solution brief September 2011 Can You Effectively Plan For The Migration And Management of Systems And Applications on Vblock Platforms?

solution brief September 2011 Can You Effectively Plan For The Migration And Management of Systems And Applications on Vblock Platforms?

CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock Platforms delivers capacity insight and decision support through the use of predictive analytics. CA Technologies patented predictive capacity management allows the combination of real-world performance data and financial information with modeling, simulation and automation to deliver highly accurate, dependable projections of future performance and service levels of business services on Vblock platforms. The business insights derived from this unique set of inputs give you the information needed to effectively plan capital budgets, improve spend on innovation, avoid costly downtime, and better manage risk across your portfolio of IT applications. 2

Executive Summary Challenge IT operations and strategic applications are at the core of your business. Customers, partners, and employees expect constant availability, while the CFO expects budget objectives to be met. Maintaining this balance has become a complex, ever-changing task for IT Operations. Performance monitoring data provides some value in that it tells you a problem is happening right now, but does not help with the proactive management of IT infrastructure assets. Virtualization adds additional levels of complexity when it comes to predicting the end user experience, and converged infrastructures further complicate the process of planning infrastructure to successfully support business services. Hypervisors add variable overhead to servers, and multiple virtual servers can compete for sometimes scarce physical resources. IT managers need to consider not just the utilization of the individual components of their datacenter, but also the end user experience. IT is also increasingly called upon to provide business service/application level reporting to the business sponsors who own applications. Response times for business critical transactions, as viewed from the customer and employee perspective, have to stay within acceptable ranges. Transactions that deliver important results to the business should complete within specified timeframes, and not adversely impact interactive workloads. How can you correctly design and plan for the capacity of Vblock Infrastructure Platforms that will satisfy your internal customers on initial deployment, and maintain the end user experience in the face of constant change? Opportunity Gartner reports that most IT shops only use 18 20% of their CPU capacity even after virtualizing. CA Capacity Management and Reporting suite for Vblock Platforms will help you identify opportunities for virtualization, and potential savings from reduced data center space, energy consumption and maintenance. The solution will provide a prescription for effectively utilizing Vblock platforms to gain economies of scale in a converged computing environment. The ability to conduct what-if scenarios will provide you concrete guidance on how applications will perform after changes are made, allowing you to consolidate to Vblock Infrastructure Platforms with confidence. You will also gain access to data that will allow you to plan capital expense budgets in support of capacity and service level requirements. CA Capacity Management and Reporting suite for Vblock Platforms provides insight that helps you better meet service levels to the business and make Vblock platform investment decisions with confidence. 3

Benefits CA Capacity Management and Reporting suite for Vblock Platforms provides insight into the mix of infrastructure investments which help you meet your target end-user response times. It provides answers in both technical and business terms that are easily accessible through executive dashboards. CA Technologies provides you the ability to identify opportunities for consolidation or virtualization to Vblock Infrastructure Platforms and highlight potential savings while keeping risk to a minimum and identifying performance bottlenecks well before they occur. Section 1 Virtualizing tier 1 applications To date, most organizations have limited their deployment of virtualization to non-mission-critical applications. Virtualization has some limitations such as an inability to effectively handle I/O intensive business functions. But given that the technology is unproven in mission critical, high-availability, highly visible applications, CIOs are reticent to fully deploy it against those areas of their shop. Tier 1 applications are typically the highest provisioned, most redundant and expensive to run in the IT shop. The potential to improve operations by virtualizing them onto Vblock platforms is substantial. While there may be consequential benefit to be gained by virtualizing, there remain a number of significant constraints as well. As the appointed steward of the organization s IT investments, the CIO is consequent to the requirements of their internal customers. All other motivations are secondary to the mission of maintaining service levels for business units and ensuring high availability of systems. With businesses depending more and more on immediate access to information and applications, degraded service is simply unacceptable; especially when that degradation is usually related to an increase in business transactions on those systems. Limited ability to test for performance Since it s not economical or practical to physically replicate production environments for test purposes, organizations have the difficult task of trying to understand and replicate actual production workloads to ensure performance. Major limitations most organizations deal with are: The test environments are often a subset of the production environment, with a limited subset of infrastructure and a limited workload. The differences between the test and production environment can mask the actual performance that will be experienced in production. Often, a small increase in workload will result in a substantial increase in end-user response times. When CPU or memory consumption approaches certain thresholds, performance falls off rapidly in production. Virtual environments have become exponentially more complex to deploy, manage and optimize. It has progressed beyond the scope of manual effort; automation is required for effective virtual management. 4

