agility
made possible
™service quality and availability
while optimizing
operations on VCE
Vblock ™ Systems?
solutions from CA Technologies.
Challenge
IT and service operations are measured by their ability to deliver on committed service levels and support business expectations for the critical services customers depend on. But how does Operations ensure the infrastructure meets these commitments to their end users and revenue-generating customers? Most enterprises and service providers rely on silo-oriented tools, third-party applications and human instinct to help ensure the health of the underlying infrastructure and business applications, but could these tools and applications work better if they were consolidated into a single business service view? How does the silo management approach change when converged infrastructure is introduced to the environment?
Opportunity
Converged infrastructure and its underlying virtualized network and compute environment presents new opportunities for management and performance monitoring. Integrated real-time availability and performance monitoring is especially important for the management solution for a converged, virtualized environment since operations must instantly respond to problems, be more collaborative among its staff, and gain better understanding of the needs that are of greatest importance to the business. Where traditional management tools are proven “silo monitors”, integrated real-time tools provide a holistic look of the entire infrastructure.
Benefits
Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies for Vblock Systems monitor components within the network, compute, virtualization, and business service layers. They discover and monitor components and applications running on Vblock Systems, providing a tightly coupled and integrated management environment for effectively managing a converged infrastructure. With integrated availability and performance management of Vblock Systems, IT can easily identify elements needing improvement and resolution, helping to ensure the health and availability of business services running on Vblock systems.
executive summary
Section 1: Challenge
Managing traditional data centers vs.
converged infrastructures
Whether an incident occurs in the traditional data center or in a converged infrastructure environment, technology operations is responsible is for remediating the issue as quickly as possible to minimize business impact. In the traditional data center, operations typically approaches problem resolution by manual notifications and by engaging suspected support departments before the actual
troubleshooting process begins.
In addition, operational teams test and check the suspected infrastructure components until a process of elimination reveals the root cause and the issue is finally resolved. This troubleshooting approach can be costly for IT since too much dedicated manpower and time resources must be diverted to restore failed services instead of focusing on new, strategic initiatives. The more complex the problem, the longer this process can take.
Converged infrastructures, like Vblock systems, present new management opportunities for enterprise IT organizations and cloud service providers. Since the fundamental infrastructure components are selected and pretested to work together, much of the complexity and diversity inherent in the traditional data center is removed. Using “Vblock Ready” certified solutions from CA Technologies, IT and service operations teams can identify and diagnose application and performance issues using a single dashboard and integrated workflows. The end result can save time by involving fewer people and processes that would normally slow down service restoration.
Hidden issues
Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies certified for Vblock Systems can help address hidden costs of data center operation.
Customer watchdog
Unfortunately, poor IT service monitoring and management often results in the customer or employees substituting for an IT problem alert system. Users might suspect their equipment is the problem, wasting valuable time checking or rebooting their systems, interrupting work until realizing it’s not them. Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies for Vblock Systems can predict in real-time areas of potential service degradation, allowing IT to proactively adjust as the situation requires.
Cross-functional teams
Rather than involving just the team that is responsible for repairing a particular issue, too often IT must engage different teams and go through “conference room correlation” for problem remediation, which wastes time for everyone, especially customers. Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies for Vblock Systems isolate the root-cause of the issue, engaging the correct department to address and repair the problem.
Data center stagnation
IT and service operations teams that have difficulties identifying areas of improvement within their infrastructure may find it difficult to keep pace with more efficient advancements in networking or physical operations. An operations group may forfeit past investments in older equipment and move to newer converged infrastructures, which can reduce operational costs and open up the possibility of lower costs from “converged management” too. Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies certified for Vblock Systems provides the converged management visibility and control, which should give IT and service operations more confidence to rapidly deploy Vblock Systems.
No baseline
Baselining infrastructure utilization is an important way to provide the means to measure and prove savings and demonstrate ROI. Without a baseline, it is difficult to accurately justify hardware upgrades and replacements. Information collected from Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies certified for Vblock Systems allows accurate capacity planning and execution of continuous improvements.
