M2 Technology Delivering Cost Effective IT Services Defense agencies have been directed to move towards cloud and shared service models by the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), the SecDef Efficiencies Initiative, the Federal CIO 25 Point Implementation Plan, the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act and other Federal or Agency level mandates. DoD Enterprise Computing Centers (ECC) and Area/Regional Processing Centers (A/RPC) will need to greatly increase the compute capability per dollar ratio to meet the DoD s estimated $370M annual efficiencies by FY 2016. DoD Enterprise Computing Centers need to offer IT services to Defense components with more reliability, more security and lower costs than the existing data centers in the components to encourage the components to migrate their applications into the ECC. Achieving this goal requires the automation of both IT processes and IT actions. Automated processes enable better decision making by gathering and presenting status and outcomes of the IT teams activities. Automating IT tasks reduces risk and enables the agility needed to provide cloud services. Automating process and actions greatly reduces the number of man hours needed to operate a data center and gives IT more time for innovation. Additional efficiencies found by changing data center architecture, application modernization and implementing hyperscale severs will be covered in future papers. www.m2ti.com 1
Broad Benefits of Automation Automating IT actions to deploying new virtual servers, deploying and upgrading applications and patch management increases change success rate, decrease man hours and lays the foundation for self-service. Considerable reduction in man hours, often from 50% to 95%, is found in time saved on compliance management and reporting alone. Automating strategy and planning processes offers systemic cost savings by identifying duplicate projects, non-priority projects, improving program and project success rates while reducing man hours spent reporting and in low value meetings. First year savings when automating Project and Portfolio Management averages over 7% of the overall IT budget. Effective automation must capture the current best practices and continuously improve them. Automation enables rapid change and it s important to keep in mind that bad actions can be automated as easily as correct actions. Current DoD guidance is to utilize Information Technology Infrastructure Library v3 (ITIL v3) to supplement or improve existing best practices. The right thing to do becomes the easy thing to do when best practices are automated. The resulting reduction in outages related to human error save time and money as well as improving service reliability. Improvement in service reliability is also found in automated mitigation powered by linking automation with business service management for a self-healing network. Automating IT actions Resource pooling and rapid agility are two essential characteristics of a cloud achieved with virtualization and automation. Complete data center automation requires crossing IT organizational boundaries with orchestrated control of servers, storage, networking and applications. An example of an orchestrated process would be the complete provisioning of a virtual machine: Acknowledge change order receipt and ownership with the Service Desk Check server resource pool to confirm availability of resources to support the VM Check storage resource pool to confirm availability of resources Confirm and configure physical and/or virtual network ports for new VM Provision VM and deploy OS Install system management software and set monitoring thresholds as defined by the Service Level Objectives for this class of VM Apply security changes to meet required compliance Run health check to confirm success Scan VM to confirm IA compliance Update change order as complete in Service Desk. Orchestration Servers Storage Networks Figure 1 - Orchestration across silos www.m2ti.com 2
Server automation is used to provision bare metal, physical and virtual servers and manage application deployment from a single pane of glass. Application deployment covers the migration of the application and updates from development through test and on to production, with the capability to roll back if there are unintended results after deployment. Policy based automation for applications, networks, servers and storage help enforce compliance policies and automate compliance reporting. Active compliance is achieved with the ability for the infrastructure to return itself to a compliant state autonomously or with operator approval. Patch management and IA compliance includes the automated remediation of the underlying application support stack comprised of the operating systems, databases and middle-ware. Model the Model the Deploy 1 application 2 servers 3 consistently 4 Report on outcomes App developer defines content and configurations Developer QA, App decide environment for deployment at each stage Repeatefly deploy using standards set by experts Management views dashboard on success and failure rates Figure 2 - Application Deployment Process Leveraging Application Mapping Application mapping is conducted at the data center and creates a logical view of the relationship between a specific application and the underpinning applications and infrastructure. Manual application maps may take 8 to 12 hours for a SME to develop and are almost immediately out of date in an agile data center. Automating this process reduces SME development time to a couple of hours and is automatically updated as the data center flexes to meet changing requirements and circumstances. Figure 3 - Application mapping requires more than defining simple dependencies www.m2ti.com 3