VM sprawl Server virtualization in distributed environments is exploding in popularity and adoption. Virtualization should allow organizations to improve their use of currently underutilized computing resources, delivering simpler system administration, fewer servers to manage, reduced power consumption and a reduced carbon footprint. Converged infrastructures like Vblock platforms accelerate these benefits if used correctly. Virtualization has quickly reached a level of technical maturity; now the challenge CIO s face is to extract the maximum economic value from the adoption of this new technology. Dynamics such as VM sprawl indicate that most organizations are working with too little information to realize the full potential of virtualization. When VM sprawl occurs in an environment like Vblock platforms, it s expensive and counter-productive. CIO s are all facing budget pressures, the need to do more with fewer resources, diminishing data center capacity, new requests to support business initiatives and rising pressure to improve the organization s impact on the environment. When you consider that IT operations create as much pollution as the airline industry, it s clear that there s a lot of potential improvement on all these fronts. Virtualization allows IT to use servers selectively to process workloads from applications as they re required, minimizing the amount of time computing capacity remains idle, effectively waiting for something to do. Most businesses only use about 18% of their actual compute power, so the potential savings can be enormous. Dynamic data center Vblock Infrastructure Platforms dynamically moves active workloads to idle resources, and prioritizes which workloads get what resources when. But not knowing the impact of one or all of these workloads on resource availability means that there s no telling when the overall architecture will reach its saturation point. Since the objective of virtualizing in the first place was to reduce the number of servers IT maintains, there will be fewer resources to call on when new virtual machines are needed to handle the demand. And when a virtualized architecture like Vblock platforms runs out of additional virtual machines to assign workloads, performance suffers. Systems become unavailable, or wait times become unacceptable. As IT budgets become more tied to lines of business and their business outcomes, or economic results, maintaining service levels in IT is becoming a condition of employment for CIO s. Section 2: Solution CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock Platforms CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock Platforms delivers insight and decision support unique predictive analytics. CA Capacity Management combines real-world performance data, modeling, simulation, financial information and intelligent reporting to deliver highly accurate, dependable projections of future performance and service levels of key applications and IT infrastructure. The business insights derived from this unique set of inputs give you the information needed to effectively plan capital budgets, improve spend on innovation, avoid costly downtime, and better manage risk across your portfolio of IT applications. 5

CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock Platforms includes a central repository and current state reporting component that can be leveraged across the enterprise providing organizations with: A single user experience for Vblock platforms capacity reporting and planning across the enterprise Automated resource capacity/ consumption reporting, normalized to a consistent measure across Vblock platforms implementations using the CA Capacity Manager Resource Score (Rx) A multi-user, Web based portal with interactive reporting capabilities A common repository for performance & configuration information An integrated global component model library (CML) & infrastructure library Logical grouping of components and hosts (by business unit, for instance) and business service support Automated, scheduled report creation for Vblock platforms capacity monitoring and management An open reporting framework with ability to group by individual system, application or logical grouping Normalization of performance information from Vblock Infrastructure Platforms A consistent, objective measure of capacity and consumption to determine large scale efficiencies across Vblock Infrastructure Platforms Automated business service based reporting and analysis allowing the business to align to actual resource usage needs CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock Platforms allow you to keep risk at a minimum by identifying performance bottlenecks early and budgeting to correct them. Using both technical and business data, you re able to make informed business decisions about IT with better clarity and certainty. CA Technologies provides insight for IT investment decisions: Balance workloads or consolidate under-utilized servers and reliably predict the effects of reallocating to Vblock platforms and various Vblock platform configuration options Evaluate and select which infrastructure to consolidate to reduce cost without affecting service levels Determine if your applications are performing to committed service levels Determine the hardware and capacity requirements to support strategic business applications Identify which infrastructure components need upgrading or which may be virtualized Optimize complex virtualized environments for cost and performance Quickly analyze the cost of possible business change scenarios Safely predict the impact of cumulative business changes on applications and their performance at a low cost 6

Section 3: Benefits Extend your infrastructure investment CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite for Vblock Platforms allows organizations to leverage your internal monitoring capability to provide the prescriptive answers and business justification you need to make informed investment decisions. No additional performance monitoring or proprietary agents are needed, which can help you lower costs, potential risks and downtime to your production environment. Just as importantly, CA Technologies predictive management allows IT organizations to do all of this without intentionally overprovisioning hardware, creating cost savings and freeing up capital for strategic investment. With better visibility into IT infrastructures, customers will benefit from: Precise alignment between the business and IT Accurate decision support for IT infrastructure and application investments Less time spent firefighting IT performance issues Balanced application performance, cost and risk Accurate prediction of application behavior resulting from production IT changes Predictable IT budget planning cycles Section 4 The CA Technologies advantage The intelligent predictive analytics engine that power CA Technologies solutions understands the scalability of the components in the customer s architectures, including the components that make up the various Vblock platform options. This intelligence allows for very fast and accurate predictions of capacity consumption and business service behavior, enabling precise and optimal placement of workloads to maximize IT efficiency. CA Technologies solution is unique in the marketplace in that it comprises patented predictive analytics, a hardware model library that understands the scalability of each component in the architecture, a fast and easily configured reporting framework for producing business and technical views, and the Resource Score, CA Technologies patented methodology for normalizing the measure of IT capacity and workload demand. Combined with CA Technologies world-class professional services and partner community, the solution is designed to support the needs of the most demanding IT shops in the world. Existing customers and users of CA Technologies will appreciate the familiar and easy-to-use interface that is shared with many other components across the CA Technologies portfolio. And because it s from CA Technologies, users can be sure that the solution is extensible and integrated with their existing investments in CA Technologies software and solutions. 7

About VCE VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company 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 platform, delivers the industry s first completely integrated IT offering with end-to-end vendor accountability. 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. To learn more about CA Technologies unique, intelligent capacity management solutions, please visit the Capacity Management section on ca.com. Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com Agility Made Possible: The CA Technologies Advantage CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data center to the cloud. CA Technologies is committed to ensuring our customers achieve their desired outcomes and expected business value through the use of our technology. To learn more about our customer success programs, visit ca.com/customer-success. For more information about CA Technologies go to ca.com. Copyright 2011 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 completeness of the information. 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, 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 in advance of the possibility of such damages. acs1642_0911