IT Management 2.0

Times are tough…There’s no denying that despite the recovery predictions  of many economists, businesses are still being extremely conservative with their investments.  Investments in IT are no exception.  This is why nearly every IT vendor that walks through your door will claim to save you money — You just need to buy what they’re selling!!!

Needless to say, this trend has created a boatload of skeptics.  Vendors that take a careless approach to “IT cost savings” can find themselves at the receiving end of these skeptics’ barbs.

At EMC, we have a healthy respect for our customers’ skepticism.  So, when we decided to put together an EMC Ionix virtualization management cost savings and benefits assessment tool, we knew it would have to produce figures that were realistic as well as “tweakable” for individual scenarios.  It would have to quantify the value of being able to virtualize faster, to manage more efficiently, and to reduce risk.  It would have to be a useful tool for evaluating your current state of virtualization management — not just an Ionix marketing tool.

So, what’s the right way to look at a cost savings calculator?

1. Recognize Each Solution is Different:  Peer case studies can be a great tool for understanding the potential benefits of a product or technology.  However, you need to take into account that each IT situation is unique.  When you are reading a case study, ask yourself how closely that customer’s situation mirrors your own.  How large is your IT organization?  How many servers are you managing?  What are your labor costs?
2. Evaluate Your Current State:  Unless you’re a startup, you are
   

   Can Effective Virtualization Management Save You $$$ ?

   not starting from ground zero.  Most IT organizations have standardized and consolidated some of their tools, have implemented some degree of automation, and have at least attempted to implement some form of IT service management.  If you were to grade the maturity of your IT management tool usage, where would would you like to be on the curve?

3. Don Just Throw Product at the Problem:  Despite what the ad implies, simply buying the weight lifting machine will not turn you into Mr. Universe.  IT management tools - whether they provide IT operations monitoring, compliance validation, or service management - are all very tightly integrated into your operational processes, policies, and organizational structure.  An IT management solution for managing a virtualized infrastructure will only deliver value if you are also willing to adjust your processes to leverage virtualization.
4. Work With Trusted Advisors:  Whether it is your EMC account team, EMC consulting (which btw has an excellent VMware consulting practice), another IT consulting firm, or colleagues at a peer company - learning from experience of an outside advisor can be invaluable as you work to manage the complexities and capabilities of virtualization.  Keep in mind, we’re all on this same journey together.
5. Keep a Scorecard:  Don’t just calculate the anticipated savings - track them over time.  Often this will require capturing metrics that you don’t capture today.  If you are not realizing the savings and benefits you anticipated, ask yourself some hard questions - Have you made the changes to your processes you need to?  Have you implemented tools on the timeline you planned to?  Ask your vendors these same hard questions (sounds strange coming from a vendor?).  You may discover that there are opportunities for some mid-flight corrections.

With all that said, I invite you to try our “EMC Ionix Virtualization Management Cost Savings and Benefits Analysis” calculator to see how management of your virtualized infrastructure compares with your peers and how EMC Ionix can help.

I’d like to hear what you think.

Phil

Service Management, Virtualization Management EMC, Ionix, ITSM, Virtualization

This week, EMC announced the acquisition of Configuresoft, a Colorado

...A Perfect Match...

Springs, CO-based private company and a leader in server configuration, change, and compliance automation software.  It is truly an exciting time as this acquisition solidifies and fills out a major foundation point in the EMC IT Management software strategy.  It builds on the existing product relationship that EMC and Configuresoft already share around EMC Server Configuration Manager (SCM) and Configuration Analytics Manager (CAM) - both of which EMC currently OEMs from Configuresoft.  With current integrations into EMC Application Discovery Manager (ADM), EMC Infra Service Management suite, and EMC Smarts already in place, we can hit the ground running. Keep Reading…

Change and Configuration, Data Center Automation and Compliance, Dependency Mapping, Service Management, Storage Resource Management (SRM) CMDB, Configuresoft, Data Center Automation, EMC, GRC, IT Management, ITIL, ITSM, Server Configuration

What My Grandmother Taught Me

The Powdered Egg of IT?

I remember, as a child, preparing Sunday lunch in my grandmother’s kitchen. As we chopped and peeled, she told me stories of cooking with powdered egg and drawing “stocking seams” on her legs with gravy browning both during and after World War II.

“Times were unbelievably tough and we just had to do more with less,” she explained as I solemnly prodded another potato.

“Doing more with less” is the mantra of CFOs the world over today as the worsening economic climate takes hold. All parts of the organization, including IT, must play their part in the belt tightening.

What is the Powdered Egg of IT?

For many years, I - along with my colleagues - have espoused the benefits of IT Service Management (ITSM) and the advice in the best practice framework ITIL. ITIL, we argue, improves the quality of IT’s operations; it more closely aligns IT with the business and makes IT more efficient. During the “good years” of the 90s and mid-2000s (in fact pretty much all of the last 15-20 years - save for the last 12 months and the burst of the dot com bubble), ITIL was implemented for reasons of quality improvement and business alignment. Today, every IT manager I discuss ITIL with asks the same thing: “Yes, but will it save us money?”

