white paper building the dynamic it infrastructure ... · building the dynamic it infrastructure:...

W H I T E P A P E R

B u i l d i n g t h e D y n a m i c I T I n f r a s t r u c t u r e : F u j i t s u ' s T R I O L E A p p r o a c h Sponsored by: Fujitsu

Vernon Turner Tim Grieser

July 2006

I N T H I S W H I T E P A P E R

In this IDC white paper, we examine the evolving requirements for a dynamic solution to IT infrastructure deployment and management, which is necessary in order to support the dynamic business environments that are essential to gaining advantage in today's highly competitive world markets. We describe the concept of

"industrialized IT infrastructures" based on the model of the automobile manufacturing industry in Japan. We then examine Fujitsu's TRIOLE approach — a process used to build an industrialized IT infrastructure.

IT managers and executives are faced with many conflicting pressures as strategic IT-based services are increasingly the key factor in achieving competitive business advantage worldwide. IT organizations are being pressed to more closely align themselves with the business needs and priorities of their parent corporations. To do

this, they need to show the business relevance of IT in terms of agility and responsiveness to changing business goals and priorities. At the same time, IT managers must meet continuous requirements to reduce costs and provide operating

efficiency in order to support increased corporate productivity.

These requirements have a strong impact on IT infrastructure deployments. IT managers are continually faced with the challenge of designing, deploying, and supporting ever more complex infrastructures to provide computer-based services to business organizations and end users. Traditional approaches typically require large expenditures in terms of time, money, and IT staff resources to achieve an IT infrastructure deployment. Changes in infrastructure to meet new or evolving

business requirements are similarly difficult and expensive to achieve.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N : T O D A Y ' S T O P C I O P R I O R I T Y — B U I L D I N G A D Y N A M I C E N T E R P R I S E

CIOs and senior IT professionals continue to face pressure from their CEOs, senior

management, and internal stakeholders to deliver high-quality IT services and to improve their speed to market while controlling costs and improving in terms of IT

operational efficiency. In fact, this sentiment is encountered across entire organizations as companies rebuild their postrecession business models and strive to improve both their top- and bottom -line performance while increasing their customers' satisfaction. Additionally, it has to be an accepted business position that the days of long-lasting market stability and competitive advantage are over, if ever they really existed at all. Most organizations today face relentless changes in every aspect of

their operations. Chief among them are customer preferences, competition, technology, economic conditions, sourcing and development strategies , distribution and service models, regulatory requirements, pricing models, and market scope. The daunting task for most senior line-of-business (LOB) executives is to anticipate and exploit these changes or to react swiftly to the unexpected.

S t r a t e g i c C h a l l e n g e : B u i l d i n g D y n a m i c I T C a p a b i l i t y

Business executives understand that they need to build and operate a dynamic enterprise. They also understand the growing strategic importance of IT in executing their business strategies. However, there is still an enormous divide at the intersection of these two realities — while businesses face the accelerating challenge to become more dynamic, IT has historically responded slowly to changing business needs. This divide can be particularly painful in fast-cycle industries like banking/financial services, retail, manufacturing, and packaged consumer goods

where the speed of the business cycle often outstrips the speed with which IT can react to new market demands.

Adding to the challenge of building Dynamic IT into an organization's infrastructure is the business executives' perception that IT costs are already too high. For some organizations, the size of the IT budget is as large or even larger than their company's profits, and for most, IT asset utilization and other IT productivity metrics are below where they should ideally be. This means that a lot of new investment dollars are not

likely to be directed now toward creating Dynamic IT capability. For many organizations, the move to Dynamic IT will need to be largely self funded — and the cost of doing so must "fit" within their budgetary umbrella.

Finally, building an IT organization that can support a more complex and diverse set of applications and customer requirements is no small task. Traditionally, IT has been challenged to remain secure, safe, and highly available while providing a minimum amount of support interruption. This complex equation is not going to be solved with traditional IT processing rules . Rather, CIOs and their management executives will have to look at a very different set of processes not built on uniqueness but on tested, repeatable, and scalable processes.

©2006 IDC #200511 3

This shift to establishing industrialized IT infrastructure and services is an emerging trend borrowed from best practices established in real manufacturing processes,

especially in the automotive industry. Here, industrialization is characterized by three important features , namely:

y Increasing standardization of components and processes, including best practices

y Selling outcome rather than content — the details of the solution are of decreasing importance compared to the benefits it can deliver

y Continual process improvement

P r o c e s s f o r B u i l d i n g I T U s i n g a n I n d u s t r i a l i z e d F r a m e w o r k

The tension between an organization's need to develop more Dynamic IT while maintaining or reducing its existing IT budget requires executives to become selective and to have a clear sense of priority when developing their Dynamic IT game plan.

