Elavon achieves greater business agility with CA Data Center Automation

Transcription

1 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION Elavon achieves greater business agility with CA Data Center Automation

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary SECTION 1: CHALLENGE 2 Maximizing IT efficiency and uptime Growing the Business, Not the Costs Agility Through Automation SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY 3 Automating Server and Application Provisioning with CA Data Center Automation Manager Automated Request Submission and Approval Automated Environment Deployment Automated Environment Recapture Driving Ongoing Growth and Profitability SECTION 3: BENEFITS 5 Data Center Automation Maximizes IT s Business Value Proof of Concept for a quantum leap SECTION 3: CONCLUSIONS 6 Doing More Business Without More IT Copyright 2008 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. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document As Is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages.

3 Executive Summary Challenge To meet the demands of an aggressive growth strategy, Elavon must efficiently integrate and streamline the IT assets of acquired companies. At the same time, to ensure it can profitably deliver the highest levels of service quality to its rapidly growing merchant customer base, the global credit processing solutions provider must minimize its cost per transaction and keep uptime at the absolute maximum. Opportunity Elavon is currently implementing CA technology to automatically provision and schedule multiplatform environments to develop and test new, business-critical software applications on-demand. The resulting significant increase in development efficiency will help lead to higher software quality and reduced time-to-market. Having established proof-of-concept for this resources as a service model, Elavon plans to apply similar automation step-by-step across its global data center ultimately to enable dynamic reallocation of virtualized assets based on load, scheduling and other predefined criteria. Benefits Elavon will be better able to develop and deploy business-critical application software of higher quality in less time. Doing so will help save money, improve Quality of Service (QoS) to merchant customers, and reduce the inherent business risk associated with any potential errors in Elavon s new and updated applications. Automated provisioning will also free IT administrators and other key staff to focus on higher-value activities. Elavon has also moved closer to its long-range goal of radically consolidating its global data center environment. This empowers the business to further hone its competitive edge and sustain both ongoing growth and enhanced profitability. TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION 1

4 SECTION 1: CHALLENGE Maximizing IT Efficiency and Uptime Many enterprises are challenged to efficiently manage growth while sustaining the high quality of service, low prices, and other factors that have enabled them to acquire and retain customers. This is especially true in technology-centric industries like financial services, where profitability and long-term success depend strongly on a company s ability to cut excess costs out of every transaction, while delivering impeccably fast and reliable service. Yet managing a growing diversity of IT assets can make it difficult to maintain much less improve the agility and reliability of IT service delivery. To meet this challenge, organizations need a resources as a service model that enables users to reserve assets on-demand through an online self-service interface. This approach drives ongoing efficiency gains by reducing data center complexity, standardizing provisioning and configuration processes, and optimizing asset utilization. Growing the Business, Not the Costs Elavon, one of the world s largest and fastest-growing credit processing solution providers, has an aggressive growth strategy that includes strategic acquisitions. When a business is acquired, Elavon s IT organization must integrate and streamline its data centers and IT assets quickly and effectively, without disrupting overall operating efficiency. It all comes down to cost per transaction. Anything we can strip out is going to be of value to us. David Brattain Senior Vice President of Systems EITM and Production Support, Elavon But, while minimizing the overhead associated with data center assets is a top IT priority, Elavon must also have the processing power required to serve its rapidly expanding customer base on tap 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Currently, Elavon serves more than one million merchant locations worldwide with an annual throughput of well over a billion transactions. At any given time the company s IT systems can easily be processing one hundred-plus customer transactions per second. In that equation, a one-minute service outage equals thousands of failed transactions. Needless to say, Elavon must minimize the possibility of downtime to the vanishing point without sacrificing the per-transaction cost-efficiency that enables it to outperform competitors. This entails consolidating redundant and underperforming assets. As David Brattain, Senior Vice President of Systems, Enterprise IT Management and Production Support at Elavon puts it, It all comes down to cost per transaction. Anything we can strip out is going to be of value to us. We need to manage out the low-value assets and make full use of the assets that provide real value. Agility Through Automation Elavon has realized significant business benefits through its adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ) framework across a broad spectrum of service lifecycle management processes (Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, etc.). For example, Elavon s use of ITIL has greatly reduced the effort involved in compliance audits, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and SAS 70. CA technology, including CA Service Desk and CA Network and Systems Management (CA NSM), has helped Elavon automate and mature these critical processes, and now supports the company s adoption of the next level of ITIL guidance. 2 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION

