Moving Toward Data Center Optimization: BMC Performance and Capacity Managed Services

solution WHITE PAPER solution WHITE PAPER Moving Toward Data Center Optimization: BMC Performance and Capacity Managed Services The Fast Track to Business Service Management

Table of Contents Managed services Accelerate Business Benefits in the Enterprise Datacenter... 1 The fast track to Business Service Management: managed services... 1 Core value: BMC Performance and Capacity Management Services... 1 BMC Managed Services Enable a Renewed Focus on Core Competencies... 1 The operational challenge: Adopting ITIL best practices while managing Service. Level Agreements (SLA)... 1 BMC managed services alleviates near-term pain and long-term challenges... 2 Accelerating the realization of Business Service Management... 2 BMC Performance and Capacity Management Services: Best Practices, Delivered... 2 PCM best practices: Connecting managed services with DCO and ITIL... 3 TCO Snapshot: the benefit of PCM managed services... 4 A large Insurance company benefits from BMC Managed Services for PCM... 4 Realizing significant business value... 4 Comparing managed services to outsourcing and professional services... 4 Summary... 5

Managed services Accelerate Business Benefits in the Enterprise Datacenter Nearly every enterprise IT organization has its sights set on tightly aligning the IT function with overall business goals an approach that, when achieved, prioritizes IT activities according to business impact. Often referred to as Business Service Management (BSM), this approach enables the IT organization to proactively address strategic mandates to lower costs, drive revenue, and mitigate risk. To fully realize the benefits of BSM, CIOs and their staffs must embrace an organizationwide BSM model, with technology, processes, and workflows that transcend groups and teams. While BSM is elegant, simple, and powerful in theory, the IT directors and managers ultimately tasked with achieving it often face a far different reality: over-worked and under-staffed organizations engaged in a non-stop struggle to keep up with daily demands. Bogged down in tactical minutia, many IT organizations are unable to shift to a more proactive approach. Data Center Optimization (DCO) solutions help IT organizattions gain firm control of IT resources a critical first step in moving toward BSM. Best-practice DCO solutions help. IT organizations discover what they have, determine what they need, and automatically implement the appropriate resources all while controlling the impact of change and assuring business service levels. The fast track to Business Service Management: managed services For IT organizations looking to quickly achieve data center optimization and, ultimately, Business Service Management, managed services providers can dramatically shorten the process and close the gap. These providers deliver subjectmatter expertise in various system management and other IT disciplines, complementing the efforts of internal IT staff and allowing them to focus on driving true business value. While most enterprises are reluctant to completely outsource their IT functions, many are turning to managed services providers to improve operations and reduce risk, effort, cost, and complexity. In the systems management area, a managed service delivers ongoing support of selected applications, providing daily technical operation, maintenance, and support. Unlike outsourcing, managed services allows organizations to retain control of specific IT functions and can deliver specific business benefits including: > Reduced operational risk > Lower ongoing costs > Shared support responsibility for the infrastructure > Improved service levels and customer support > Decreased implementation time and time-to-market > Better utilization of existing IT staff for higher business value roles Core value: BMC Performance and Capacity Management Services Many IT functions are candidates for managed services. One high-impact area that can be transitioned easily is perfformance and capacity management (PCM), a major task in most organizations because internal and external customers expect systems to deliver high performance and keep pace with changes and growth which easily can lead to overprovisioning. However, even in over-built server environments, service outages can occur. Managed services for performance and capacity management address a growing disparity between the complexity of today s computing environments including mainframes and distributed Linux-based clusters and the shrinking amount of administrative resources available to manage them. For example, a few years ago a system administrator may have managed only two to three dozen servers or partitions; today, the same staff position may oversee more than 200 servers or partitions a manual task that is quickly becoming impossible to perform effectively. BMC Managed Services for Performance and Capacity Management meet complex IT requirements and escalating business needs, while moving IT organizations toward. greater efficacy through data center optimization and Business Service Management. BMC Managed Services for PCM provides an attractive, complete option for performance. and capacity management, giving IT organizations the. flexibility to acquire coverage that meets their specific needs. With these dependable, low-risk managed services, companies gain additional expertise from BMC to implement, administer, and maintain required software capabilities allowing staff to focus on delivering business results, not the enabling technology. BMC Managed Services Enable a Renewed Focus on Core Competencies During the past five to seven years, many components of enterprise IT environments, ranging from network security to enterprise applications, have been successfully migrated from in-house delivery to managed services. BMC managed services for PCM arrive at a critical time, addressing a confluence of challenges now gripping most enterprise IT organizations. The operational challenge: Adopting ITIL best practices while managing Service Level Agreements (SLA) Perhaps the most fundamental operational change is that most enterprise IT organizations now function as internal service providers, chartered to meet service level agreements (SLAs). These service level requirements remain fixed, despite constant changes in the resources available to fulfill