A recent IDC study of several hundred IT executives in North America, Europe, and

Asia highlights their priorities with regard to moving toward Dynamic IT. The three most pressing needs driving the shift to optimized or Dynamic IT include the following:

y Better business agility. Speeding up the capability to respond faster to

changing business needs.

y Improved business efficiency. Driving out operational costs and simplifying or eliminating complexity.

y Better business continuity. Improving and establishing higher levels of reliability and more robust platforms .

In IDC's view, the top priorities map directly to the two major paths we see

organizations taking as they create their blueprint for more Dynamic IT capability. This capability will focus on improving the following:

y Business strategy execution and automation. Responding faster to changing business needs by improving in terms of ability to support new business requirements. This also refers to us ing IT to monitor business performance and to improve in terms of speed in making operational business adjustments to meet market changes.

y IT operations management and automation. Delivering better service-level

performance by IT operations to support the business and lowering the costs of infrastructure on which business applications depend. Linking, monitoring, and managing — from end to end — all of the IT operational elements that support a business activity — from the hardware and system software to business applications, data, workflow, and business processes.

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F I G U R E 1

I D C ' s D y n a m i c I T V i s i o n

Source: IDC, 2006

A Dynamic IT environment improves service delivery, increases speed, and reduces costs, in part, by smartly leveraging information across an entire IT organization — from development to operations and back. This requires as many resources as possible to support a business activity or process and must be logically linked in an

end-to-end, dynamic management view. The IT operations staff should have a clear view of the entire "IT value chain" — end-user devices, communication/collaboration systems, workflow systems , applications, middleware, security, systems software, networks, storage, and servers — with the entire end-to-end chain supporting the delivery and execution of a business process. Likewise, application integrators/developers and data and workflow architects should have a clear view of the operating environment that supports their systems so they can factor in operating environment realities into their designs.

©2006 IDC #200511 5

F U J I T S U ' S A N S W E R T O D Y N A M I C I T I S T R I O L E

Fujitsu has developed a compelling architecture and a product strategy to support the

IT operations, management, and automation concepts of Dynamic IT. TRIOLE is Fujitsu's process for creating industrialized IT infrastructure and services based on

architecture, core technology, and IT service management.

Traditional approaches to building and deploying IT infrastructure solutions often rely on a custom -built product-by-product approach. This approach can be expensive to design and implement and its results can be difficult to support and often lack flexibility so that changes to meet evolving business needs can be slow and expensive.

F I G U R E 2

T R I O L E ' s I n d u s t r i a l i z e d I T I n f r a s t r u c t u r e

Develop product, Verify every time

Product- by-product

　　TRADITIONAL APPROACH　　VENDOR 　CUSTOMER SITE

Quick developmentStable, Reliable

　　　　　　TRIOLE APPROACH　　　　FUJITSU 　CUSTOMER SITE

Pre-fabricationPre-verify


Product- by-product



Product- by-product








Source: Fujitsu, 2006

Fujitsu's TRIOLE approach is based on industrialized practices as in the automobile

industry where components and processes are standardized and refined so that they can be reused in many different solutions. As shown by Figure 2, Fujitsu's TRIOLE approach makes use of industrialized components and services to implement commonly deployed IT infrastructure components and functions such as databases (DBs), networks, transactions, and backup. The key advantage is to be able to deploy a core infrastructure that has been pre verified and is thus expected to work as soon

as it is installed.

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T R I O L E ' s C o r e T e c h n o l o g i e s : V i r t u a l i z a t i o n a n d A u t o m a t i o n

TRIOLE is based on two core technologies — virtualization and automation. Virtualization and automation are important technologies for TRIOLE's offerings in order to build modern infrastructures that drive business agility, efficiency, and continuity. TRIOLE's core technologies are highlighted as follows:

y Virtualization. This separates business applications and data from dedicated IT

resources and pools or shares the resources for flexible and efficient usage. The use of virtualization allows IT infrastructures to adapt quickly to changing business requirements. Pooling enables information technologies to share infrastructure resources to achieve better utilization.

y Automation (without human intervention). This provides cross-environment

platforms and IT infrastructures with automatic adjustments to respond dynamically to changes in operations and the environment. Automation allows IT

systems to meet changing demands while keeping operations stable.