Section 2: Opportunity
Tightly-integrated assurance solutions
Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies for Vblock Systems can be used in a tightly integrated configuration or deployed over time for organizations that have limited capital expenses or prefer to roll out management solutions more gradually.
CA Infrastructure Management is a foundational component of the Service Assurance solution for Vblock Systems. It incorporates availability and performance management functions by combining the CA Spectrum® and CA eHealth® technologies and includes an application integration module (AIM) to the Cisco UCS Manager for monitoring the Cisco networking and compute components within Vblock Systems (UCS AIM). An add-on module for CA Infrastructure Management, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, interfaces with the VMware vCenter for monitoring the virtual machine components (vCenter AIM).
CA Service Operations Insight is a next-generation solution for managing business services in traditional and cloud-connected environments. CA Service Operations Insight integrates and analyzes information from CA Technologies and third-party IT management tools to pinpoint, prioritize and resolve service problems across the technology supply chain to help minimize risks to the business.
The solution includes integration with the EMC® Ionix™ Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) interface for incorporating Vblock Systems as part of a service model.
CA Infrastructure Management – CA Spectrum technology component
The CA Spectrum technology is part of the CA Infrastructure Management solution. CA Spectrum provides auto-discovery of network devices and physical and virtual systems and builds a software representation of the topology for a centralized view of the Vblock Systems (figure 2). It provides fault detection, alarm notification, fault isolation and root cause analysis for the monitored environment.
CA Spectrum version 9.2.1 is supported on Red Hat® Linux® and Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008.
CA Spectrum continuously discovers the granular Vblock Systems and virtual machines, leveraging information from Cisco UCS® Manager and VMware® vCenter®, resulting in an accurate, real-time model of the environment. CA Spectrum integrates with VMware vCenter via the add-on vCenter AIM module (CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers) and with Cisco UCS via an embedded Cisco USCAIM module to provide:
• Management capabilities of systems under VMware vCenter Server control
• Collection of availability and device statistics from Cisco UCS
Figure 1
Communications flow of Service Assurance from CA Technologies components
integrating with
Vblock Systems Spectrum
& eHealth Catalyst Connector
CA Catalyst ConnectorUIM
Catalyst
Business Service Management
Common Integration Platform
Infrastructure and Performance Monitoring
Service Operations Insight
Spectrum eHealth
Cisco UCS Vblock
UIM VMware vCenter
vCenter AIM UCS AIM
Vblock Platform
Application Insight Modules (AIMs)
Automated root cause analysis
One of CA Spectrum’s key features is automatically isolating faults determined by alarm and event correlation. All but the originating, root cause alert are suppressed so that operations can focus on actionable information.
CA Infrastructure Management – CA eHealth Technology Component
CA eHealth (figure 3) collects and analyzes performance information for real time issue detection (figure 3) and predictive analysis (figure 4) to determine where service quality could be jeopardized.
It combines historical and real-time metrics to generate a wide variety of out-of-the box reports, which are used for troubleshooting and service reporting. CA eHealth version 6.3 is supported on Red Hat Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 32-bit editions only.
CA eHealth integrates with VMware vCenter via the add-on vCenter AIM and with Cisco UCS via an embedded USC AIM module to:
• Collect performance, utilization and capacity data from the VMware vSphere environments through
Figure 2
CA Spectrum® isolates the problem’s root cause and clearly displays the affected element in red. The impacts on the network, services and customers are directly displayed as well in gray.
Figure 3
With predefined thresholds for each key performance indicator (KPI) based on best practices, the system’s Time over Threshold technology lets you know when an IT resource has persistent performance problems, allowing you to avoid the transient spikes that don’t need your attention.
Figure 4
Deviation from Normal technology uses historical data to establish a baseline for what is normal behavior for your infrastructure within each monitoring window (hour of each day and day of week) and then assesses whether the current behavior deviates from that norm.
CA Service Operations Insight
CA Service Operations Insight integrates with application and infrastructure domain management tools to build views of service status and to analyze and pinpoint service problems. CA Service Operations Insight can also integrate with other IT management tools to take automated actions for escalating and remediating service problems, mitigating service risks and improving service level performance.
