycle.

HP has won top placing in both areas in the Gartner Magic Quadrant analyses.

HP believes that its «TBEC» automated root cause analysis is the best in the industry. The new BSM 9 product allows application-aware analysis of both fault and performance data to determine root cause accurately.

34% descrease in downtime comes from an IDC study across a number of HP Software customers

3X first call resolution comes from a study of our service desk installed base

3X reduction in the number of experts to solve an application performance problem comes from analysis of our BAC installed base

As does the increase in app uptime from 97 to 99.7%.

Independent Blue Cross (IBC) uses both the Consolidated Operations and the Application Performance Mangement solution sets. These allow them to create SLA, incident and problem management processes.

You’ll note the use of HP’s products for application performance testing and the common use of HP Diagnostics.

And you’ll also note the foundation use of HP’s discovered service dependency map.

• When we provision a service, we do it using automation workflow software so it’s the same build, every time – no “human variation”

• We use element-level compliance monitoring software to ensure that no-one fiddles with the configuration.

• This includes the application of all the latest patches to all the different types of system we have – network devices, storage devices, servers, middleware, databases.

• Of course, the right patch levels and best practice configurations today are not going to be the same tomorrow. In order to ensure you’re always up to date, we offer a cloud service that provides you all the patches and configuration regulations on an ongoing basis

• We use automated discovery to detect rogue changes at a high level. This is known as “desired state management”

Self-serve IT results in faster delivery of IT goods and services and is typically more efficient than a more manual approach.

In very broad terms, it breaks down into:

• self-serve of services such as email, server capacity, DBs for testing, etc. This is often known as “private cloud”

• Self-serve of physical “IT product” such as printers, PCs, and smart-phones

• And self-serve of IT help – allowing employees to solve their own problems

Let’s look at how self-serve of IT services works..

• A catalog of services is created. This is typically the result of a service simplification exercise.

• Services can be chosen from the catalog. Services will typically have attributes. For example, an email service may have mailbox size as an attribute.

• The service is ordered and is then signed off (if this is required)

• Typically, a virtualized platform is used to host the service. This is not totally necessary, but many private cloud services are provisioned onto a virtualized platform.

• The whole service is provisioned. This will start with provisioning of the infrastructure required. The application and any configuration and data it needs will then be provisioned

• Service capacity can be adjusted thought-out the life of the service

• Typically, the service will be billed to the user on a usage basis

• When the service is no longer required, or when the services lease period expires, the service will be decommissioned for that user

This diagram gives a brief description of HP’s new Cloud Service Automation artchitecture...

• Firstly, we recommend simplifying your IT services. It’s very hard to offer thousands of services in a catalog. Better to take this opportunity to simplify

• The catalog is the new Service Request Catalog

• Once an order is placed, resource has to be found for it. We have a standard resource allocator in our Service Automation product. Or, advanced features can be found in the Mohab product

• The infrastructure and then the application is provisioned. If required, monitoring is automatically setup for the service too. This step can be very complex. It uses the overarching Operations Orchestration product and any number of element automation products all the way up to the Stratavia DB and middleware deployment tool.

• Billing, based on useage is then recorded and either chargeback or showback is provided

• Once the lease period on the service is up, or the user opts to cancel the service, the service is decommissioned (again, using auatomation technology) and the resource given back to the resource allocator.

The architectre described is in use at an international bank. The service catalog used is not actually HP’s (the Service Request Catalog wasn’t available at the time).

The the overarching automation orchestrator is HP’s and Stratavia is used to provision the databases.

The customer also moved from a traditional phyiscal to a virtualized platform at the same time.

When self-serving phyiscal IT product, things are slightly different.

The same IT service catalog is used.

However, the product needs to be purchased – against the company’s supplier catalog and using bulk purchases where necessary. Integration with an ERP system like SAP is often required.

If product can be re-used, then this should happen.

All this is managed by an asset management system

Once the product is made live, it needs to be tracked using asset management and maybe put under change management.

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3. Sustained Compliance: compliance can be compliance to regulations and compliance to internal best practice configurations. Manually monitoring compliance is time consuming and error prone. And fixing compliance issues manually is similarly problematic. Sustained compliance is about ensuring each element’s configuration is compliance, but also about ensuring whole service hiearchies remain “frozen” – this is known as desired state management. It’s also important we can prove our compliance – compliance of elements, compliance of whole services and compliance to proper change processes.

4. Automated Self-serve : if you want to be fast and low cost, you must allow your “customers” in the rest of the organization to order services from you via a catalog. No longer can IT afford to deliver whatever a developer or business user wants – we need to constain using a catalog. A specific form of request management that is hot right now is Private Cloud.

In order to meet these three goals, the VP Ops has to ensure that a number of things work well. These “pillars”are:

1. Automated Release, provisioning and change automation: this is all about moving stuff from dev/test to production, provisioning whole services in the operations environment, and making changes to running services. It’s about controlling change as well as automating change.

2. Availability and Performance: this all about ensuring that services are available and that they are performing to the correct levels. The latter, performance management, is becoming increasingly important – it’s no good that the web site is up, it has to be fast enough that customers don’t leave and go to a competitor. Or, it’s no good that a network path is up – it has to be fast enough that people can stream video over it. It’s also key that health is managed with respect to application performance – at the end of the day, it’s the application’s preformance that is paramount.

This slide is helpful for explaining how the technnologies that go into HP's Unified Operations' technologies play into each of the five IT Operations pillars. The table that shows the functionality that each technology area brings to each of the five pillars.

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