TRIOLE is based on end-to-end integration principles. This includes the pre integration of systems and software to build complete solutions or blocks of infrastructure in a factory and a laboratory. This process of assessing the total

customer requirements and pre integrating to the greatest extent possible is the heart of the TRIOLE methodology. The TRIOLE approach pre integrates virtualization and automation technologies into offerings such as packaged solutions that are used to implement industrialized IT infrastructures.

TRIOLE takes the technologies of virtualization and automation that are already

delivering individual benefits in areas such as server and storage consolidation, making low-cost administration of applications and workloads a reality, and increasing

the level of service availability and refocuses them on customers' needs to deploy total end-to-end business solutions that span many types of servers.

©2006 IDC #200511 7

T R I O L E I s t h e P r o c e s s f o r C r e a t i n g I n d u s t r i a l i z e d I T I n f r a s t r u c t u r e s a n d S e r v i c e s

Fujitsu takes the TRIOLE process one step further by offering a combination of products, solutions, and services to make sure that IT benefits are actually realized. Figure 3 shows the major steps in a typical Fujitsu service engagement that implements the TRIOLE process for creating an industrialized IT infrastructure.

F I G U R E 3

T R I O L E ' s P r o c e s s B u i l d i n g B l o c k s

CLIENT ENGAGEMENT PROPOSAL & COMMERCIAL

MODEL

SOLUTION BUILD MODELS/

PACKAGED SOLUTION

TEMPLATES RESEARCH & DEVELOPEMENT

CUSTOMER

Development requirements and recorded requests

Increasing level of re - use & standardi z ation

TSMF


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The process begins with a client engagement to identify the opportunities for IT infrastructure improvements based on the TRIOLE architecture and technologies, to develop requirements, and to record customer requests as shown in the leftmost block in Figure 3. The TRIOLE development process then proceeds according to a series of steps as follows :

y Step 1: Solution Build Model (SBM). As shown in the second block in Figure 3,

Fujitsu addresses customer requirements by designing, bench testing, and refining an infrastructure solution that includes hardware, software, connectivity,

and service support. This is the same kind of process that an IT department would follow when creating a build-from-scratch IT solution. Fujitsu defines this designed, pre-built, and tested infrastructure solution as an SBM. An SBM built for a specific application is called a "packaged solution."

y Step 2: Template. In cases where there is a possibility of multiple demand for a

particular solution, a template can be created that defines a model and makes all or part of an SBM repeatable and modular, making, in effect, a reusable solution. A template makes models more rigid by providing well-defined procedures that are documented in keystroke detail, leaving no room for human error. Further development of a model may include virtualization or automation and the

template may also be used to create a discrete IT product.

y Step 3: Services Management Framework. TRIOLE provides a framework for infrastructure support and services. The TRIOLE Services Management Framework (TSMF) provides a consistent basis for standardized service delivery and support that is compliant with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 20000 standards .

y Step 4: Research and Development (R&D). Starting from this basic foundation,

the TRIOLE development process can adapt solution components to meet specific customer needs and can incorporate the latest technologies. These developments can be quickly incorporated into packaged solutions and templates and be proposed to TRIOLE's customers.

TRIOLE's key advantage lies in the fact that it is adaptive or dynamic across the whole IT infrastructure — from the client desktop to the server and DB products. As the underlying technology changes, it can deliver the most appropriate technology platforms that match the business requirement. TRIOLE's building blocks and techniques can be changed via virtualization, provisioning, and automation techniques without redesigning the entire IT infrastructure. It is clear then that under

this strategy, products, solutions , and services that optimize IT and move a step further toward Dynamic IT have been and are being developed by Fujitsu.

©2006 IDC #200511 9

Fujitsu has been working for several years on turning this vision of Dynamic IT into reality with its own development units and in cooperation with its hardware and software partners. In order to intensify these activities and integrate them more strongly, they were made part of a formal and published strategy called "TRIOLE," introduced in Japan in 2002 and deployed globally starting 2004. With TRIOLE, Fujitsu provides solutions that permit

new application architectures to be used and integrated optimally in ongoing IT operations. This development takes place in close cooperation with leading vendors of infrastructure and business applications such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and many others. The result is dynamic infrastructures for key vendors' architectures.

By taking this approach, TRIOLE addresses the following key business requirements:

y Efficiency from implementing cost-effective solutions that are built on proven technology building blocks that can be reused as needed. This provides the ability to implement quickly and contain costs.

y Agility with a highly adaptive or Dynamic IT infrastructure that supports

flexible computing and advanced management of workloads across multi-server IT infrastructures. This provides support for the growth or the resizing of

the infrastructure based on changing business needs and market conditions.

y Continuity by delivering on Fujitsu's mission-critical know-how in the area of highly available systems, 24 x 7 operations, quality of service (QoS), and disaster recovery. This delivers the robustness, resilience, and reliability necessary to keep IT operations going under a variety of adverse conditions in a cost-effective manner.