Application maps exist in the Run Time Service Model (RTSM). The Run Time Service Model exists to support the network operator, architects and IT management. The RTSM can be leveraged in the Change Control and Release Management (CCRM) process to mitigate risk by highlighting application interdependencies and to de-conflict the Change Schedule (also known as the Forward Schedule of Change or FSC.) Using the RTSM as the authoritative data source for CCRM enables IT organizations to implement a virtual Change Advisory Board (CAB). Virtual CABs can operate asynchronously, allowing CAB members to participate according to their schedule and scope of responsibility. The virtual CAB model allows organizations to replace weekly CAB meetings with a monthly review meeting freeing up many FTE hours. Figure 4 - Automated impact and risk analysis CCRM can also be used to identify the appropriate personnel needed to support a change based on availability and expertise. Traditionally there are two sources for scheduling information; operational scheduling from the service desk used for managing change orders and strategic scheduling pulled from portfolio, project or program management as appropriate. Leveraging Business Service Management The Run Time Service Model also receives discovery information from the Business Service Management systems used to determine how IT services are performing in the environment. The RTSM underpins Topology Based Event Correlation (TBEC) to leverage the application mapping model for event correlation and automated fault isolation. This approach greatly reduces the level of effort needed to support event correlation over previous techniques. Simple event correlations may be created on the fly by operators in a matter of minutes and more complex correlations are automatically updated as the data center flexes. Figure 5 - Topology Based Event Correlation based on Run Time Service Model www.m2ti.com 4
Business service management determines IT performance by gathering information on how applications and infrastructure are performing. Applications and underpinning IT services are often measured from the enduser perspective using actual user transactions or from synthetic transactions that mimic a user transaction. These techniques are not mutually exclusive and the combination of both provides a robust understanding of application performance. The top down information from the end user view must be supplemented by bottom up details about how the infrastructure components are performing. Both agent and agent-less monitoring support out of the box intelligence for industry standard operating systems and applications to help your network operators leverage industry expertise and see results quickly. This out of the box intelligence also offers application specific actions that can be executed automatically or by a network operator. The metrics gathered by the components of the business service management are used by the Service Health Analyzer (SHA) to proactively identify problems before they impact service delivery. Unlike Figure 6 - Using Application and Infrastructure performance complex solutions that require fine tuning baselines data to update the Run Time Service Model and thresholds, SHA automatically creates baselines for all metrics factoring day of week and time of day to create baselines based on current average usage. When a number of metrics associated with a service go outside of standard variance an alert is sent to the network operators that they should investigate the service. Server metrics for virtual servers are analyzed in the Service Health Optimizer (SHO) to determine the best placement of virtual servers on the pool of physical hosts based on resource utilization. If server automation has been deployed these changes can take place automatically for an optimized lights out data center. Automating Project and Portfolio Management Strategic and tactical service delivery automation significantly reduce IT spend while simultaneously reducing risk. Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) automates strategic IT services and provide important status updates to the KPIs in the Executive Scorecard. Gathering the status of all programs and their projects into a comprehensive portfolio returns an average cost savings of 7% of the complete IT budget in the first year by identifying non-strategic projects. Figure 7 - Application Portfolio Management Risk Assessment www.m2ti.com 5
PPM substantially reduces the amount of time that project and program managers spend gathering status updates and correlating reports since all information is updated in PPM in real time. This allows program and project meetings to be more productive by reducing the need to provide complete status updates before addressing action items. Project and Portfolio Management supports risk analysis modeling so decision makers can balance cost, risk and business priority in go / no go decisions and prioritizing projects. The PPM Capital Planning and Investment Control Accelerator automates and simplifies the form completion and management of OMB Exhibits 300 and 53. This is an import increase in efficiency for contracting offices that may be challenged to staff senior contracting personnel. Completing the Cloud Data centers that have fully automated their infrastructure, integrated automated application mapping and business service management are well on the journey of delivering cloud services and have already seen substantial cost savings and increased service reliability. Self-service is the last of the five cloud characteristics with resource pooling, rapid agility and measured service realized through virtualization, automation and business service management with the assumption of broad network access being in place. Taking the First Step Figure 8 Self service Portal Different organizations begin moving towards the cloud with different initiatives depending on their current state of automation, application mapping, business service management and project and portfolio management. With the end state of having these capabilities tightly coupled to achieve the synergy necessary to run most efficiently the environment must be analyzed to see how to integrate the current capabilities or when capabilities need upgraded. As an HP Cloud Center of Excellence, M2 Technology is prepared to offer the insights and best practices gained in helping our customers reach successful IT outcomes. Learn how our subject matter experts can help your organization dramatically reduce costs and improve efficiency call your M2 account manager or reach us at 210-566-3773 or on the web at www.proventrusted.com. www.m2ti.com 6