D
D
a
a
t
t
a
a
C
C
e
e
n
n
t
t
e
e
r
r
C
C
o
o
n
n
s
s
o
o
l
l
i
i
d
d
a
a
t
t
i
i
o
o
n
n
Written by: Mark Blowers
Published October 2007
© Butler Direct Limited All rights reserved. This publication, or any part of it, may not be reproduced or adapted, by any method whatsoever, without prior written Butler Direct Limited consent.
X BUTLER GROUP VIEW
Catalyst
Data Center consolidation does not signify a move back to the centralized world of ten to 20 years ago, but the adoption of a more pragmatic appraisal of the IT infrastructure, focusing on optimizing the IT environment to meet the demands of the organization and providing a flexible foundation on which to base IT services. There is also a trend towards greater centralization of IT management and the consolidation of applications. HP’s Operations Center software can be used to support these initiatives by providing a range of components and functionality that models, monitors, and reports on a consolidated IT environment.
Summary
A typically complex, distributed, and heterogeneous IT environment is very difficult and expensive to manage, and a number of disadvantages to this model have become apparent. These include escalating operational costs, inflexible infrastructure, and ever-increasing difficulties in meeting service levels, as well as erratic data security and integrity. Consequently, Butler Group believes that the proliferation of system silos found within the majority of enterprises today is not sustainable in the long term. In addressing this problem, Data Center consolidation and the adoption of a corresponding centralized management approach can bring significant benefits, including:
• A reduction in the system administration overhead.
• Easier data management.
• A simplified infrastructure.
• More efficient use of resources.
• Increased leverage of shared services.
• Improved IT risk management posture.
• The ability to evolve more easily to a service-centric IT infrastructure.
Data Center consolidation can have a far-reaching impact on the organization, and there are many things to consider, not least the implications of a more centralized approach. This centralization can have unexpected consequences which require management tools to help plan and quickly identify issues in the IT environment. Consolidation causes the network to become a critical component in the infrastructure, and is therefore something which should be closely monitored. HP’s Operations Center solution consolidates event, availability, and performance management across the IT silos, and provides service impact models which map the IT infrastructure and application components to the business-oriented services and processes. The service-oriented approach greatly assists with the deployment of a consolidation strategy, and a wider continuous optimization process.
For organizations contemplating these initiatives, some of the key points to consider are as follows:
• The focus of a consolidation strategy needs to be on providing value, as well as reducing costs.
• Key initial objectives are the deployment of performance measurement mechanisms, along with enhancing and centralizing the management capability.
• The aim of consolidation must be to provide a balanced, optimized environment that enables the smooth progression to a service-centric IT infrastructure.
• It is important to have a continuous process of IT infrastructure optimization.
• HP Operations Center software can be used to support a consolidation strategy and service-based operations.
• HP’s customers are gaining significant benefits from the use of Operations Center.
X ANALYSIS
The focus of a consolidation strategy needs to be on providing value, as well as
controlling costs.
Many organizations are finding that having a large number of servers and distributed storage within the business is an unmanageable proposition, from both a cost and an administration perspective. A distributed systems strategy can cause a considerable number of issues for the business as a whole, including:
• Rising costs.
• An increased maintenance burden.
• Poor response times.
• Service unavailability.
• Failure to quickly deploy new applications.
• Inconsistent data security and integrity.
• Weaknesses in disaster recovery and business continuity.
The rising costs of such a decentralized strategy means that IT management must reappraise this model and look seriously at moving towards a more centralized approach. Consolidation can deliver substantial Return On Investment (ROI), and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and research indicates that the IT manager can expect operational cost savings of, on average, between 15% and 25% depending on the scale and scope of the consolidation.
However, it is important that IT is not treated simply as a cost centre when contemplating consolidation, and that a broader range of considerations are taken into account. These aspects include providing value, Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, virtualization, software needs, shared services, administration overheads, enterprise continuity, and even human factors.
There is no single right answer to consolidation: the aim must be to find the correct balance between a centralized and fully-distributed environment, which gives optimal performance for the lowest cost, whilst still managing to meet the organization’s objectives and provide value. The simplification of the systems infrastructure through consolidation can bring significant financial benefits, such as reductions in infrastructure, licensing, staff, and maintenance costs, as well as in the number of data centers. With IT costs averaging around 3.5% of total company costs, controlling and reducing them remains an important consideration. Optimizing this spend to deliver the greatest possible business benefit is often seen as the Holy Grail and should have a higher priority than simply controlling costs.