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T R I O L E ' s S o l u t i o n s : A C l o s e r L o o k

As can be expected from any industrialized process, outcomes are delivered as

results of applying the TRIOLE method to meet user requirements. For the IT industry, Fujitsu delivers solutions developed using the TRIOLE process. The typical components that can be delivered as part of a TRIOLE solution include the following:

y SBM. An infrastructure solution that includes hardware, software, connectivity, and service support. An SBM is designed, integrated, and bench tested by Fujitsu to support a specific business or infrastructure application. A packaged solution is an SBM tuned for specific applications, that is, a complete and a proven solution for a specific application or functionality that has already been designed, tested, and packaged as in FlexFrame for mySAP or Oracle. Unlike templates, however, packaged solutions cannot be decomposed into blocks for

generic use.

y Templates. These are prefabricated building blocks built and exhaustively tested by Fujitsu prior to installation in a customer's site. Templates reduce "soft costs" related to personnel skill sets and training because they leverage IT best practices for reuse in new organizations that want to deploy TRIOLE rapidly in order to begin gaining business benefits. These are based on actual experiences with customers gained over half a century so templates are proven, tested, and

certified methods for speeding up application deployments. A template can be used to implement functions such as "reliable DB services" or "backup and recovery" that were designed and rigorously tested and calibrated. Templates can be used as part of a client's infrastructure, either individually or in combination.

Fujitsu has identified that success and speed in deploying a dynamic environment based on differing customer needs are based on creating a repeatable process such as creating a TRIOLE template. Fujitsu has even put up several template development centers, which gather best practices in flexible computing then test and certify the combined hardware, software, and service practices into templates for

customer use. One such center is the TRIOLE Integration Center in Numazu, Japan, which opened in June 2003, and another is the UK TRIOLE Integration Center in the United Kingdom , which opened in November 2004. Both centers focus on reliability, availability, and serviceability, tuning, optimization, and production -level testing of capabilities. These two centers serve as models for other template centers of expertise, which will be created over time on a worldwide basis.

As a result of these activities, Fujitsu has established its infrastructure templates across a wide array of customers' technical needs. Some the solutions cover deployments of Java-based Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Microsoft .NET, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Unix (Solaris), x86 servers, and

reduced instruction set computer (RISC)-based servers, along with support for server consolidation and for XML — all of which, when combined, improve interoperability between server platforms, allowing them to exchange data more easily. Java and .NET support Web services and service oriented architectures (SOAs) while XML eases data exchange between DBs made by different software vendors.

©2006 IDC #200511 11

Since TRIOLE is based on pretested and -certified technology, the anticipated result is lower implementation costs for IT and reduced business risks from deployments.

Furthermore, as technologies change, underlying templates can also be modified as needed, allowing new technologies to adapt to changing business conditions and to be added on a plug-and-play basis. More importantly, however, focusing technologies this way not only allows for IT innovations to continue but also enables all of Fujitsu's resources, including hardware, services, and consulting, to be brought together in very structured and meaningful ways around each functional area in order to maximize their overall benefits to customers:

TRIOLE Services Management Framework. Fujitsu recognizes the need for

predictable, compliant support and services as a key requirement for deploying , operating, and managing workloads running on industrialized IT infrastructure. The

TRIOLE Services Management Framework (TSMF) provides a best practices process and tool framework for standardized service delivery and service support that is compliant with ITIL and ISO 20000 standards.

ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a set of best practices used to deliver high quality IT services. The best practices described in ITIL represent the consensus derived from over a decade of work by thousands of IT and data processing professionals’ world-wide, including hundreds of years of collective

experience. Because of its depth and breadth, the ITIL has become one of the leading global standard for IT best practices.

ISO 20000 is a recently adopted international standard, based on the previous BS 15000 standard, that specifies a service management system and a set of practices

that together define the features of standardized service management processes. ISO 20000 aligns with ITIL.

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Measurements show that the overall results of moving from no IT Service Management adoption to full adoption can reduce an organization's total cost of ownership (TCO) by as much as 45%. Figure 4 shows the key elements of TSMF.