5 To support more and more customers while continuously improving the IT efficiency so crucial to its bottom line, Elavon is systematically virtualizing and consolidating as much of its distributed data center assets as possible. Solid IT process maturity contributes greatly to this effort. According to Brattain, We ve been able to recover about 30 to 40 percent of our power, space, and cooling as a result. But while consolidation has enabled Elavon to improve its transaction processing efficiency, data center automation capabilities like application discovery, configuration change management, and automated provisioning are also important in realizing the full business value of improved IT resource utilization. Brattain s long-range vision is to fundamentally change the way we manage virtual server capacity. Ultimately, Elavon wants to be able to provision and configure application servers or database servers based on dynamic business needs automatically within the virtual data center environment, in response to thresholds or alerts. Elavon will use CA Data Center Automation Manager technology in combination with its other CA investments to make this vision a reality going forward. SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY The CA Data Center Automation solution will help Elavon s development staff automatically request, provision, configure, and schedule the use of complete, virtual environments. Automating Server and Application Provisioning with CA Data Center Automation Manager The first step toward fully automated discovery, impact analysis and provisioning across Elavon s global production environment is to automate server and application provisioning for crucial software development activities, using CA Data Center Automation Manager. CA Data Center Automation Manager will help Elavon s development staff automatically request, provision, configure, and schedule the use of complete, physical and virtual environments. This includes: application servers, web servers, database servers, middleware, operating systems, software code libraries, development tools, and other elements necessary to conduct all levels of testing on Elavon s financial services software. Because CA Data Center Automation does not require the procurement and deployment of multiple physical hardware environments to support these activities, CA technology can help Elavon roll out new, virtual software testing environments in minutes instead of weeks. The ways in which Elavon will use CA Data Automation Manager include: QA staff will utilize the Data Center Reservation Manager to request that an environment for testing a new release of an application be made available, or to reactivate an environment that has been deactivated. Using Data Center Reservation Manager, an IT administrator can approve the request and have the environment automatically configured and provisioned for QA testing use. TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION 3

6 IT administrators will use CA Data Center Automation Manager to perform the one-time configuration of virtual machines (or templates) that make up specific application develop - ment environments. Existing virtual machines can simply be cloned as a starting point to create new ones. IT administrators will use CA Data Center Automation Manager to create software packages used to deploy the new release of Elavon software to the virtual servers. Figure A illustrates this self-service resource provisioning model. FIGURE A Traditional and self-service provisioning models. SELF-SERVICE RESOURCE PROVISIONING MODEL Automated Request Submission and Approval When QA submits a request for a virtual development environment, an notification will automatically be sent to the appropriate IT administrators. The will include the identity of the user who submitted the request, the user s organization, requested start and end times, and other relevant details of the request, along with a URL for launching Data Center Reservation Manager. The administrator can then quickly view the submitted reservation request, evaluate it, and approve or reject it. If rejected, the administrator s reason for this decision is automatically ed to the requestor. If approved, CA Data Center Reservation Manager processes the request and makes the environment available at the requested start time, without additional intervention from the administrator. 4 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION

7 Automated Environment Deployment The CA Data Center Automation Manager starts up automatically when it is time to process an approved request. If a scheduled action must be performed before bringing any machine online, CA Data Center Automation Manager automatically executes that action first. For example, a database server may need to be configured with test data prior to starting up the virtual test servers. If a problem arises in the course of performing any action, an alert is sent to all appropriate IT administrators and the test environment deployment fails. Otherwise, CA Data Center Automation Manager begins processing the individual server templates that make up the full QA test environment. If an action is to be performed after it brings the full virtual environment online, CA Data Center Automation Manager executes that action; for example, to run verification tests to confirm that the test environment is provisioned and configured correctly. When the test environment is ready for use, a confirmation is sent to the QA user who submitted the request. Automated Environment Recapture At the expiration time for the requested development environment, CA Data Center Automation Manager automatically notifies the requestor. CA Data Center Automation Manager then performs any pending required actions. Next, CA Data Center Automation Manager submits requests to power down all virtual machines and servers associated with the expiring development environment. Driving Ongoing Growth and Profitability Having begun utilizing CA Data Center Automation Manager to automatically schedule, provision, and deploy virtual environments for business-critical application development activities, Elavon is poised to further consolidate its data centers, starting with key data centers in Atlanta and Knoxville. This positions the company to successfully manage ongoing, rapid growth, while shrinking its all-important cost per transaction at the same time. SECTION 3: BENEFITS Data Center Automation Maximizes IT s Business Value Elavon s initial use of CA Data Center Automation Manager in its application test environment will yield significant benefits for the credit processing solutions provider and its customers: SHORTER TIME-TO-MARKET FOR APPLICATIONS The time required to set up and take down test environments will be radically less than when these processes were performed manually. This reduces the time required to test new software and thus the time-to-market for changes, upgrades and new services. IMPROVED IT SERVICE QUALITY AND AVAILABILITY By reducing the time and resources required for software testing, and the human errors associated with setting up appropriate hardware and software configurations and procedures, Elavon can develop and deliver higher-quality software in less time. This directly improves service quality and reliability, leading to greater customer satisfaction. TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION 5