The employee cost element is of particular importance, since it is not only a significant overhead but also includes the cost of recruiting and keeping skilled resources, and in a distributed IT scenario, there is a greater tendency for people costs and support requirements to escalate. Consolidation of such an environment can therefore help to bring direct employee costs under control, and to generate further saving by lowering the IT support requirements and reducing downtime.
“There is no right or wrong answer. The aim must be to find the
correct balance between a centralized and distributed environment.”
Consolidation also has a dramatic effect on hardware costs, although there may be an up-front requirement to invest in fewer, larger machines, or in blade servers. The reduction in the amount of hardware also lowers the operational costs used to support the IT infrastructure, such as power requirements and cooling needs, and improves the utilization of floor space. Research indicates that direct hardware cost savings can be up to 25%, although it should be stressed that additional benefits can accrue from areas including utilization, virtualization, standards, connectivity, management, security, and risk.
With respect to software costs, whilst the savings from consolidation may not be as clear-cut as other areas, there are still opportunities to lower software-licensing costs through the consolidation of applications running on separate servers to a shared services model on fewer systems. However, not all licensing costs will reduce in direct proportion, as they are often based on either the number of users or workload metrics. Further savings can be made from the consolidation of the numerous management applications often found in the IT environment. Overall, we estimate that software costs can be reduced by up to 15% from a typical consolidation initiative. The challenge for today’s IT management is to provide an IT infrastructure that enables business growth in a cost-conscious environment, against a background of continuing growth in the organization that drives up transaction volumes. The expectation is therefore that IT can quickly respond to new business requirements, which places more pressure on existing resources. The ability to manage performance is essential to optimize and plan capacity. If the resources are not robust enough to handle the increase, then additional spend will be required to maintain and repair the IT hardware to meet new and increasing commitments.
One of the key objectives is to improve the efficiency and lower the cost of the core infrastructure, or what can be termed ‘Run-The-Organization’ (RTO) spending. It is important for IT managers to understand the level of IT spending that is required to keep the organization running at its current level of activity, so this investment can be optimized for business benefit. In many instances it is a significant investment, equating to over three-quarters of the total IT budget. Reporting of under-utilized servers, storage, and network links can be used to reclaim capacity and/or redeploy more effectively. By exploiting portfolio management techniques, enterprises are also reducing the number of applications – including management systems deployed in the IT environment – to help lower this RTO spend.
Measuring the effectiveness of IT investments is a very significant factor in the ability of IT to provide value. Many organizations still have a long way to go in redirecting a greater proportion of IT spending towards ‘Change-The-Organization’ (CTO) investments. The HP Operations Center solution supports these investment decisions by associating business relevance with the infrastructure, enabling IT staff to work on the most important items first. This is at the core of a service-oriented approach to IT management, and the solution reduces operational costs by providing real-time visibility into the impact that the infrastructure components are having on IT and business performance.
An important aspect of this service-based approach, enabled by a consolidation strategy, is to ensure the performance and availability of critical services. The reliability and availability of IT systems, communications networks, and equipment is a key risk management consideration for the organization, and something that should be continually monitored. Risk assessment is an ongoing process, rather than something that is done once and then forgotten. By applying metrics and an appropriate management solution the IT department can keep track of events in the areas of performance and availability, whilst also ensuring that the risks the organization faces are continuously managed.
Key initial objectives are the deployment of performance measurement
mechanisms, along with enhancing and centralizing the management
capability.
Looking now in more detail at the key objectives of consolidation, it is surprising in discussions with IT managers to find the number of organizations that still do not have performance measurement systems in place. This is exacerbated by poor asset management, with little or no formal recording of what is contained within the IT environment. System metrics and information pertaining to resource utilization, and IT operational performance compared to business level metrics, are both vital for an understanding of the value that IT provides and in providing feedback to the management aspects of IT. Before embarking on a consolidation approach it is recommended that the following disciplines are instigated: financial and asset baselining, creating a plan of an optimized infrastructure, and the implementation of ongoing financial and performance metrics.
A prerequisite of any consolidation initiative is the deployment of a common management framework, and the centralization of management functions. You must know what you have got and how it performs before embarking on any kind of optimization including the monitoring of virtualized environments. The last thing that anybody wants to do is consolidate existing problems, making the current issues even worse and potentially impacting the whole business.