them. For example, the commodity computing boom has left many data centers over-provisioned with under-utilized computing resources, a situation that is difficult to rectify because it is coupled with a dearth of system administrators. Still, the need to complete crucial server management projects marches forward; understaffing translates into poor server performance and missed SLAs. In this chronic struggle to keep pace with day-to-day demands, it is nearly impossible to initiate a disciplined and effective approach to capacity and performance management. Methodologies such as data center optimization and best practices IT management disciplines such as ITIL are being adopted globally by companies wanting to gain more efficacy in IT service delivery. Capacity management is a key compponent of ITIL, but while many organizations are committed to achieving ITIL practices, doing so requires substantial time and resources both of which most IT departments have none to spare. BMC managed services alleviates near-term pain and long-term challenges In the near-term, BMC managed services for PCM relieves capacity planners from tool support and other administrative burdens, allowing their technical and business expertise to be immediately re-deployed to address more pressing issues. In turn, BMC managed services capabilities easily can be scaled to cover all enterprise servers, applications, and databases. This allows enterprise IT organizations to gain BMC-specialized proficiency in platforms, tuning, and advanced modeling, and also receive well-documented recommendations that can be executed by in-house staff. If a formal performance management and capacity planning discipline does not exist within the IT organization, BMC managed services can be used to enable IT to quickly achieve a best-practice discipline in this area. From a longer-term perspective, BMC managed services reduce operational risk because they are acquired on a fixed-cost, subscription basis. This risk is further mitigated as the IT organization acquires performance management and capacity planning expertise over time, and can readily apply it across a wide range of enterprise IT resources. Accelerating the realization of Business Service Management There are several metrics used to determine how effectively an IT organization is implementing Business Service Management. One of the most widely applicable is the notion of a Systems Management Maturity Model, an offshoot of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) a well-established collection of instructions an organization can follow to gain better control over its software development process. As indicated in Figure 1, the Systems Management Maturity Model comprises three levels, each of which delivers greater integration with BSM principles: > Level 1 provides Performance Visualization of server resources and application workloads, bringing associated data from assigned systems and reports into a consolidated portal for review and recommendation. > Level 2 enables Performance Management the expert analysis of current and historical data for both reactive problem-solving and opportunistic optimization and tuning. > Level 3 allows IT organizations to take the quantum leap from reactive mode to proactive Capacity Management. This comprises two phases: 1. Looking forward by executing predictive capacity planning to optimize overall IT investment 2. Integrating capacity management into a larger structure of BSM or another, ITIL-based solution. In the context of the Systems Management Maturity Model, BMC managed services for PCM can quickly fill in the gaps, augmenting and enabling IT organizations to achieve the strategic values associated with BSM. This is further discussed in the next section. ROI Value Capacity Planning Performance Management Performance Visualization (Data, Reporting) Maturity (and Investment) Achieve BSM faster with a proven PCM process BSM Integration BMC Performance and Capacity Management Services: Best Practices, Delivered BMC managed services for Performance and Capacity Management provide a complete solution to address complex IT requirements and escalating business needs. This hosted, managed services suite is a dependable, low-risk option for performance and capacity management, with the flexibility to acquire as much coverage as desired. BMC managed services for PCM comprise three offerings that can be deployed separately and together to deliver comprehensive capabilities: > BMC Performance Visualization Service delivers data collection, historical trending, and performance reporting

