Published: December 14 2009, 01:37 PM | no comments
by Brian Bakstran

By now we are all very familiar with the Virtualization numbers:

• 80% of new servers installed by 2012 will be virtualized
• 60% improvement to your systems utilization rate
• 82% reduction in server energy consumption from virtualization

Virtualizing your data center is a no brainer right? So, what are you waiting for?

Hold on one second before you jump into that ice cold water... Are you familiar with this number:

59?

According to Network Instruments study, 59 represents the percentage of "IT organizations who lack the experience to manage virtualized environments effectively"... It is one thing to recognize a trend and get caught up in the hype surrounding the IT savings associated with virtualization. However,  it is quite different to actually put it into practice within your own data center environment, and ensure success. Consider this, you may only have one chance to implement virtualization correctly. Line of business owners will be skeptical. They will probably share their concern that by virtualizing the IT environment their mission critical application will suffer. Your business cannot skip a beat when you are virtualized. But how do you do it correctly? To ensure success and achieve operational excellence in your physical and virtualized environment there are many questions that need to be answered and your IT staff needs a partner that can help you develop a well devised virtualization management strategy that will help you ensure agility, quality, efficiency and mitigation of IT and business risk.

You need a partner that can manage both your physical and virtual systems environment seamlessly giving you that single pane of glass for operational visibility and control. Fewer tools that are tightly integrated is one key ingredient to operational excellence. However, it goes beyond just managing both physical and virtual systems, Achieving operational excellence requires a comprehensive IT service assurance and automation solution, but, it also must include application performance management and the capability to manage your environment as a business service, not just device management. Important capabilities you should look for must include;

Proactive performance management across your IT domains - systems, networks, databases, and applications,

• Model-based root cause analysis
• Strong application performance management capabilities
• Strong automation solutions that are integrated with the IT management suite
• A business service model approach with executive dashboards indicating the health of your services
• And the knowledge and experience to help you implement a virtualized environment to ensuring success

Don't jump into the water too soon. Prepare yourself for success and partner with the right IT management vendor.

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Published: December 08 2009, 08:48 AM | no comments
by Pam Snaith

Managing service quality is not elusive, but, if attempted manually, it may seem so. Service quality management requires real time knowledge of every component that is involved in providing that service. For a service such as email or order management this means you must track status of the routers, switches, LAN and WAN links, interfaces to the LAN and WAN, applications, physical and virtual servers, databases, and so on.  This is not a simple task. When something goes wrong with any of these components it immediately impacts at least a portion of the service users and puts IT under pressure to fix it quickly in order to restore service quality.  Is there any way to proactively avoid the impact to service users and to IT as they cope with unexpected service issues?

I contend that managing risk is fundamental to managing service quality; without risk management every service issue will be unexpected, putting your IT staff in constant firefighting mode, scrambling to correct the latest infrastructure issue. In fact, managing risk is the only way to really improve your service quality since risk management proactively averts many service issues.

Let's look at one way to think about risk management. When an organization is building or adding to their infrastructure, robustness is typically an important consideration. IT organizations build in alternate network paths, primary and secondary routers, redundant servers and server farms, virtual servers and so forth to avoid those worrisome single points of failure. Redundancy works well - as long as it is preserved - and that's where risk management enters the picture.

For example, if an order management application is served by three servers and one goes down, your risk has just increased substantially even if the service quality remains high and the two remaining servers are able to meet the business requirement. Now the end of the quarter arrives and the two servers can no longer meet the business demand, meaning order management is degraded - at the worst possible time. What happened was that the robustness that was originally built into the infrastructure was compromised. If risk to service delivery is treated as seriously as impact to service quality, the robustness of the infrastructure will be preserved and many instances of service impact will be avoided altogether.

Managing risk means paying attention to the "heads up" you receive from your infrastructure management solution. From a service quality perspective, service outages are more often than not preceded by service degradation, and service degradation is often preceded by a weakening of one or more infrastructure components in the delivery path of that service. With a full view of your infrastructure you can see the potential points of failure and restore infrastructure integrity before service is impacted. Proactively treating the source of problems rather than treating the symptoms after the fact is a far better approach to managing service quality.

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Published: December 07 2009, 03:08 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by David Hayward

"IT alignment" may be an over-used phrase, but it packs a punch when IT Operations gets an unexpected call from senior management, important customers or the help desk asking why a service is down or slow. 

Industry research shows that majority of IT departments first find out about service problems when users call to complain.   Most IT departments still operate in the "break-fix" mode, fixing problems after things break versus predicting when they will break and fixing them beforehand.  As well, there's a lack of easy to use IT management tools that  map IT assets to services and accurately analyze service impact. 

The problem gets worse:  IT departments commonly admit they spend more of their time (up to 66%) trying to manage problems and less time (as little as 34%) adding new value to their business.  That's because productive work regularly grinds to a halt as support staff across all silos rush to troubleshoot the same problem. 

Unfortunately, most are hunting down symptomatic alarms from a root cause in "somebody else's silo."

Ultimately, this is the result of the traditional, outmoded approach to IT management, an approach that focus on managing technology in silos, not services end-to-end.

To solve this dilemma, both enterprise and government IT executives are looking to transform their operations from traditional technology monitoring and management to delivering IT and business services and proactively managing service quality.  Enterprises call this "aligning IT with the business," and the government agencies call this "aligning IT with the mission."  

No matter, as IT belts are tightened and stakeholders demand more services, the traditional methods of managing in silos cannot satisfactorily protect the quality of services or satisfy service level agreements.

A New IT Mind-Set for an Increasingly SLA-Oriented World

Transforming IT from a technology-orientation to a service-orientation requires a new mind-set that emphasizes four key "service assurance" principals:

• Focus IT staff resources on priority services (business-critical services for  enterprises and mission-critical services for government agencies)
• Improve service quality by proactively eliminating IT service problems and mitigating risks before they impact customers and by speeding mean time to repair
• Increase productivity by improving mean time to problem identification and repair; reducing firefighting  frees staff to add more value to the business
• Reduce waste by eliminating dead-end troubleshooting in technology silos that have nothing to do with the root cause of a specific service's problems  and ensuring that silo teams always know if the service problem is their or someone else's problem

To explore how well they can achieve these goals, IT management needs to ask themselves several key questions about their operations staff:

How do we define and visualize services -- and know what infrastructure and application components comprise them?

• How do we ensure that staff always prioritizes work on components that support the most important services?
• Do we really understand service quality from the end users' perspective?
• How do how we understand if an alarm impacts quality or just puts it at risk?
• How do we weigh risks to service quality and focus staff on the greater risks?
• How long does it take to determine root cause of quality issues on average?
• Are we spending more time troubleshooting and managing problems versus adding value?

From Mind-Set to Action

Analysts at the 2008 Gartner, Inc. Infrastructure and Operations Symposium predicted that IT organizations will  move toward a service delivery mind-set and that new IT jobs, such as Service Delivery Managers who represent the needs of specific users and stakeholders, will arise.  In fact, new titles like Service Delivery Manager, Service Assurance Manager, Director of Services, are appearing across many industries and government agencies.

Whether or not your organization has yet created these new positions, you should be establishing a service assurance mind-set and  game plan for transforming  your organization from traditional technology monitoring and management  to delivering services and managing their quality.

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