Consideration must be given to deploying an end-to-end management solution that can provide better visibility, interoperability, and additional functionality, enabling capabilities such as remote management, automation of back-up and restore, and automated software distribution and system provisioning procedures. Managing a computing environment made up of a large number of autonomous IT ‘islands’ should become a thing of the past, and organizations should plan a transition from using many individual solutions for monitoring and managing different hardware devices to a more service-centric operation. This transition requires bottom-up measurement to be used in conjunction with top-down service performance monitoring, driven by policies. The combination of both of these approaches culminates in an Operations Center for IT operations.
“Moving to a more service-centric operation means that bottom-up
measurement should be used in conjunction with top-down service
performance monitoring, driven by policies.”
The outcome of this centralized management strategy is that the whole systems environment can be administered by a central function, staffed by dedicated IT professionals. The management tools and associated user interface should be sophisticated enough now to allow a single point of control for all the different devices in the systems infrastructure. Consideration must be given to deploying an end-to-end management framework, such as HP’s Operations Center solution.
Consolidation initiatives typically consist of 10% technology and 90% procedure, where the availability of software to manage services, asset tracking tools, and discovery agents, helps IT staff with information gathering and deployment. No amount of system assistance and technology will prevent the reoccurrence of server sprawl after the deployment of a consolidation data center solution, unless there is the introduction of agreed-upon procedures for ongoing asset management, application delivery, IT service management, and associated change management processes.
The aim of consolidation must be to provide a balanced, optimized environment
that enables the smooth progression to a service-centric IT infrastructure.
Butler Group conducted a survey of IT decision-makers on issues relating to IT flexibility, including infrastructure agility. This survey of IT end-users was conducted through self-assessment by delegates at Butler Group Master Classes during 2006, and comprised 80 senior, managerial-level IT decision-makers from a variety of verticals. The survey indicated that the majority of respondents have centralized or largely centralized management and that 59% of organizations had embarked on an infrastructure consolidation strategy, either at departmental level or on an enterprise-wide basis.
This is in line with the notion that centralization and consolidation are a good starting point for an organization-wide IT infrastructure optimization initiative. However, for enterprise-scale organizations, with locations geographically spread, such unification can be problematic. This is borne out by the results of the survey, where at the enterprise level (5,000+ employees), adoption is only 6%, compared with 47% in large organizations (500-5,000 employees), whilst there is no discernable difference by sector. We believe that an integrated end-to-end management solution can assist these enterprise-scale organizations in gaining and maintaining visibility of the IT estate. The benefits of consolidation will obviously differ from enterprise to enterprise, and are dependent on the demands of the business and the rationale for consolidating in the first instance. Consolidation is not always about moving to one big system, but instead must be focused on adopting a balanced approach that takes all the operational considerations into account. Allied to the consolidation of the infrastructure and applications, the management of the infrastructure should evolve from being based purely on perceived technical requirements to being aligned with organizational requirements. For example, rather than simply ensuring bandwidth availability, the emphasis should be on ensuring that sufficient bandwidth is available for those applications and business processes that are mission critical. By managing the IT environment holistically and linking the infrastructure with the business services, IT operations and service-level management can be based on business priorities. Another requirement is to improve IT processes, so that the IT department is able to better manage all tasks and requirements. By enhancing management capabilities, manual workloads can be reduced, activities can be controlled, IT processes can be speeded up, and quality can be improved. This all leads to improved staff efficiency, and quicker mean time to problem identification and repair through root cause analysis.
To support the transition to a service-centric approach, many organizations are implementing best practice frameworks, such as ITIL or Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT). These frameworks provide the guidelines that are imperative in managing high-quality IT services, such as change management, problem resolution, service level monitoring, capacity and contingency planning, and configuration management. Planning to assess the risks and impact of proposed changes augments this, but can involve a large number of people. HP software solutions for IT Service Management (ITSM), including change management, provide tools to address and simplify these challenges.
It is important to have a continuous process of IT infrastructure optimization.