coverage across all servers, allowing organizations to achieve Level 1 of the Systems Management Maturity Model. The base service for all performance activities, Performance Visualization incorporates remote technology and data collection to provide a fully managed, historical performance metric database. This information can be used to generate and deliver summary and detailed performance reports, allowing IT organizations to achieve best-practice reporting from Day I. > BMC Performance Management Service delivers Level 2 compliance with the Systems Management Maturity Model. It gives in-depth optimization and tuning recommendations across a rolling subset of servers each week. This enables the identification and quick resolution of server, application, and database performance issues, as BMC provides expert analysis across technology silos and platforms. Periodic state-of-system reviews and weekly tuning and performance optimization recommendations round out the ongoing stream of information. > BMC Capacity Planning Service provides expert capacity planning across a rolling subset of servers on a monthly basis, allowing companies to reach Level 3 of the Systems Management Maturity Model. It delivers best-practice capacity management and immediately creates a technical best practice for ITIL Capacity Management. Using advanced, non-linear response time predictive modeling, BMC. Capacity Planning Service provides IT-business capacity planning and forecasting; monthly studies give detailed information for consolidation, growth, purchasing, or capacity optimization. BMC Performance Assurance Service is an integrated bundle of all of the above services, designed to present best practices in capacity management. All BMC managed services for PCM supply the software, best practices, and staff to deliver: > Fully managed services, powered by BMC Performance Assurance technology > A team of BMC experts in cross-platform performance analysis and capacity planning, working as part of the customers internal team Capacity Planning Performance Management Performance Visualization Build a modular, high-performance, mature systems management capability with BMC managed services for PCM. > The ability for internal IT staffs to solve performance problems and assess future capacity needs without. having to manage the underlying technology > Subscription-based, pay-as-you-go pricing > Immediate scalability across heterogeneous. enterprise environments PCM best practices: Connecting managed services with DCO and ITIL As IT organizations improve capacity management and. performance through managed services such as PCM offeriings from BMC, they can accomplish more than immediate operational improvements and longer-term achievement of BSM. Subscribing to managed services for PCM also can help enterprises optimize their data centers and deploy ITILbased approaches to IT resource management. Specifically, BMC managed services for PCM follow the best practices set forth through BMC Data Center Optimization methodology and provide a faster, more cost-efficient avenue for accomplishing DCO than doing it all in-house. The threestep DCO process allows users to Identify, Analyze, and Implement and Optimize IT resources: > Identify ways to increase efficiency by discovering and quantifying the IT resources available to run the business. This includes categorizing all business services and the resources they require, and determining current performance demand and IT resource utilization rates across them. BMC IT Asset and Discovery solutions can be used to discover and populate the CMDB in preparation for an ongoing BMC Managed Service for PCM. > Analyze approaches to balance resource utilization rates against service level requirements. This can speed consolidattion and virtualization projects through automation, and increase efficiency and reduce costs by understanding the real resource requirements needed to sustain business services. Finally, risk can be reduced through careful evaluation of IT and business growth and change scenarios. In optimizing the data center, one of the key deliverables of the Analyze step is to generate a resource plan. Doing so requires the ITIL discipline of capacity management, which can be fulfilled with relative ease and low cost though BMC Managed Services for PCM. Hence, the powerful link between managed services, DCO, and ITIL. > Implement and Optimize IT resource management through the automation of change and configuration management. This reduces IT resource costs while meeting service levels, and allows the IT organization to gain control over resource acquisition and provisioning. Finally, users can gain business and IT clarity with reports on business service levels and resource performance.