Implementing ITIL

Until now, efficiency and productivity gains have been an after-thought - a side-show that is a pleasant by-product of implementing ITIL. Today, it is the reason companies do it. At an EMC Infra project kickoff meeting some months ago, the project sponsor opened the meeting by declaring the primary purpose of the project to be to save £5m over a period of five years. They are well on the way to achieving this through a smart implementation of Infra that automates the parts of their business that cost them too much to run. As a by-product, they also deliver a better quality of service to their customers and - by using Infra’s web-based customer portal - are able to align more closely with the business. Of course, most cost savings are in the form of labor costs.

We ought to face up to this: ITIL drives efficiencies by making processes quicker and simpler and by automating them - meaning you require fewer people to participate in them.

Happily, in the example above, all of the staff whose jobs became redundant are still working the same organization, but are now doing more rewarding/less repetitive jobs that provide greater value to the business.

The Bottom Line

ITIL is not a guarantee of cost savings, of course. You have to do it right. In coming weeks, I’ll blog on my view of what the right way is. Until then, I reiterate my fervent believe that organizations are able to “do more with less” in today’s climate. Not by serving powdered egg in the canteen, but by implementing ITIL.

I’d like to know what you think. Please post your comments and we can keep this discussion going.

David Percy

Change and Configuration EMC, Infra, ITIL, ITSM

Solving the Puzzle

Is there a doctor in the house?

The other night, I was watching an episode of the TV show House that I taped, because I hadn’t been able to catch it when it originally aired (Hey, my son’s basketball games always take priority!).  The show’s formula isn’t that complex:

• Someone gets sick
• No one knows why - so House gets the case as a diagnostic specialist
• More insight is needed, and a few theories and permutations get tested (and fail) among House’s team
• One or two other unrelated stories arc among the ensemble cast
• Eventually House - usually about 50 minutes into the episode - has his cathartic “a-ha” moment and solves the case

Although the formula works well in Hollywood, it’s not exactly the approach you’d want to see IT organizations taking.  In the end, IT ends up at the same destination that House gets to - that is, solving the problem.  But in real-world IT environments, the “House formula” takes too long to get you there.  Until the data center can get advertisers to sponsor problems and incidents (Imagine:  “This hour of application downtime has been brought to you by Tylenol…”) the hunt-and-peck, try-one-thing-at-a-time, manual troubleshooting method just doesn’t work.

House in the Data Center

Think of how boring a program like House would be if he solved every case in less than one minute into the episode — and did it by just glancing over at a computer screen.  But in the data center, that which would make prime-time TV drama “boring” would be award-winning content for IT.  This is specially true when you throw the need to identify root-causes in virtual environments into the mix of IT management responsibilities.

And imagine if House, with all his analytical and diagnostic skills, had to also deal with hospital orderlies moving around his patients - without telling anyone - every few minutes.  How could he ever efficiently solve the problem if he didn’t even know where the patient was at any given point in time?

But if you’re on the hook for ensuring IT service delivery in a VMware-enabled data center, you face a similar set of challenges.  You need to know exactly where your VMs are at any given point in time.  And since those IT services based on virtualized applications rely on a combination of physical and virtual infrastructures for their delivery, you also need to know the relationships those VMs have to the infrastructure - as well as the IT services being delivered.  Because when a problem occurs, how can you fix it quickly if you’re stumbling on something as basic as where to get started?

An Example - EMC Smarts

One example of a solution that addresses these challenges today is EMC Smarts Server Manager.  The solution builds on the strengths of the core EMC Smarts management platform to deliver automated root-cause analysis from the edge of the network, all the way down to the VM level - and everything in between.  It provides visibility and insight into the management of the virtual data center, saving time and allowing users to maximize critical IT personnel and resources. 

Smarts Server Manager cuts the time it takes to determine the real source of the problem (a.k.a. MTTI) from hours (on average) in a complex virtual data center, to a few seconds.  Basically, the solution takes all the guesswork out of incident and problem management - putting the right person on the right problem right away.  In the end, customers can benefit from faster service restoration, better SLAand OLA compliance, and most importantly, less downtime for the business processes and users impacted by the problem.  More information how companies can increase their IT efficiencies using solutions like EMC Smarts Server Manager can be found here:

A Final Diagnosis

It’s tools like EMC Smarts Server Manager that are helping customers better manage the data centers of today and tomorrow.  It’s almost like having the aforementioned “boring” House in a box.  Working for you…All the insight analytics you need, right when you need it most.  Without the drama and delivering the right answer in just a few seconds. 

An ultra-boring TV program?  Absolutely!  Would it ever win any Emmy?  No way! 

But by solving one of your biggest management challenges - automatically identifying the root-cause of problems in the virtual data center - Smarts Server Manager is just the kind of must-see programming that could make IT operations (and even the business) stand up and cheer.

Dr. House would be proud. 

Let me know what you think…

Brian Lett

Data Center Automation and Compliance, Virtualization Management EMC, EMC Smarts, ITSM, Virtualization, Virtualization Management, VMware