CA Service Operations Insight provides a variety of primary views of service delivery, including a dashboard showing status of all business services under management, an operational console showing the model of a service and an operational consoled showing all the events originating from the monitored environment (figure 5).
Figure 5
CA Service Operations Insight includes Service Dashboard, Operations and Alert consoles, Mobile UI, and Reporting
CA Service Operations Insight integrates via the UIM interface to discover services hosted on the platform. CA SOI version 3.0 is supported on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and requires access to an instance of Microsoft MS-SQL Server 2008 Standard or Enterprise Edition.
CA Service Operations Insight helps highlight and isolate service issues using:
• Dynamic Business Service Modeling – Creates and updates in real-time models of business services based on transaction discovery and mapping, policy-based relationship discovery, and real-time updates of imported infrastructure models.
• Service Analytics and Alerts – Isolates service quality issues proactively before serious problems can occur.
• Service-Driven Automation – Alerts can be configured to generate service desk tickets and related processes.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) Performance Management – Continuously monitors and compares service quality and availability to negotiated customer expectations, giving IT advanced notification of performance issues.
Section 3: Benefits
Focus on Virtualization Performance Monitoring
Transform IT operations from reactive to proactive
Addressing performance issues with key infrastructure elements before they potentially become a problem can’t be accomplished with traditional management tools that alert after the fact. Reacting to issues in real-time requires real-time, integrated management tools to improve incident response time.
Demonstrate IT business value to executives and stakeholders
IT and service operations departments share a responsibility with the business in meeting its goals.
With proper assurance tools, these groups can play a more vital role in the business. Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies also make it easy to produce extensive historical and real-time reports for performance and capacity planning.
Complete management workflow
By completely integrating CA Service Operations Insight and CA Infrastructure Management (with its embedded CA Spectrum and CA eHealth technologies), businesses benefit from a complete fault and performance, business service-oriented management workflow. Monitored components will be synchronized automatically between the two CA Service Assurance solutions. The performance alerts generated from CA eHealth will be integrated into the CA Spectrum root cause analysis engine and the CA Service Operations Insight business service views. CA eHealth reports can be directly loaded from the CA Spectrum administrator interface.
Evolve to service-focused management
• Proactively identify, prioritize and resolve issue across IT service supply chain and help minimize risks to business
• Build and maintain a real-time, cross-domain, end-to-end view of services
• Analyze service health, quality, availability and risk
• Contextually launch domain managers for root-cause analysis
• Query and correlate cross-domain events into actionable alerts and queries
• Standardize and enforce escalation policies
Section 4:
The CA Technologies advantage
The Service Assurance portfolio of solutions from CA Technologies allows for proactive monitoring for the availability and performance of Vblock Systems and the business services hosted on them.
The CA Technologies approach to service assurance delivers improved ROI because it makes it easier to target underperforming areas of your Vblock Systems infrastructure.
The CA Spectrum technology is well proven as a fault and availability manager, using CA Technologies patented root-cause and AutoDiscovery technology, infrastructure service modeling, and change-aware configuration management.
The CA eHealth technology continually monitors your Vblock Systems, collecting performance and utilization data. After evaluating the results for threshold violations, the solution issues alerts in real-time to help you identify performance issues that impact business services, allowing proactive intervention before it impacts your customers.
CA Service Operations Insight uniquely integrates application performance, infrastructure and other management tools to provide a comprehensive view of services based on end-to-end application performance and transaction visibility and a top-to-bottom understanding of the IT infrastructure.
To keep your CA Technologies solutions operating at top performance, CA Support ca.com/support delivers superior technical and customer support worldwide, along with training and education through CA Education, ca.com/education. For updates on the latest CA Technologies Vblock-ready products and solutions, go to ca.com/vblock.
Section 5:
About VCE
VCE, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock system, delivers the industry’s only fully integrated and fully virtualized cloud infrastructure system. VCE’s prepackaged solutions are available through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating and managing IT infrastructure. For more information, go to www.vce.com.
Copyright © 2012 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or
CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments—from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 rely on CA Technologies to manage their evolving IT ecosystems.
For additional information, visit CA Technologies at ca.com.