8 CA is making it possible for someone with practically no technical experience to bring up or power down a whole application infrastructure David Brattain Senior Vice President of Systems EITM and Production Support, Elavon IMPROVED IT PRODUCTIVITY IT administrators are a scarce commodity in any company, and their time is extremely valuable. CA Data Center Automation makes it possible for staff members who are not highly technically skilled to perform many of the routine tasks associated with provisioning virtual environments. This frees IT administrators to perform more high-value work. CA is making it possible for someone with practically no technical experience to bring up or power down a whole application infrastructure, which I think is pretty remarkable, offers Brattain. Proof of Concept for a Quantum Leap In addition to the above benefits, experiencing CA Data Center Automation has positioned Elavon to begin automating more of its global data center environment, step by step. According to Brattain, bringing this initiative to fruition will deliver exceptional benefits that will directly improve Elavon s profitability, business agility and competitive edge: IMPROVED TRANSACTION THROUGHPUT Through data center automation, Elavon can improve its application availability. Increased IT efficiency means more transactions processed per unit of time, which drives down the cost per transaction and that translates directly to success in Elavon s business. REDUCED OPERATING EXPENSES Data center automation makes it possible for Elavon to utilize its consolidated and virtualized server assets more efficiently and completely. Over time, this will enable Elavon to further consolidate transaction processing capacity and reduce the number of data centers and physical machines it needs to manage. This translates into operating expense savings on cooling, electricity, space, and headcount and directly supports Elavon s green IT initiatives. Everything we can do to reduce the cost per transaction and keep the engine running without interruption is beneficial, Brattain explains. Through leveraging CA s data center automation solution in combination with other key CA technology, says Brattain, We ll have a dramatic reduction in the number of data centers that we have to support in the future. SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS Elavon s vision for virtualization goes well beyond the conventional perspective, Brattain adds What everybody s doing today, such as mapping physical machines to virtual machines, that s nothing fundamentally new. We were doing that in the mainframe world thirty years ago. Brattain continues, What is different and new, and which we weren t doing in the mainframe era, is the ability to bring up virtual machines based on performance thresholds, alerts, and other predefined criteria. That is huge stuff. That s the Holy Grail of virtualization. It will fundamentally change the way we manage IT. In contrast, many of Elavon s competitors have been slow to adopt even conventional virtualization models, according to Brattain. As a result, to increase processing capacity they must purchase, deploy, provision, house, power, and cool more and more bare metal servers. I think they re going to find all this getting very expensive to manage in our business environment, Brattain asserts. 6 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION

9 Right now we re seeing a fairly steep rise in business growth, with a correspondingly very, very small incremental growth in our data center requirements. David Brattain Senior Vice President of Systems EITM and Production Support, Elavon Doing More Business Without More IT According to Brattain, it is not necessary for Elavon to increase physical data center capacity to grow the business. He states, The technology is there; we just have to continue implementing it. Right now we re seeing a fairly steep rise in business growth, with a correspondingly very, very small incremental growth in our data center requirements. It takes only a very small amount of additional IT horsepower to drive significantly more business. CA s solutions and Enterprise IT Management (EITM) approach fit well with our business model, comments Brattain. By adopting a resources as a service model in combination with mature service lifecycle management processes, all supported by CA technology, Elavon can continue to further optimize its IT asset utilization driving cost reductions that go straight to its bottom line. These ongoing efficiency and resource gains optimally empower Elavon s business strategy of aggressive acquisition by enabling the business to become more profitable the more it grows. As it continues to succeed on the critical measure of cost per transaction, Elavon is wellpositioned to continue to take market share and enjoy a dominant position in its industry well into the future. To learn more about the CA Data Center Automation architecture and technical approach, visit ca.com/dca. TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE IT MANAGEMENT WITH INCREASED AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION 7

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