Many consolidation initiatives are one-off projects focused only on cost containment, or reduction, with the main focus on cutting back the number of physical servers found in the organization. A better approach is to adopt an evolutionary process, where optimization is based on continuous improvement of the systems environment, geared to meeting the business demands and the consolidation objectives of the IT department. This process consists of three main elements: monitoring, planning, and deployment. Butler Group cautions against one-off projects for monitoring tasks, or including them as the ‘assessment phase’ of the consolidation project. The belief is that monitoring is a key on-going process that should be integrated into day-to-day IT management activities.
Monitoring
The key considerations for the monitoring phase are as follows:
• Understanding business and service-level requirements is vital if the infrastructure is to be optimized.
• A system architecture cannot be designed correctly unless there is a good understanding of the business aims and the impact caused by downtime or poor performance.
• IT goals and technology need to be tightly integrated with the business objectives and systems put in place.
• The IT infrastructure must be capable of supporting sustained growth, and be flexible enough to react to changes in organization needs.
• Optimizing the system environment using virtualization approaches delivers a responsive infrastructure capable of meeting business demands.
• Reports from monitoring tools should be compared with business and IT objectives on a regular basis.
Before considering Data Center consolidation options, it is important to have a good understanding of the existing IT infrastructure, which can be enabled by discovery mechanisms and management tools that continually monitor the IT environment, populate a universal Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and provide dashboard views of the relationships with services. Watching the infrastructure for new servers, clients, network devices, along with deletions, changes, and additions, is essential to determine which elements to monitor and what events are important to monitor on the respective devices. These automated discovery mechanisms are an integral part of the Operations Center solution, as is the creation of a services model to provide scope for the monitoring.
“Monitoring is a key on-going process that should be integrated into
day-to-day IT management activities.”
An essential aspect of optimization is the reporting structure that is put in place. Examples that are important for consolidated Data Centers include network, server, storage, and virtual machine utilization and performance. By making reporting integral to the operation it is possible to create a holistic view of the environment, not only to analyze reported problems, but also to gain a greater insight into how each service impacts other areas of the infrastructure.
The use made of this more extensive level of reporting will be up to every individual organization to decide, since there is a trade-off between depth of reporting and cost. Those organizations that do not just consider reporting from a fire fighting perspective, but view it as an opportunity to improve their infrastructure and service provision on an ongoing basis, will gain the maximum benefit from acting upon end-to-end analytics.
Figure 2: Monitoring the IT Environment
Planning
System changes implemented as part of a consolidation strategy need careful planning and integration with other IT infrastructure optimization initiatives. Although this is the case for any IT project, experience indicates that pre-deployment planning is of paramount importance in this scenario. Initially, the business and technology priorities for infrastructure optimization need to be determined, with the ultimate objective being to evolve to a service-based systems environment. Compromises will always have to be made to achieve the required optimization, including balancing the parameters of high availability, cost reduction, and infrastructure agility. Other aims to be considered are the required capacity of the enhanced environment and the planned budget for running the optimized infrastructure.
Detailed planning provides the information and analysis needed for the migration to the chosen consolidation solution, and involves researching the hardware and software options and redesigning the infrastructure architecture based on the capacity and growth predictions. The primary deliverables are plans for implementing the optimization solution, the technical recommendations, and the identification of issues and risks. Performance monitoring provides essential input for capacity planning related to infrastructure, virtual servers, network, storage, application, and business service requirements. ITIL best practices for service management including change also help enforce solid IT planning processes, and are supported by HP Operations Center and ITSM.
Deployment
When deploying consolidation solutions it is important to utilize a multi-skilled dedicated team, with representation from network, system, and application professionals. In many instances the IT department may not have the skills or resources to implement the required changes in-house. In such cases, services can be provided by a third party. Even with proper planning and the use of simulation techniques, there can still be unforeseen consequences of system consolidation.
HP Operations Center software can be used to support a consolidation strategy
and service-based IT operations.
There are various elements of the HP Software Operations Center solution that can assist with a Data Center and/or IT management consolidation strategy, along with ongoing infrastructure and service optimization. HP Software is the market leading supplier for managing IT infrastructure operations from a business service management perspective, and its solution comprises a number of integrated core, underlying, and extended components.
Operations Center provides an integrated enterprise management solution that allows IT operations to optimize their infrastructure by increasing availability and performance of the end-to-end, heterogeneous IT infrastructure and applications. The outcome is that the enterprise can deliver and manage reliable cross-domain IT services to the business teams that rely on them, while improving staff efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations. HP Operations Center provides an essential foundation for Data Center consolidation and minimizes IT risk as mandated by worldwide compliance regulations and IT governance policies.