F I G U R E 4

T R I O L E ' s S e r v i c e M a n a g e m e n t F r a m e w o r k

TSMF: TRIOLE Service Management FrameworkStandardizing Management and Process of Support & Service Utilizing the experience of FJ’s own IT system, Outsourcing Business and System IntegrationITIL Compliant

TRIOLE Service Management Framework (ITIL based)Composition/Modification Management

Planning/DesignService

Planning/DesignService

DeliveryServiceDeliveryService

Operation/SupportService

Operation/SupportService

DiagnosticsService

DiagnosticsService

TRIOLE Template

IncidentManagement

ProblemManagement

ReleaseManagement

CapacityManagement

availabilityManagement

.....

• Knowledge of product compliance•Service Price Table•Performance estimation Tool

•Automated Insulation•Knowledge of parameter design•Automated composition confirmation & production

•Knowledge of System Load test

•SLA Check•Maintenance execution

foundation•Knowledge of Operation•Parameter Check

•Knowledge of Diagnostic(System Management Criteria)•SLA Check


©2006 IDC #200511 13

P a r t n e r s h i p s : A b i l i t y t o S u p p o r t a D y n a m i c B u s i n e s s E n v i r o n m e n t

Having an IT platform and application solutions that were specifically created to expose and realize a business's competitive advantage requires strong and reliable service management capabilities . With its heritage in supporting complex environments across major Japan, Europe, and North America markets, Fujitsu's services are very capable of supporting the TRIOLE environment. Since TRIOLE is an open strategy, Fujitsu has the ability to team up with many of the leading IT suppliers to create a very strong robust offering. By combining its capabilities with its systems integrator (SI) partners, Fujitsu's TRIOLE templates can attain global or worldwide consulting reach while providing local market knowledge about customer

sites. The key advantage of this delivery network is that Fujitsu's certified technology partners have the opportunity to share in the company's TRIOLE vision and to create ongoing investment protection for their customer installed bases.

F U T U R E O U T L O O K

Dynamic IT initiatives finally got the attention of datacenters. CIOs will be forced to rethink their focus on operational efficiency and to instead seek for bigger payoffs from being able to react more quickly to changes in business rules and from being able to provide access to all information as needed. While IDC sees the movement toward Dynamic IT as a multiyear or even a multi -decade transition for most

businesses, first-mover advantage is extremely important, particularly on the IT side where product differentiation will become increasingly difficult. IDC believes that for IT vendors to lead in this market, they must be able to address both business and IT requirements across multiple dimensions of the Dynamic IT stack.

In the future, TRIOLE is expected to expand industrialized IT and evolve IT systems based on life-cycle management (e.g., planning/design, delivery, operation/support, diagnosis). The key to becoming successful in this journey with customers is understanding that business processes must first undergo a transformation and that IT will support these changes and not lead them.

C H A L L E N G E S

Fujitsu faces several challenges in marketing TRIOLE. First, the technology must be

marketed on a worldwide basis, to global customers. Accordingly, the company will need to coordinate marketing plans across geographic regions worldwide, to present

a unified marketing effort around the TRIOLE concept and product introductions. Second, Fujitsu must demonstrate the business benefits of this technology, chiefly through references to customers who have achieved business benefits from deploying TRIOLE. Finally, the company must communicate clearly its differentiation with other offerings available from competing systems vendors. IDC believes that Fujitsu can achieve all three of these goals, but that it will likely take some time for Fujitsu to tell the TRIOLE story on a worldwide basis, as would be expected for any major product introduction in the computer industry.

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C O N C L U S I O N

Fujitsu has made substantial progress in advancing the TRIOLE strategy and product deliverables that support the said strategy. Customers in Japan, Asia, Europe, and

North America have already benefited from the deployment of TRIOLE, following its introduction in 2002. Now, the focus is to accelerate TRIOLE deployments on a worldwide basis as the Fujitsu group of companies and its business partners work with customers to speed up TRIOLE deployments. Industrializing IT processes is key to making the Dynamic IT vision a real ity. The new packaged solutions and templates are major stepping-stones to realize the goals of TRIOLE:

Fujitsu's TRIOLE is a framework of technologies that aims to:

y Bridge "islands of automation" that have grown up in IT organizations

y Build flexible infrastructures that support Dynamic IT

y Reduce development times to gain IT agility

y Provide business benefits to enterprises seeking flexible operations

All of these aims will allow information technologies to leverage existing IT infrastructures and computing systems and to build on existing investments while improving a business's ability to respond to ever-changing business conditions. By preserving investments in hardware and software and leveraging existing

technologies to support new business requirements, TRIOLE, as a process, creates industrialized IT infrastructures that support IT's moves toward agile and dynamic infrastructures and flexible computing to support global business priorities.

C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e

External Publication of IDC Information and Data — Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason.

Copyright 2006 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.

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