Comparing managed services to outsourcing and professional services Important distinctions exist between managed services, traditional outsourcing, and professional services. With managed services such as those for PCM, the internal IT organization maintains control of IT processes because it retains the computing resources and IT staff used to deliver business services. Managed services typically augments existing staff with additional PCM experts through a remote management model that allows clients to stay in control of their IT infrastructure. Consequently, client organizations maintain the flexibility to adapt rapidly to changes in their business. In traditional outsourcing, most control over IT transfers to the outsourcer. As a result, in-house control of the key disciplines of IT management, planning, and maintaining IT application relevance may be greatly reduced or even lost. Moreover, in an outsourcing relationship, the client may have difficulty in extracting its organization from the provider s, or to move from one service provider to another. With professional services, the provider s team departs after the implementation is complete, but remains available for re-engagement in the future. Managed services providers, however, deliver the initial implementation and then handle ongoing operational functions. They are focused on the ongoing business success of the project and support it beyond the date of the implementation. 2 TCO Snapshot: the benefit of PCM managed services One of the most successful applications of managed services augments the efforts of in-house staff. Through judicious subscription to managed services, the efforts of an internal capacity management staff can be fully and reliably scaled across the enterprise. This in turn delivers high visibility and success in supporting the business, and significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). BMC Managed Services for PCM provide reliable capabilities quickly, and at a lower cost than via in-house resources. These services optimize capacity management practices in three ways through: 1. Immediate creation of best practices for the capacity management discipline; managed services can reduce the typical six-month creation timeframe to less than a month for first results, at a controlled cost due to the services subscription basis. 2. Deep technical expertise in a variety of silo technology areas, supported by state-of-the-art modeling and analysis software 3. Off-loading software administration, operation, and maintenance of BMC Managed Services for PCM software, allowing in-house staff to focus on interpreting and applying the information provided by BMC. A large Insurance company benefits from BMC Managed Services for PCM A managed services approach allows companies to obtain the high value of work activities, such as capacity planning, in a timely fashion for all required systems. For a large insuraance company an enterprise with an expansive server infrastructure and a subscriber to BMC managed services for PCM this benefit can be captured as an estimate of increased efficacy versus execution of related tasks in-house. For example, prior to using BMC Managed Services for PCM, four to five IT staff could produce reporting for 500 systems and capacity planning studies for 10 applications in one year, while remaining busy with day-to-day administration and firefighting problem resolution. When their efforts were augmented with BMC Managed Services for PCM, they were able to produce performance management reports on thousands of systems and plan capacity for more than 70 application performance studies in a single year. At the next level of managed services utilization, the insurance company can purchase a subscription to report on all enterpprise systems and produce two capacity planning studies per month, for a total of an additional 24 per year. Achieving this level of output exclusively with in-house staff would require approximately 26 analysts, many of whom would be called upon only occasionally, but would have to be available and ready to perform as required. Realizing significant business value These metrics illustrate a valuable benefit of BMC Managed Services for PCM the subscription level can be increased or decreased over time to match changing IT and business needs. Consistent internal staffing can be supplemented over time with variable amounts of managed services. By using BMC Managed Services deep expertise as required, the insurance company can recognize benefits including: > Time-sharing of expertise. BMC Managed Services for PCM encompass concentrated intellectual capital in all aspects of performance and capacity planning, across all enterprise server platforms: Linux, UNIX, and mainframe. > Internal performance and capacity planning staff can focus on business issues, covering more ground and delivering more value as IT generalists, while being supported by BMC technology and process experts.

Summary For enterprise IT organizations, today s environment presents a conflicting set of goals and realities: demands to flexibly support business goals and meet stringent OLAs fall upon IT organizations that are resource strapped. In addition, these IT organizations are also often pursuing higher-level goals such as data center optimization, ITIL-based management, and, ultimately, achievement of Business Service Management. BMC Managed Services for Performance and Capacity Management help IT organizations achieve a wide range. of strategic and tactical goals with a compelling set of. benefits, allowing them to: > Eliminate the investment and risk associated with hiring, training, and retaining in-house staff to specialize in performance and capacity management > Improve IT service levels with dedicated resources and best-practice expertise > Fill short- or long-term staffing gaps in IT. capacity management > Gain instant access to best-practice subject matter expertise, enabling companies to optimize performance with minimal IT investment > Achieve results faster by eliminating many of the issues related to start-up time > Free IT managers and staff to focus on more strategic work, instead of managing software > Control IT costs with a pay-as-you-go subscription pricing model > Improve the performance of mission-critical systems > Ensure that infrastructure is equipped to handle. business changes. More than any other enterprise software vendor, BMC with its partners is extremely well qualified to deliver managed services for PCM. BMC offers three decades worth of experience in helping enterprise IT organizations to operate more effectively and deliver unmatched business value. BMC offers deep understanding, a consultative approach, and significant resources to create a best-practices managed services for PCM offering that can deliver measurable value in weeks, not months. For more information about BMC Performance and Capacity Management, and other BMC managed services, please visit www.bmc.com/managedservices End Notes 1 Excerpt from Building Business Value Faster with Managed Services, by Jay M. Gardner, VP and General Manager of the On Demand Business Unit at BMC Software. Read the white paper at www.bmc.com/managedservices.

About BMC Software BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC], is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2005 revenues of more than $1.46 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit www.bmc.com. BMC Software, the BMC Software logos and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc.. All other registered trademarks or trademarks belong to their respective companies. 2006 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. 63601 *63601*