Figure 3: HP’s Service Management Approach for IT Infrastructure Operations
Core Operations Center Components
• Operations Manager – is the core component in providing the consolidated enterprise console, collecting and
correlating intelligence across local information sources with service impact views. The tool can detect capacity problems that could impact business services and supporting applications, enabling IT management to proactively respond. Risks can be minimized by ensuring the availability and performance of IT services.
• Performance Manager, Performance Agent, and GlancePlus – combine to provide a powerful and flexible
distributed management solution. This solution is a single interface for centrally monitoring, analyzing, and forecasting resource utilization for distributed multi-vendor physical and virtual environments.
• SiteScope – is an agentless monitoring software that helps increase the availability and performance of your
IT infrastructure. It continually monitors more than 65 types of IT infrastructure targets via a Web-based architecture that is lightweight and highly customizable.
• Service Impact Views – operates with a model of the services that compose the IT environment, highlighting
relationships and interdependencies, and enabling the identification of the impact that problems can cause on high-level services.
• Smart Plug-ins – offer integrated, out-of-the-box extension modules providing intelligence for managing
• Performance Insight – provides the required insight into your management data for successful service level
management. It is a highly scalable and customizable reporting tool that collects, analyzes, and summarizes management data from networks, systems, and services.
• Operations Dashboard – enables proactive sharing of consolidated and relevant IT Management information
from multiple domain tools via end-to-end Infrastructure Service health views.
Other Integrated Components
• Network Node Manager – gives the administrator the ability to manage large heterogeneous networks. The
software automatically discovers network assets and can graphically display the configuration.
• HP Storage Management – supplies storage area management.
• HP System Insight Manager – embedded management capability found in HP hardware.
• IT Service Management – identifies which services rely on certain IT elements, creating a link between
business services and the IT infrastructure, and enabling the administration of service levels.
HP’s customers are gaining significant benefits from the use of HP Operations
Center.
One example of a company that is gaining benefits from a Data Center consolidation strategy using HP software solutions is the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO), which provides electricity to 95% of the state’s 1.2 million residents.
Hawaiian Electric Company
Key Challenges
• Improve delivery and support of core business services.
• Centralize the operations of the Data Center.
• Design and implement an enterprise management software solution for a heterogeneous mix of Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and mainframe systems.
• Migrate from the mainframe to a distributed environment.
Strategy
Prior to 2005, HECO did not have any software management capability to centrally manage business critical services such as billing, ERP, and communications. The strategy embarked upon included Data Center consolidation, followed by the migration of core business applications from an IBM mainframe to a distributed systems architecture. In addition, to support business services the company invested in Avaya Voice over IP (VoIP) technology and required a means of controlling it centrally.
The HECO’s enterprise service management solution consists of HP OpenView Operations for Windows, Network Node Manager, Internet Services, Reporter, Smart Plug-in for Avaya IP Telephony, Dashboard, as well as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and SQL Server, and Oracle, Websphere MQ, and WebLogic Smart Plug-Ins. The Network Node Manager Smart Plug-In for Avaya Internet Portal Telephony enabled HECO to pass telephony management data up to the Network Node Manager console.
Outcomes
• Reduced complexity and costs by using integrated enterprise management software tools.
• Improved operations visibility, through a centralized, comprehensive view.
• Provided a standard interface for customers and partners.
• Shortened response cycles and increased operational efficiency.
• Increased productivity through the use of proactive management.
Contact Details
Hewlett-Packard Company 3000 Hanover Street Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel: +1 650 857 1501 Fax: +1 650 857 5518 www.hp.com/go/softwareHeadquarters: Australian Sales Office: End-user Sales Office (USA):
Europa House, Butler Direct Pty Ltd., Butler Group,
184 Ferensway, Level 46, Citigroup Building, 245 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor, Hull, East Yorkshire, 2 Park Street, Sydney, New York, NY 10016, HU1 3UT, UK NSW, 2000, Australia USA
Tel: +44 (0)1482 586149 Tel: + 61 (02) 8705 6960 Tel: +1 212 652 5302 Fax: +44 (0)1482 323577 Fax: + 61 (02) 8705 6961 Fax: +1 212 202 4684
WP000077DCC Important Notice
